Traffics and League of Legends Servers
https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Servers
League of Legends (LoL) is a multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Riot Games .It is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) where 2 teams (blue and red) face off. In League of Legends, players assume the role of a “champion” with unique abilities and battle against a team of other player- or computer-controlled champions. There are 3 lanes, a jungle, and 5 roles. The goal is to take down the enemy Nexus to win the game. (https://github.com/jh991205/League-of-Legends-Game-Analysis) In the game, there are different servers to join. Usually, whichever continent you are in, you will join the continent’s server. Such as in the U.S, you will join the NA server, or in Europe in will join the EUW/EUNE servers. However, things are a lot different in the Chinese servers.
There are a total of 33 servers in China for league of legends due to the huge population China has. This is directly related to traffics. There are different pings existing in different servers connecting from different parts of China. Pings means your network latency, it is crucial for a game like league of legends to have a low network latency to maximize one’s chance of winning. Every second of league of legends can be decisive to the winning of the game. Usually, it is best to play on pings lower than 50 ms. And now we can see why 33 servers are needed in China. It was impossible to have one server that provides all player low ping to play the game. When players all go into one server, the ping goes very high for all players. However, there can’t be too many servers because if too many exist, it would be impossible to find a match in the server against other players. Also, the distance from the location where the player is playing to the server affects the ping. Generally speaking, the closer the distance is between the player and the server is , the lower the ping will be. So players want to go into servers that are geographically near them and also having a reasonable amount of player.
After introducing all the necessary backgrounds, now we can discuss how this connects to traffic. We can imagine a player A that wants to play a game B. And in order to do so, there will exist 33 connections between them which represents different servers the players can connect in order to play a game. We can imagine that there exists arbitrary functions that take in your distance between the server and players currently in the server and in the end returns the pings. Individual Players will definitely choose the server that gives them the lowest ping at that moment and play on the server. This will be the individual player’s dominant strategy to do.