Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

Reminds me of the cable lengths for black boxes connected to the network in Wall Street. Each cable is the same length regardless of which computer is closer to the access point.

The part I was interested about the most was glossed over.

In what situation can this happen?

> we realized that there was a calculation error that only manifested in scenarios where the actual ping was significantly lower than the target latency. In this situation the actual latency would be considerably higher than what is displayed on the overlay on the player's screens.

Decwars used to "equalize" latency for consoles verses dialups (in the 1970's)...

As context this was a big international fiasco. Nobody was acting maliciously but fans of RNG and other teams felt wronged. RNG didn't want to attend due to covid restrictions on travel but Riot really wants Chinese viewers in international tournaments, hence all this online latency work. Pros on other teams were lied to by the false latency information which must be almost paranoia inducing to be told it's only 35ms even when it (correctly) feels higher. In the end RNG had to replay their games, which was not as bad as it could have been since they were vs much weaker teams, but still annoying.

Anyways, by "scenarios where the actual ping was significantly lower than the target latency" do they mean like if the ping from Busan-server is 10 but they want it to feel like 35? I feel like that's the one scenario you'd care about, making the Busan players have 35 ping was the whole point.

Edit - also the other scenario, where the actual ping is significantly higher than the target latency...well in that case your latency service would be some sort of magical time travel box! Adding latency is literally the only thing it can do right? It's not possible to lower it. Maybe the it depends what they mean by "significantly" but idk the target latency was 35ms so like at most they could be 35ms lower than that.

I guess they didn't catch it because the bug was in the latency service itself which gave the wrong value to both the in game display and to the old network monitoring system. Idk in hindsight it's easy to say if you're going to introduce this new ping equalizing service it might break how you test ping especially because it hasn't been tested in soloq. But meh a lot easier to see what happened in hindsight after they write it all up.

Not apocryphal; IEX has 38 miles of wire in their building. Tom Scott did a video a few years ago about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4