Good News! An update from a new Oceanic Region Manager in Riot!
Quote:
Originally Posted by MasterMirkinen
Bump
We want dedicated Oceanic service and support as much as you guys, and we're working hard behind the scenes to make that happen
Quote:
Originally Posted by MasterMirkinen
We will release servers there.
The many Australian / New Zealand players here deserve an update regarding this matter. I have been a loyal player since Closed Beta 2009 and I even traveled from Australia to LA to watch the Season 2 Championships in person. I like your game, I have stuck with it through all of the changes and I am upcoming to 4 years in this great community. Unfortunately, after hearing DOTA 2 stepping it up for us, often forgotten and ignored members of the gaming community, it comes to great sadness to have to start favouring another game over this one, just so that we can comfortably play without 200-300 latency.
I don't want to play DOTA 2 over League of Legends, I want to play League of Legends with <100 latency. Unfortunately, we are greatly lacking any information or updates from you regarding if or when we may be seeing some good news about our struggle to compete in a competitive game due to constant latency issues.
tl;dr: Requesting Riot to provide an update to Australian / Oceanic players regarding if or when we are going to see a server that is dedicated for our region.
tl;dr Good News! An Oceanic server is on the way!
---------------------------------------
Update May 1:
Hey guys just a quick update from when i started the thread until now.
When i saw the official recruitment posting for the Sydney office i instantly applied for the NOC Technician position (someone who will be directly responsible for the Oceanic Server). The entire interviewing process took about 2 months, I spoke with multiple managers in both Riot Head Office and the new Oceanic office, I even went down and spoke to the Country Manager in person at the new office.
Unfortunately I only made it to the final 3 in the recruitment process and did not manage to become the NOC Technician for Oceania. I was hoping to be able to make a direct impact on the development of the new Oceanic server for our community but unfortunately it did not come to pass.
I guess now I will just be another eager observer on the progress of our new server, waiting from the outside for any new information.
I tried my best, several months of interviews and made it all the way to the finish line, but only got the silver medal. Sorry guys
------------------------------------------
Australian server hosting and bandwidth costs are well above what Riot would pay for the equivalent in the US. However there are companies willing to help with that because they recognise that bringing the world's most played game to Australians would be a big deal.
I work at iiNet, Australia's 2nd largest broadband ISP, as part of the team that run our gaming network and we would be incredibly eager to discuss what we can offer in terms of datacentre hosting to Riot. With DSL quotas what they are in Australia, being able to offer quota-free traffic to our customers who play League of Legends would be a huge PR boost for us.
If anyone from Riot wants to discuss this proposal further, feel free to send me a PM and I'll provide my contact info.
A major concern for most of us:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jungle Jarvan IV
having a hard time keeping my friends going to dota 2
I think this will be the case for many of us, our aussie friends will be divided due to wanting to play Dota 2 with a low ping and wanting to play League of Legends with their current friends and community.
An sensible post from reddit user Dyerbolical
Quote:
Australia really goes under the radar in forms of all gaming, yet people don't realize that the majority of oceania players would be playing on say the NA servers and yet would still be rather high ranks in their games. Being high ranked plus having terrible ping, by having a Oceania server, it would create a gateway to great potential and amazing players.
Australia and New Zealand will be deprived of forming any sort of real competitive League of Legends network that can perhaps one day compete with the pro teams from other regions, due to not being able to experience the game and constantly practice in a latency closer to a LAN environment.
A basic summary of the thread so far:
Quote:
Originally Posted by KínseySíx
I'm honestly surprised this doesn't have any sort of response. Have we heard anything on this subject from a red lately?, the last I've seen were old as the hills.
With Dota2 releasing an Australian server I thought the Riot fellas might pop in and some something, anything......
Also this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Punkshifter
with PAX coming to Australia it could provide Riot with a view to how many of us dedicated gamers actually exist in Australia.
Quote:
Originally Posted by d3vlyn
Bumping this because it isn't that hard to put a server farm in Australia. Many lower budget games have done so off the bat, with nowhere near as much support in Aus as LOL already has. Since the new league system, I've really wanted to compete against my other league members, but it would be far more interesting in a smaller competition against local players.
We can't keep playing at 200+ ms pings. Us Aussies have to live with the fact that we can only play some champs at 50% effectiveness, such as; blitz, ezreal, lee sin, brand. The delay causes us to have to predict enemy movement far further ahead.
Below is my ping in the new Aussie DOTA 2 Server. It is located in Sydney.
Regardless of whether you're a troll or an actual Riot worker, this post is just about as informative as Morello's.
Sorry, my account was not properly flagged, it is now. I can assure you once we have a solid date for launching any new region it will get announced and you can expect us to deliver.
The simple fact is we do not yet have a date for when this will happen, but there are many of us here interested in seeing the experience being improved there. We hear your pleas.
thank you so much for the overwhelming reaction to the Sydney Openings announcement.
I just wanted to share another piece of information.
Today we also opened 2 jobs based out of Sydney in the Technical Operation department.
You can find them here: http://www.riotgames.com/careers?loc...5D=425&search=
I also wanted to clarify couple of things:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Erased321
I just had a quick question - I have a background in IT support (desktop support) - do you have any idea if a similar position will be opened at some stage for the Sydney office?
I'd love to apply if so.
Not sure exactly about your background but we did open 2 new position today with a technical background. You can find then here: http://www.riotgames.com/careers?loc...5D=425&search=
Stay tuned as we will open more in the next weeks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lagNZ
if the new region is released, would an account transfer be possible?
Id hate to have to grind for levels, my champions, runes and buy my skins all over again
We are aware that "not losing content you already purchased / unlocked" is something important for you so rest assure we are working on this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gunnandahalf
I wouldn't mind some kind of confirmation that they are releasing servers, and not just an Esports office!
We will release servers there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Plazman
I heard that Australian servers will be available late March, 2013
This is not true unfortunately. We are hiring now so it's going to take longer than that to be ready.
Hi guys,
I'm really sorry I cannot give you a better time frame but I promise you that we are working super hard to set up the servers and to find the right people to work in our sydney office (which BTW we opened on Monday in lovely Sydney).
Glad you tried the game out on our ping! Sucks right?! Thanks for the update but no timeframe at all?!?! ;( 3-6 months? 6-12? 12+ ?!?!!
The last thing I want to do is telling you guys "this will happen in 6 months" and then for some reason this doesn't happen.
Not only you guys would be raging (for good reason) but we would look like a company who doesn't deliver our promise.
First of all I want to thank Werewolf and Kudos for maintaining this post alive and for trying to keep a positive attitude although they must be as impatient as anyone else.
Second, I have read all your comments and I fully understand your frustration.
I wanted to give you some update to show you that things are moving and we are not just "saying things" to keep you quiet.
In term of hiring, as some of you mentioned, the interview process is very long in Riot. We want the best for our players but to do that we need to find the best Rioters!
I've received and screened 665 Curriculum since we open the positions. I think I've interview more than 200 people. Of these 200, few made it to the final stage and we are in a good place for some positions (like eSport, NOC, Network Engineer and System Administrator) and in a "not so good" place for others (like Community, Marketing and Web Developer).
We keep searching because we know that the Rioter we are looking for is out there but he/she doesn't know it yet.
In term of server setup, still with the purpose of providing the community with the best experience, we evaluated 10 Data Centre. Of these 10, we started talking actively with 6. We asked all of them to perform a test and we shortlisted to 4. After that we asked them to lend us some server to do some testing and only 2 of them were able to do so.
After that test, we chose one.
From here, I still cannot tell you when the servers will be up and running (because we don't know it yet as we rely on suppliers as well to get our equipments) but at least I hope you guys have a better picture of the progress we have made in these months.
Thank you for your understanding and continuous support.
Hey guys,
some of you have suggested to provide you with a weekly update. I won't promise a weekly update as some weeks I might not have any but I promise to give you more. So here below some more info:
Last week was great from a hiring point of view. We made an offer for the eSport coordinator and he accepted.
We also are in the process of making 4 offers for technical positions (NOC and OPS).
Moreover, I took some of the question I can answer and try to give you some more info.
Quote:
Originally Posted by exe3
Can you say who you went with? Was it Internode/iiNet?
Sorry, we cannot disclose this but I can assure you we tested intensively and we believe that company we have chosen is the best for our needs.
Thank you n3phx, I'll definitely add to the list of website we advertise.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EFG
While thats promising there are some issues that could use some immediate attention. The biggest one being our inability to choose which server group our games are currently assigned to. I get 180ms to LA and 220ms to the other servers (Washington?). Why is there no way for me to stop getting assigned to games on the non-LA servers to avoid the extra latency? While this isn't a long term solution it would ease the pain somewhat until the Australian servers are in place and I'm sure that a lot of north Americans would also appreciate being able to choose the servers closer to them too.
We could start working on that but give or take, a project like that would take a month... Would you rather us working on setting up the Oceanic platform or delaying this a month and develop a feature that likely won't be useful in the future?
Quote:
Originally Posted by combat
Thank you very much for the update! It is so appreciated. Perhaps you could come in once a week or so to continue to give periodic updates? Thank you very much and we look so forward to the servers.
Hey combat, thank you for the suggestion. I wont commit to a weekly update because some weeks I might not have any update, but I will try to update you guys more often.
Quote:
Originally Posted by yoshiwaan
As a fellow Sydney ITer, are you allowed to say which DC you picked? I'm interested. It also reads like you're only getting 1 web developer, Sysadmin, Noc technician etc. I would have thought there would be more? Or was it just the wording.
Again, I cannot tell you which IDC we chose, but regarding your second question, yes, that was wording. We are hiring more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NZ Firetruck
Cool! Thanks for the update MasterMirk, It's nice to be kept abreast of how everything is progressing. I note that you're looking to hire an e-sports director and I have a question regarding e-sports for the Oceanic Region. Are you planning to set up an LCS style league for season 4 if the servers are out in time? Would be really cool to see local players competing in a consistent league. I understand that this might not be a realistic goal, but it's definitely something that would be really cool. Also is it likely that there will be spots for Oceania at season 4 world finals?
Hey NZ, eSport plans are not finalized. Our ultimate goal for Oceania is to develop eSport to professional level. This might take some time though as PRO eSport needs to be fostered from the bottom therefore for the first period we will focus on semi-pro organisation development.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BoozBear
Id firstly just like to say thanks for the official response on this thread! Was so stoked when i saw it. Secondly i would like to politely ask if its at all possible for you to tell us if you THINK (not if you know) that the servers will be up in Aus before the end of the year? Having some sort of idea even if its not a official post would be cool. If not at all possible i understand but thanks anyway.
Riot - Please Respond regarding AUSTRALIAN / OCEANIC Server
Please advise the status of an Australia / Oceanic based server for League of Legends.
There is your large thread (1 year ago) collecting data here regarding our terrible latency issues to your NA server that we have to put up with: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=1174937
Also, many people are now aware of the upcoming release of the DOTA 2 Australian server next month: http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?...l=1#post407410
MISC
- Added Australia server region.
We want dedicated Oceanic service and support as much as you guys, and we're working hard behind the scenes to make that happen
The many Australian / New Zealand players here deserve an update regarding this matter. I have been a loyal player since Closed Beta 2009 and I even traveled from Australia to LA to watch the Season 2 Championships in person. I like your game, I have stuck with it through all of the changes and I am upcoming to 4 years in this great community. Unfortunately, after hearing DOTA 2 stepping it up for us, often forgotten and ignored members of the gaming community, it comes to great sadness to have to start favouring another game over this one, just so that we can comfortably play without 200-300 latency.
I don't want to play DOTA 2 over League of Legends, I want to play League of Legends with <100 latency. Unfortunately, we are greatly lacking any information or updates from you regarding if or when we may be seeing some good news about our struggle to compete in a competitive game due to constant latency issues.
tl;dr: Requesting Riot to provide an update to Australian / Oceanic players regarding if or when we are going to see a server that is dedicated for our region.
tl;dr Good News! An Oceanic server is on the way!
---------------------------------------
Update May 1:
Hey guys just a quick update from when i started the thread until now.
When i saw the official recruitment posting for the Sydney office i instantly applied for the NOC Technician position (someone who will be directly responsible for the Oceanic Server). The entire interviewing process took about 2 months, I spoke with multiple managers in both Riot Head Office and the new Oceanic office, I even went down and spoke to the Country Manager in person at the new office.
Unfortunately I only made it to the final 3 in the recruitment process and did not manage to become the NOC Technician for Oceania. I was hoping to be able to make a direct impact on the development of the new Oceanic server for our community but unfortunately it did not come to pass.
I guess now I will just be another eager observer on the progress of our new server, waiting from the outside for any new information.
I tried my best, several months of interviews and made it all the way to the finish line, but only got the silver medal. Sorry guys
------------------------------------------
TheOddOne stating how terrible the gaming experience is in Australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25nNtJv9ptg#t=1m43s
A wild reddit post has appeared: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflege...ers_needs_you/
Also a very helpful aussie below:
I work at iiNet, Australia's 2nd largest broadband ISP, as part of the team that run our gaming network and we would be incredibly eager to discuss what we can offer in terms of datacentre hosting to Riot. With DSL quotas what they are in Australia, being able to offer quota-free traffic to our customers who play League of Legends would be a huge PR boost for us.
If anyone from Riot wants to discuss this proposal further, feel free to send me a PM and I'll provide my contact info.
A major concern for most of us:
An sensible post from reddit user Dyerbolical
A basic summary of the thread so far:
With Dota2 releasing an Australian server I thought the Riot fellas might pop in and some something, anything......
We can't keep playing at 200+ ms pings. Us Aussies have to live with the fact that we can only play some champs at 50% effectiveness, such as; blitz, ezreal, lee sin, brand. The delay causes us to have to predict enemy movement far further ahead.
I just wanted to say I'm ignoring these threads because international server stuff is something I might even know less about than you guys.
I can sniff around, but I'm unlikely to be able to help
The simple fact is we do not yet have a date for when this will happen, but there are many of us here interested in seeing the experience being improved there. We hear your pleas.
target1...
We want dedicated Oceanic service and support as much as you guys, and we're working hard behind the scenes to make that happen.
As Zerglinator just noticed, we just opened a couple of positions for Riot Sydney: http://www.riotgames.com/careers?loc...5D=425&search=
If you or someone you know is passionate about community or esports in Oceania, please apply!
That's all I've got for today, but I did want to make sure you know we're listening, we're working, and we'll have more to share soon(TM).
thank you so much for the overwhelming reaction to the Sydney Openings announcement.
I just wanted to share another piece of information.
Today we also opened 2 jobs based out of Sydney in the Technical Operation department.
You can find them here: http://www.riotgames.com/careers?loc...5D=425&search=
I also wanted to clarify couple of things:
I'd love to apply if so.
Stay tuned as we will open more in the next weeks.
Id hate to have to grind for levels, my champions, runes and buy my skins all over again
I'm really sorry I cannot give you a better time frame but I promise you that we are working super hard to set up the servers and to find the right people to work in our sydney office (which BTW we opened on Monday in lovely Sydney).
I wanted to share again our Sydney recruiting page: http://www.riotgames.com/careers?loc...5D=425&search=
and as you will see, there are some new positions:
PR and Marketing Manager:
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/pr-...keting-manager
Front End Web Designer / Developer
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/fro...ignerdeveloper
We also have 2 position based out of the Santa Monica office for people coming from Oceania but currently living / working in the US.
Oceanic Player Support Lead:
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/pla...t-lead-oceania
Oceanic Project Manager:
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/oce...ject-manager-0
As someone else mentioned, we don't reply to all emails (I've screened more than 300 CV since we opened the position).
Again, thank you for your patience, after having played one game today I REALLY feel your pain and we want to fix.
Not only you guys would be raging (for good reason) but we would look like a company who doesn't deliver our promise.
Does it make sense?
First of all I want to thank Werewolf and Kudos for maintaining this post alive and for trying to keep a positive attitude although they must be as impatient as anyone else.
Second, I have read all your comments and I fully understand your frustration.
I wanted to give you some update to show you that things are moving and we are not just "saying things" to keep you quiet.
In term of hiring, as some of you mentioned, the interview process is very long in Riot. We want the best for our players but to do that we need to find the best Rioters!
I've received and screened 665 Curriculum since we open the positions. I think I've interview more than 200 people. Of these 200, few made it to the final stage and we are in a good place for some positions (like eSport, NOC, Network Engineer and System Administrator) and in a "not so good" place for others (like Community, Marketing and Web Developer).
We keep searching because we know that the Rioter we are looking for is out there but he/she doesn't know it yet.
In term of server setup, still with the purpose of providing the community with the best experience, we evaluated 10 Data Centre. Of these 10, we started talking actively with 6. We asked all of them to perform a test and we shortlisted to 4. After that we asked them to lend us some server to do some testing and only 2 of them were able to do so.
After that test, we chose one.
From here, I still cannot tell you when the servers will be up and running (because we don't know it yet as we rely on suppliers as well to get our equipments) but at least I hope you guys have a better picture of the progress we have made in these months.
Thank you for your understanding and continuous support.
P.S. for all Sydney people, I recommend attending this MOBAR event: https://www.facebook.com/events/553257121403699/ .. I went last week and was such a great atmosphere!
some of you have suggested to provide you with a weekly update. I won't promise a weekly update as some weeks I might not have any but I promise to give you more. So here below some more info:
Last week was great from a hiring point of view. We made an offer for the eSport coordinator and he accepted.
We also are in the process of making 4 offers for technical positions (NOC and OPS).
Moreover, I took some of the question I can answer and try to give you some more info.
Thank you again all for your patience.