Dear Riot,
I understand and accept your decision to split the EU server, but from a Community Relations perspective it has been handled in a less than optimal way. The main problem the community is having with the split rests on the geographical boundaries suggested by the names of the two servers ("Nordic and East" and "West"). Generic names or, even better, names inspired by League of Legends lore would have been a far better choice. Please allow me to elaborate.
Europe is a multifaceted geographic region that is better handled either in its entirety (“Europe”) or by referring concrete nations (“Germany”,”Italy”,”Portugal”). Anything in-between is bound to create tensions. Complicated sentiments between nations and often irritating self-image problems make a split a very sensible issue for a large part of the player base: “Why are countries X and Y together?”, “Why do I have to play with Z?” It sounds trivial but it has to be taken into consideration. Naming the servers in a geographically and by that a culturally agnostic way, would have created a far less uproar. As an interesting side note, the problems you are facing are, in essence, the same problems the European Union has been faced with since its foundation over 50 years ago.
From a technical standpoint I cannot imagine that the servers will be in different locations. It would only raise costs (double on-site personnel, management overhead etc.) with no noticeable impact on network/game performance (latency between Greece and Britain is not worse than between Greece and Norway). Moreover, the abstract naming of the servers would have allowed for greater flexibility in managing the player base split: Using a clustering algorithm “friend networks” can be found. While partitioning the sum of these networks optimally to each server is an instance of the “Partition Problem” (which is NP-complete) good heuristic solutions exist. If some “friend networks” are too large, then they are to be split with minimal cost e.g. by severing only a single “friend connection”. This split can also be heuristically determined (I assume there is some kind of game history data to find out if a player hasn’t played with somebody for over a year). The resulting player bases of the two new servers will, in all likelihood, be just as varied as the current server. The data-mining could even be done before the announcement in order to better estimate the effect of the split and thus enabling a better management of the situation.
To conclude: I love this game and I truly believe that with the right strategic decisions it can become the first true online sport.
Also: I wouldn’t say no to a job offer and/or a Maokai buff. :-)
Good luck with the migration,
M.Comp.Sc. “The Consultant”
??
Junior Member
