Original Post — Direct link

https://i.gyazo.com/54710f85e36b1af9759704b8fc3ccc53.png

A shard is a collection of game servers and platform resources that serves a given VALORANT player population.

EU/TR/MENA/CIS Shard: Madrid, Paris 1, Paris 2, London, Frankfurt 1, Frankfurt 2, Stockholm 1, Warsaw, Istanbul, Bahrain & Tokyo;

North America Shard: US East N. Virginia 1 (Ashburn), US East N. Virginia 2 (Ashburn), US Central Georgia (Atlanta), US Central Texas (Dallas), US Central Illinois (Chicago), US West N. California (San Jose), US West N. California (San Jose), US West Oregon 1 (Portland);

LATAM Shard: Miami, Santiago & Mexico City - This shard has very poor coverage

BR Shard: São Paulo

JP/OCE/SEA Shard: Mumbai, Singapore 1, Singapore 2, Hong Kong 1, Hong Kong 2, Tokyo 1, Tokyo 2, Sydney 1 & Sydney 2;

KR Shard: Seoul;

The servers with the 2 have the entry point usualy in AWS, while the servers with 1 enter directly via RIOT DIRECT.

External link →
over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

I worked on the infra plan, AMA (within reason)

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by IHaveNoEyeDeer

For some reason my friends and I (all Seattle based) get better pings to the North California servers than we do to the Oregon servers. Is there a technical reason why Oregon is so much worse while being closer in distance?

Also, is there a plan to expand your server infrastructure into Seattle given the high density of cloud providers and data centers here?

Re: getting better latency to San Jose than Portland, the technical reason is usually ISPs peering in an unexpected way. Can you tell me what ISP you're on?

Re: expanding into Seattle, no plans, adding servers in Seattle would be a small incremental improvement to a relatively small player population that are mostly already being served well out of Portland. The goal is to balance two tensions: more servers to lower latency, but fewer servers to concentrate the player base and improve matchmaking.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by MaestroLA

/u/ZealousApathy why are the 2 servers hosted by AWS? This is a big gamble but what I think is those servers usualy have the routing sorted with all ISPs and thats why you guys did that? Some ISPs dont have the best routing to riot direct. Big if but its my thoughts.

Most of our servers are hosted in AWS. In some locations, generally the "2" locations as you've noted, we chose to expose some servers via AWS Edge in addition to Riot Direct, because AWS Edge has better routing for some players. Over time, we'll improve Riot Direct's routing and deprecate the AWS Edge servers.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by Remarkable-Shine7924

are we gonna see a server in Italy Milan since we have AWS there ?

I said this elsewhere:

The goal is to balance two tensions: more servers to lower latency, but fewer servers to concentrate the player base and improve matchmaking.

We don't have any plans to put servers in Milan right now, but we've got that option if we think that the player base fragmentation is worth the reduction in latency for some players.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by Randomdudeinthecar

Is there a plan in the future to be able to play on any server no matter the region you created the account in? For example having a NA acc but playing on London servers while travelling to London.

No plans right now. Your use case makes sense, but providing that support will only impact a very small part of the player base (e.g. those currently traveling outside their shard, or players with friends across the world who want to play together and have terrible latency).

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by STLNKILLZ

Why is Miami part of the latam shard? I live in Florida and Miami would be a much better server for me rather than Georgia

The goal is to balance two tensions: more servers to lower latency, but fewer servers to concentrate the player base and improve matchmaking.

I felt it was better to "pull" players in from Florida to Atlanta, than to push more central players out to Miami. Purely a judgement call on my part, that a central location will better serve more players.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by Remarkable-Shine7924

well the reason why I asked is when MENA servers were announced the North African players we were so happy that we will finally get server , but the thing is the server was located in Bahrain so it should not be called MENA cause on that server we would get 150+ ping it's even worst then NA that we can get 120 .We are now playing on Europe and we get around 60-80 but I am sure if you guys make it happen in Milan the latency would be around 40 since I have experienced that server in other games .

Yep, you've identified the primary case for why we'd put servers in Milan. It's on our radar, but we don't have any work planned yet.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by ian_525

ISPs usually suck in LATAM which leads to high pings (apart from distances), and as op said, that area has a very poor coverage, are there any plans on getting more servers for LAN/LAS?

I don't have firm plans that I can talk about but it's on my priority list for next year. Real talk, the problem is that infrastructure is expensive in Latin America, without much coverage from public cloud providers (e.g. AWS is only in Sao Paulo, which is why most games are only hosted there in Latin America). We think we can do better, but I want to under-promise and over-deliver.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by [deleted]

Why is Bahrain on EU shard even when ME players gets lower ping to asian servers than eu servers. My friend lives in dubai and he gets 30ms to mumbai and 20ms to Bahrain.(while the next lowest ping is 130ms in EU shard)

You’ve essentially halved the playable population, which means longer queues time. Learn from apex where they have Bahrain server but no one plays on it, since even the ones that do play on Singapore servers

Even if both Bahrain and Mumbai were in the same shard we'd already be splitting the player population because we prefer the server with lower latency. Yes, there might be some players like your friend in Dubai who have decent latency to both, but with a 10ms difference hopefully they always end up on Bahrain. The reason that Bahrain is on EU is that at launch, we didn't want to block Middle Eastern players from playing the game, and we thought that being on EU made the most sense while we waited for Bahrain to come online. Now that it has, we don't want Middle Eastern players to lose the ability to play with their friends in EU.

Ultimately, I believe we have the player population to make this layout work.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by Ellixist

Any plans on another server in South India? Say Bengaluru or Chennai?

No plans right now, we try to use AWS where we can and they're only in Mumbai. That's not to say we'd never think about another server location in India, but we'd need to see strong engagement from the Indian player base to be confident that a) matchmaking would still be viable and b) it was worth the investment (because we'd have to build a solution outside AWS, e.g. Microsoft Azure is in Chennai, but we don't support Azure right now).

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by DuckAsFumb

I heard Ana (Supercakes) said a couples months ago that there where some places where the team wasn't totally satisfied with the latency in certain regions. One of them being Argentina. Has there been any progress with this issue?

I think we all know LATAM isn't where it could be right now, so we'll be looking closely at what we can do to improve LATAM in 2021.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by tbone603727

If you could have any animal tamed as a pet what would you want?

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by nostalgic26

Can we get a Denver server please!

No plans for more coverage in North America right now, sorry!

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by MaestroLA

/u/ZealousApathy talking now about competitive advantage, it seems like u guys consider anything higher than 40ms not ideal right? I'm just saying this based on the number of green bars now that we can choose servers, its like 0-40 = 4 bars, 41-70 = 3 bars, 71 to 100 is 2 bars with yellow and above 100 is red. But lets be honest a guy with 40 ping vs a player with 12-16ms is still in a lot of disadvantage no? Assuming equal skill.

We'd like 70% of our players to be below 35ms, and 90% to be below 50ms. Achieving 35ms universally is impossible. So we'll always be happy to look for ways to improve those numbers, but need to balance improving those numbers against the cost (financial cost and impact to matchmaking). We're already greatly exceeding 70% in the European shard.

So there are always going to be ping discrepancies between players, but a hypothetical 15ms ping difference is only one aspect of what it takes to win any encounter; ability usage, knowing what angles to hold, game sense, team coordination, and honestly a bit of luck go into winning an encounter.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by MaestroLA

What did you guys took into account to decide the thresholds of ping and if its a full 4 green bar connection vs 1 bar red etc. Some games consider up to 100ms to be perfectly fine for example.

We did a lot of testing of different combinations of server tick rate and latency, to try and find a combination that minimized the perception of peeker's advantage (because you can never eliminate it, only minimize it). We settled on 128hz/35ms being an achievable target. We think it's "ok" up towards 50ms, but peeker's advantage becomes more and more prominent the higher your latency. That's why we generally aim for: 70% < 35ms, 90% < 50ms.

over 3 years ago - /u/ZealousApathy - Direct link

Originally posted by foreveralone_o

We play from north africa (Tunisia), we get ~130ms on Bahrain and ~90ms on Madrid, Paris 1, Paris 2, London, Frankfurt 1, Frankfurt 2 .

Yeah that's not surprising, Frankfurt is a central internet hub in Europe so internet tends to follow towards Frankfurt.