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For League of Legends Creator Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-just-need-a-good-jungler dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Riot Games created the very successful League of Legends gaming franchise, which hosts millions of monthly users. Barry Livingston, director of engineering for the company's Big Data group, talks about how Riot Games scaled up to deal with that enormous data load. Consider all the millions of people playing the game in real time. Picture joining three massive tables — player data, game data, and session data — and you begin to see the full scope of Riot Games' issue. Gamer activity generates more than 500 GB of structured data and over four TB of operational logs every day. Riot Games has also posted 60 open-source Chef and Opscode recipes, among other code samples."

33 comments

  1. Heroes of Newerth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    HoN > LoL.... everybody knows that

  2. "League of Legends gaming franchise" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Franchise? Isn't it just the one game?

    1. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by loufoque · · Score: -1, Flamebait

      More accurately: isn't it just one rip-off?
      It's just DotA.

    2. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by LordLucless · · Score: 2, Informative

      Just as much as every FPS ever is just a rip-off of Wolfenstein

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    3. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, just like all the Call of Duty games are just rip offs of Wolfenstine 3d.

    4. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by Slotty · · Score: 2, Informative

      More accurately: isn't it just one rip-off? It's just DotA.

      Seeing as League of Legends was created by the guy that created DotA he didn't rip it off he just decided to take his own work and develop it into a successful business instead of relying on the ever trustworthy Blizzard who has the best intentions for all their community based developers

    5. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If by 'create dota', you mean 'slap all the DotAs together and call it done', then sure, he created it.
      I would consider IceFrog is more of a father of DotA than him. (And he's with Valve making DotA2, whose only crime is that it can't be fully up fast enough.)

      Well, that and I'm inherently against a game that markets itsself as cometative, yet doesn't offer a level playing field for entry-level/aspiring players as to a pro player. Namely, champions needing to be bought. It doesn't matter if you can earn enough non-monetary currency to 'purchase' a champion; The amount of RP you can accumulate seriously playing is barely enough to stay ahead of their constant champion vomiting. And yes, you do need every single hero- if you are playing professionally, you need to be able to pick up whatever champion recieved favorable patch changes and/or drop whomever had significant nerfs.

    6. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by jhoegl · · Score: 4, Funny

      PPFFTT, that was just a rip off of Pong.

    7. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Any real pro only needs Tristana, noob.

    8. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you are playing "professionally" then you are a fucking meathead.

      Seriously. I'm guessing you posted AC because you have an account here that you don't want to lose precious karma. I, on the other hand, just didn't think it was worth the time creating one to point out how inane you are.

      "Playing" professionally? At what point did you start taking games so seriously that it's a profession for you now? Oooh, you need "every single hero," who gives a flying FUCK. There's obviously plenty of people who don't, because there are plenty of people playing it for free.

      The reason they're constantly selling new champions is the same reason that Valve is constantly selling new TF2 hats, the same reason that Microsoft is selling Halo 4 after Halo 3 was supposed to be the "stunning conclusion" to the "trilogy," ad nauseam. People like you. People who get so fucking obsessed over games that you have the audacity to call yourself a professional player, an oxymoron if ever there was one. People like you will buy that shit up because you need to be better than everyone else playing, because it's the only place you'll -ever- feel better than everyone else.

    9. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by Whatah1 · · Score: 2

      There are "obsessive completionists" who are not "professional players". I know people who have played the heck out of this game for a couple years and have saved up enough of the free "IP" to buy every champion in the game without spending any actual money. If they also want to spend actual money to get Riot Points so they can then buy totally unneeded (but perhaps cool) alternate skins for those champs then that is their business.

      From your comment I am not sure if you are referring to the "obsessive completionists" or actual "professional players."

      There are actual pro players, some who get money from streaming, and other who are on a sponsored team getting paid 5 figures + prize money and who live as a team in a house where they practice all day and stream all night. There are about 6-10 popular NA/Eur teams right now, and then a few that come over from China/Korea for the big events. Many of the weekly tournaments have 10k+ prizes (which have to be shared between the 5 players) and the larger events have much larger prizes (season2 championships had a $2,000,000 prize pool with 1mil going to winning team.)

      http://leaguepedia.com/wiki/Season_2_World_Championship

    10. Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise" by flimflammer · · Score: 1

      No.

  3. Massive bandwidth used for streaming by Whatah1 · · Score: 1

    During the LoL Season 2 World Championships a couple months ago the event stream made up 5% of NA internet bandwidth.

    Casual events streamed on twitch.tv tend to break 40,00 viewers and large events break 100,000

    1. Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming by blackraven14250 · · Score: 1

      I have no idea why they're using a standard streaming format, when they could probably integrate their spectator mode with some extra streaming bits (for shoutcasters between matches, player images at the bottom of the screen, voiceovers, etc) and a couple tidbits like having the camera directed by a central operator instead of the user in order to save a massive amount of the bandwidth they use to host one of these events. It would be a huge technical undertaking to develop, but has the potential to reduce bandwidth by such a large amount that I'm surprised it's not even considered at this point AFAIK.

    2. Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming by preaction · · Score: 1

      It probably is/was being considered, but a normal video player is ubiquitous even on mobile platforms, as opposed to what amounts to a spectate-only client which would cost money to develop. And, if they host the video on a provider like Youtube, they don't pay for the bandwidth (unless there are rules above a certain limit).

    3. Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming by blackraven14250 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, they already have a spectator mode built in to their client, with the ability to watch any PvP game being played on their servers on a 3 minute delay (to prevent using it to cheat). There's all of the other technical issues like the ones that I mention that would be required to allow the other functions of a championship game to be broadcasted, but a spectator mode does already exist. Hell, I use LOLReplay, which automatically connects to the spectator view for any and all games I play and saves the replay for later viewing. You can probably use that file size to estimate a cap for bandwidth savings. The largest replay I have is 22MB for a game that lasted an hour and 20 minutes. To stream that in 1080, you're probably looking at over 2GB of bandwidth, so your maximum savings is almost 2GB per viewer. With 10 million viewers (and there were more than that watching the championships on Twitch alone, which was just one of the US streaming providers; I remember seeing 14 and 15 million nearly the whole time), that's an enormous 20 petabytes. Obviously, once you have shoutcast voices and the other streaming bits, you're going to cut into that, but it's going to be a huge savings that could be pocketed rather than given up to the streaming provider (since they're running the ads and taking their cut to pay for that bandwidth before paying Riot their share).

    4. Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is true. Often i watch the big matches on my phone while traveling.

    5. Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming by hibiki_r · · Score: 1

      That's what Dota 2 is doing: They have an external player, and you can connect to games directly from the game too. There's player spots for official announcers, so you can listen to them, and use their camera view if you wish.

      It provides all kinds of other advantages, like being able to see statistics that the announcer is not looking at, or even see the game for a player's perspective, which is great for learning high level play.

  4. FA^ILZORS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    We strongly urge e7eryt4ing else Deliver. Some of

  5. We used to do that in the 90ies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We used to do that back in the 90ies. Like all good things I think it originated in the Quake scene with QuakeTV being the first semi-organized effort. I think a few later games even had ActiveX plugins for IE. Then come all that fuss with security of running native code from the internet and it became rather hard to get people to download a separate executable to watch video. If they tried that now I think they would only get a fraction of the viewers. Video is ubiquitous nowadays anyway, nobody really cares that much about bandwidth anymore.

    http://wiki.quakeworld.nu/QuakeTV

  6. LoL vs HoN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So Riot develops open source code for LoL but doesn't release a Linux version of their game while their competitor S2Games doesn't release any code but provides a well supported Linux version. Strange world.

  7. LoL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    I play League of Legens (a LOT) and it is a very good game as far as content is concerned. Quite innovative : they really added some nice novelties to DOTA and riot provided a game that is more than a dota clone. great.

      BUT as far as code and features are concern : it is utter CRAP. It is very buggy and poor feature-wise. DOTA 2 by Valve is a much MUCH superior piece of software.

      LOL lacks and has been lacking a proper observer mode (theirs is shit) and replay capabilities for 4 years. The interface to feed the users these so called important statistics is just laughable. And the game is sooo buggy.

      And I still play it, because i prefer the content of lol to that of Dota2, it just suits my tastes better, but god do I curse Riot everyday !

      improvements that are Urgently needed :

      A] Spent 0.1% of total profit to hire 10 people to DEBUG. For real.

      B] Revamp observer mode to integrate it in the CHAT SYSTEM !! You can't chat with your friends while observing but you can while playing : HOW stupid is that ? and don't talk to me about anti cheating, people can communicate via TS or mumble or skype + there is a 3 minute delay on observing?

      C] MAKE a replay feature : lolreplay has already GIVEN you for FREE their code. Just streamline it and integrate it ffs !

      D] For the statistic part : STOP focusing so much on individual data : I don't care how much magic dmg I dealt 9 games before but I'd love to have an history that spans over more than 10 games, and I'd love to see the whole score board in that history to actually remember WHAT the game was (the other champs, the teams, who fed who owned etc..) to be able to analyse the games instead of having tons of information that I can't use to do anything useful!

      With all my love, I hope someone from riot reads this.

    1. Re:LoL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I like to add CAPSLOCK to my SENTENCES to make them more ANNOYING and make me look like an utter FAGGOT who needs to DIE.

      I play LoL every FUCKING day and only encounter BUGS once every fucking THREE MONTHS so I don't know WHAT the FUCK you are ON about. If you want to play on your own PIECE of SHIT Pentium TWO then that's YOUR OWN FUCKING FAULT.

      Also, more seriously; Riot actually makes changes to the client just so it works with tools like LoLReplay, so I guess you could say it was an official tool.

      Also also, your match history has barely anything to do with this article.

    2. Re:LoL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Living your life on 4chan isn't healthy.

    3. Re:LoL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      lol working for riot much ?

        I meant this from the bottom of my heart : I love League of legends, it is a great game. But it is codded by monkeys on heroin.

        I play lol everyday with a 2000+ elo. I play Dota 2 every week for 2 games with my bro. Every fucking time I'm just blown away by how much lol sucks as a software. it is just utter crap. like the recent crazy lags you get when picking champions. it is insane

        I'm waiting for a ranked as I type this. And I had to invite a friends 10 times because of bugs. The last patch was a disaster.

  8. Okay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Game requires you to store / move too much data? Better nerf Irelia!

  9. "scaled up to deal with that load..." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem is that Riot's servers are completely fucked. They HAVEN'T scaled as much as this article claims. There are few players who experience no lag. I have FiOS and my ping spikes to 500-600 ms nearly every game. Almost every ranked match I play there is someone disconnecting due to lag that is probably not on their end.

  10. Just sayin' by ThePhilips · · Score: 1

    Gamer activity generates more than 500 GB of structured data and over four TB of operational logs every day.

    Fits in RAM of a single, well stocked server.

    Just sayin'.

    --
    All hope abandon ye who enter here.
    1. Re:Just sayin' by flimflammer · · Score: 1

      ...and?

    2. Re:Just sayin' by BitZtream · · Score: 1

      And ... what they are dealing with isn't that hard to deal with and for most of us who have done any moderately sized projects ... we don't call that 'big data'.

      They are clearly doing it wrong.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  11. Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    People still play that piece of shit league of lamers?

    Really? Wow...

    What's wrong with them?

    Game ran like shit and is populated by rejects from 4chan. I can't imagine anyone still plays LoL.
    I sure don't know anyone that still does. everyone quit years ago.

    This must just be some slashvertisment to try and remind people they still exist..... Dice must have invested. lol@LoL

    1. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You, writing this hatetext, don't realise that you are pretty much advertising the game.

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