League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games has announced a new partnership with Cisco Systems from San Jose, California.
The worldwide technology giant will be the “Official Enterprise Networking Partner of League of Legends Esports” for the next two years. Cisco engineers and tech will be powering The Realm, Riot’s top-tier tournament client. They’ll also be doing much more. For example, Cisco will be upgrading all 12 of the League Broadcast Centers across the globe.
With @Cisco tech being implemented in “The Realm,” we are working to help pros compete on Summoner’s Rift at sub-1ms ping, allowing for near instantaneous reaction times & uninterrupted gameplay. The new Cisco servers are expected to offer up to 200% raw performance improvement https://t.co/IJsEuNE25l pic.twitter.com/kUQhkYuE94
— David Higdon (@davidhigdon) August 19, 2020
The three marquee events of the LoL season will hopefully see players get less than 1ms ping under the new deal. Those events are The League of Legends World Championship, The Mid-Season Invitational, and The All-Star Event.
The partnership will apparently improve the connection speeds for people watching these events on stream too. Also, Cisco will be installing 200 more tournament realm servers. That’s a blessing for those participating in Riot backed events across the world.
Most of this work will be shouldered by new Cisco Blade server technology. These cutting-edge systems are apparently able to “adapt and support the broadcast centers without the need for new hardware, allowing for potential new esports applications to come online with ease.” That’s a tantalizing bit of information there. It seems to suggest some new moves from Riot’s esports division in the pipeline.
Could we be seeing an official Riot Valorant league debut on their new Cisco servers? Who knows.
Cisco and Riot – an uncontroversial deal
What we do know, is that this deal will no doubt be more popular than one they tried last month. The partnership between the League of Legends European Championship (LEC) and Saudi tech-city NEOM lasted just over 24-hours.
Community backlash from LEC team members and the wider player-base forced Riot into cancelling the deal.
There should be no such problems with this new partnership with Cisco. Especially with sub 1ms ping times involved.
“Cisco is committed to redesigning the internet for the future, and esports has a big impact on that goal,” said Brian Eaton, Cisco’s Director of Global Sports Marketing.
