League Of Legends Servers Are Moving Next Week

Riot Games is all set to move League of Legends' North American servers from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois. Today they announced the exact date of the move along with everything else players need to know.

On August 25th, Riot will begin transitioning the game to the new Chicago servers. The process will happen between 5 AM PDT and 12 PM. Riot hopes that everyone will be able to play during this time. However, they're going to disabled ranked matches until the move is complete just to be sure.

Once the transfer is complete, all LoL games will be utilizing the Chicago servers. Riot hopes that moving the servers to a more central location in North America will help even out player latency. With the current Portland servers, many players in the East Coast experience significantly higher ping than their West Coast counterparts. Some East Coasters have even resorted to playing on Latin America North servers because they're based in Miami.

Riot said last week that they expect the following changes in ping thanks to the server move:

• Moderate latency increases (up to ~45 ms) in the Pacific Northwest and outlying regions (Hawaii, other Pacific Islands, Japan, etc)
• Minor latency increases (up to ~30 ms) across the rest of the west coast of North America.
• Generally neutral effects across a broad strip of the Mountain States and Saskatchewan
• Moderate to major latency reductions (up to ~50 ms for much of the East Coast) across the entire eastern half of North America

While West Coast players should see an increase in their ping, Riot claims that their overall experience will nonetheless be improved by "connection improvements in the form of better overall stability and reduced packet loss."

However, Riot acknowledges players could experience some problems with the move. It's possible that some players won't be connecting to the Chicago servers as quickly as they should be. Riot will be working with players to resolve these pathing issues through the support forums.

Riot wants to stress test the Chicago servers the weekend after they're up and running. To ensure that as many players log in as possible between August 28th and August 30th, the company will be hosting another Party IP weekend. During the event, players will get bonus Influence Points by forming premade groups for PvP matches. The bonus will increase with the size of your group:

• 2 players - 100% bonus
• 3 - 150% bonus
• 4 - 200% bonus
• 5 - 300% bonus

If you need a group, join the in-game chat room RedditLFG (or RedditLFG2, RedditLFG3, etc.). You should be able to find four companions pretty quick. These premade groups sometimes have players of very different skill levels (I got matched up against a Master-level player during a previous Team Up event) so you could might get destroyed. Still, you'll get some bonus IP whether you win or lose so it's worth the embarrassment. The bonus adds up quick and makes it easy to get a new champion or two.