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

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."

Re:

[LordLucless]

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

Re:"League of Legends gaming franchise"

[jhoegl]

PPFFTT, that was just a rip off of Pong.

Re:

[Slotty]

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

Re:

[Whatah1]

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 compl

Re:

[flimflammer]

No.

Massive bandwidth used for streaming

[Whatah1]

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

Re:

[blackraven14250]

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

Re:

[preaction]

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).

Re:Massive bandwidth used for streaming

[blackraven14250]

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).

Re:

[hibiki_r]

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.

Just sayin'

[ThePhilips]

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'.

Re:

[flimflammer]

...and?

Re:

[BitZtream]

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.

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