Again Massive Riot Direct ISSUE AS6507
All those who have experienced a sharp increase in ping at some point, please read and support if not indifferent https://www.reddit.com/r/riotgames/comments/1ig3vaj/again_massive_riot_direct_issue_as6507/
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@Riot Schmick
there's nothing i can do about this. i dont work in our networking area. those that do keep an eye out for these things
Just how to contact them, it's a problem that hasn't been solved for years and is getting worse (presumably) from the Riot Direct expansion
Contact riot support?
there is no way to directly contact anyone on Riot staff. if there were, we would be getting a constant influx of requests and would never be able to sort out the relevant ones, much less have time to do our jobs
I already sent everything in, but the employee said he didn't know if anyone would be doing it
and that's correct. all they can do is route it to the right folks. it's up to that owning team to decide if anything can be done and if so, if the effort involved can be prioritized over other efforts that are being worked on
but it's not even guaranteed that we have the power to fix it. a lot of the times we rely on ISPs or other providers to make changes on their end and they aren't always willing or able to
I understand how it works, but it seems that no one is interested in this problem and does not advertise it in any way, all the information I found is only how people complain en masse about the increase in ping from different regions 1-3 years ago specifically to Valorant, they just say, the problem of the provider of something else and all forget, to contact in any way can not, to get through too, support will just say ask to configure your ISPs Riot Direct, although just at the backbone provider RETN was configured Riot Direct and this is what comes out
Anyway, thanks for the reply
wait for the arrival of the holy Kenji-san :Prayge:
just because no one from the team is responding directly to you or on the posts doesn't mean no one is interested. we don't necessarily advertise our work for most parts of the company. i'm not promising that we are currently working on this. i'm just saying that something not being advertised doesn't mean anything.
but either way, there's nothing i can do to help here. if it's been reported then our team has likely been made aware. in addition, if it's been complained about for years, then they probably already knew, as we have people that monitor socials for sentiment and issues. i can't speak personally to what has been done/tried on our end or why it hasn't improved, except to say that it's not because no one cares. it's more likely because our hands our tied in some way.
Thanks for the reply, I'm just hoping someone from Riot NetOps has a more detailed answer, so I'm writing where I can
Hey @Tatara I am aware of the problem and this is not a very easy and quick fix, usually we take individual ISPs and optimize them, but we cant really tell them or force them to use transit of our choice, as unfortunately its out of our scope. I did a few tweaks to RETN events during 2024 major one was cutting advertisements in RETN PL towards APAC countries via BGP communities, but that wont stop all ISPs in CIS using different path/transit that results in preferring path via Poland. I can assure you we are reacting to this problem as we have plenty of metrics and ahead warnings when it happens. There are few more things I want to try this year as well that might improve or resolve it.
for now, you can create topic here which I actively sweep few times a week when you know about certain ISP that have a routing issue towards Stockholm and we can check it out if they are willing to cooperate with us and fix it
had a sweep through our cases and as example: we fixed one in December 2024, ASN 50498 were pathing via RETN PL, they were learning our prefixes as well in RETN St.Petersburg and instead of sending it via Stockholm it was flying via Poland. You can imagine latency nearly tripled for them. They were willing to cooperate with us and we resolved it within a day, some graphs for your vis.

Id say these shows up about every 3-4months, we react to it quickly enough
The problem is that most local providers and providers in Kazakhstan and Russia just connect to RETN. In Kazakhstan it is TTC and TNS, they provide Retn services to us and in Kazakhstan itself. I can only provide a few, in my country and others. AS41798, AS42837, AS5617, AS41750, AS35168
Retn makes Warsaw a base for the whole CIS and Russia
And the problem is that a lot of CIS providers have started connecting to RETN.
Specifically in my country, the routes have not changed for several years
I understand the frustration of this and dont want to brush this off, but you must understand that this is between those ISPs and RETN as a two individual companies, we cant be really telling them how to run their network. If I own an ISP and buy Tier 1 transit to connect me with a certain prefix I need to speak to my Tier 1 and tell them my issue. I pay money to Tier 1 they need to fix it. This is my logic to the problem. ISP can also utilize bgp communities towards RETN, I am sure you know how these works given you seem to understand routing.
if the return traffic would be the problem you bet I can fix that part as its our network and we control it
nevertheless, we can at least reach out to the individuals and ask them to look at it, that is what we are doing as part of the process . ill also have a look at those ISPs you mentioned throughout the week
I don't know much about routes, I've only started to learn about it this week. Thank you very much for your reply, that's the most you've done so far.
no probs man, feel free to ask or make topics in here when you have questions people around are very nice and knowledgeable
Have you tried working with Retn Russia AS57304 and RETN Kazakhstan 44877? Maybe they have more control over routing choices in CIS and can cooperate better with ISPs
:val_Heh:
UPD: AS8449 - it's a higher provider, for a few local ones. Including - AS42837. It uses a couple of transits including RETN.
@Tatara thanks Tatara, ill check them out when I get a chance. Meanwhile they should be talking to RETN themselves to get a reroute towards St.Petersburg or closer to Stockholm RETN
I tried to write to higher providers from Kazakhstan nobody answered me, I tried local providers, they said they can not do anything. Now I will try to write to AS8449
hello, I did a small change and reached out to RETN RU if they can help out with these faults. CIS/RU should route towards Stockholm and to ensure that I have made 185.40.64.0/24 available only in STO for RETN downstreams. But the problem is sitting in their layout
when using RETN infra their customers have (nearly) same latency towards Stockholm and Warsaw
in theory STO should be about 1ms faster than WAW but that is not what we are seeing, I did a trace from Kazahstan and got about 2ms better average latency to WAW. so this means if you are sitting in KZ and want to play you will get better latency in WAW than in STO due to latency based matchmaking Valorant is running
then other stuff comes into play...
The ping to Stockholm is now 70ms, which is slightly higher than the expected 61-64ms, but still an improvement. According to the traces, traffic is still routed through Warsaw
when you trace
185.40.64.0
you should only route to Stockholm
what is your average ping towards 162.249.72.0
?61-62
66-67

see thats the problem, Valorant is a latency based game and whereever you get lower ping there you are going to proxy from, eg. Warsaw Poland due to lower latency there
is the Warsaw Valorant ping below 70ms ?
Yeah, in Valorant 61-63.
you must be from east Kazakhstan then like Almaty?
Bishkek Kyrgyzstan
acording to RETN Almaty < - > Stockholm should be about 62ms on their infra

oh so even further east, nice I think thats a good ping in that case

^ yeah thats rought estimate I think as your trace shows their RETN hop at 66ms
see this, warsaw shows a bit higher ping but nearly identical

thats our issue we need Warsaw to get higher ping somehow
The ping on stockholm used to be just 62 and there was a higher ping on warsaw. And it is not clear where RETN has problems, because the same ExitLag has a supposed ping of 60 before and 64 real in the game.
it can be anything on their network, they might have improved one thing or other. I asked them to check it out, but you see its a complex problem to solve if its not our network
Yes, I understand, thank you so much for your help anyway
I think Warsaw is playable for you guys though, but not ideal
Yes, the problem is that there are no CIS players at all and you always play against Poles who do not speak Russian and against you always with ping 10-15. I play with a friend and we always have to look for a party because of the difference in rank and in such a situation is very disturbing. It wouldn't be a problem if CIS players played there
And it often happens that if they hear a Russian accent, they start clowning around, like “YOU ARE RUSSIAN YOU PUTIN” and so on and they would just start and just talk instead of playing. So 70 ping on stockholm in this case is a blessing
That's the situation on the other provider, haha. Stockholm finally won

I just found out from a friend who has been playing valorant longer than me that ping used to be 35-40 on Stockholm. Somewhere in Early 2023, well I found a video from 3 years ago where the guy has the same ping from my region, what has changed since then? And might have changed.
Do you have any ping stats from back in the day?
One person asked to write, it looks like the same problem in lol, can you help?
League routing is a bit different, what is his issue ?
get him to trace
162.249.72.0
Problem with high ping as it was in valorant with the route through Warsaw. He has the same ISP and city
our ISP has a route to this IP RETN warsaw.

Hello, it seems that after the adjustments on February 15 Kazakhtelecom and related providers have something broken, I wanted to ask is it a matter of routes or something in the providers?
Saw a lot of complaints on CIS discord already.
^ What is the problem, Valorant latency or League latency. These are both different issues. can you get me their ASNs
Valorant
1 sec
48503 9198
Another one, same isp

routing looks ok in STO, majority for
ASN 48503
are using SOVAM ASN 3216
their trace looks to be going via transtelecom we got those as well in STO, but that one taking 200ms for some reason, its something internal in Transtelecom I am afraid
200ms sounds like a route via Tokyo ? they need to get in touch with them I am afraidokay, thx for information
CIS routing is crazy bad, cant wait till the war is over and we can start building relationships again, this is definitely not good
for anybody
There could also be a problem that this players public IP address is not advertised by his provider towards Riot Games in Europe but its in Asia, so we dont know about it in Europe. I cant tell as I dont know their IP addresses
Thanks again for your help, I wrote that they should contact their ISP already, one guy straight up gave the date you changed the route and that he has had 200 ping since that day:jokerge:
Could they have just lost the route after the bgp change?