The Secret League of Legends Server

What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
We all have our own servers we play on, be it North America, Europe, Korea or perhaps
the PBE.
But there is another League of Legends server that isn’t actually available to the public.
This server is called the Tournament Realm.
Perhaps you might know about the existence of the Tournament Realm - the secret League
of Legends server - but very few ever get the chance to actually play on it.
As a result you might tend to assume it’s the same as the conventional League servers
but is mostly kept private for use by tournaments and the LCS, but in reality there are quite
a few differences that you might not expect.
One of the most common misunderstandings about the Tournament Realm is that it’s accessed
using the Tournament Code feature on any normal server - but that feature in question actually
behaves more like a specialised custom game lobby.
The Tournament Realm is completely separate from the regular gameservers, to the point
where you actually need a separate client and account to play on it.
Players in major tournaments like IEM or the LCS are given links under a loose NDA directly
from Riot to where they can download a copy of the Tournament Realm client - this link
is kept secret and changed often to avoid it being leaked to the average player base.
This means useage is entirely limited to professional players, and a handful of amateur players
that require access for tournament qualifiers.
This might suggest that the Tournament Realm isn’t a live server and is LAN-exclusive,
but we actually know that’s not the case.
After the release of Dynamic Queue, pro players complained that high ELO matchmaking was a
total mess, which lead to them using the Tournament Realm to soloqueue against each other.
This tells us that although the Tournament Realm is always online, there’s simply no
way to access it unless Riot has specifically sent you the download link and provided you
with an account.
Notably Riot only laid down one rule for pro players that wanted to use the Tournament
Realm to set up their own little matchmaking system - they were not permitted to stream
games on it, which pretty much serves as a testament to how secretive Riot are when it
comes to the Tournament Realm.
But it also goes to show that the Tournament Realm can be used for more than just professional
LAN Matches, although it is used for those as well.
If you ever managed to get hold of a Tournament Realm account, there would be a few things
you’d immediately notice.
For starters, pretty much everything is unlocked.
All the champions are ready to be used without purchase, and most cosmetic items are also
available, but with a few notable exceptions.
There are actually a multitude of skins that are disabled to use on this server, and with
good reason; they either confuse the spectator experience, or they are seen as giving a slight
advantage to players.
A well known example of this was perhaps Steel Legion Lux, whose abilities were quite a bit
harder to see, at least compared to her other skins, and as a result was disabled on this
server among many other skins as well.
Riot recently started doing quite a few ‘VFX Clarity’ updates to some of these skins,
so more skins are available today on the Tournament Realm than in the past.
It’s quite difficult to piece together exactly which skins are banned or useable on the Tournament
Realm as Riot occasionally fixes one or adds a new skin to the list, and they also are
quite secretive in keeping the full list quiet from the public.
From the few Rioters I contacted about this information, all of them came back to me and
said that they were unavailable to release the list because the people who had the authority
to decide to share that information had decided keep the list private.
The Tournament Realm is also what allows Riot to setup features such as the Ekko Rewind
thing we’ve seen before, without potentially risking any bugs entering the normal game.
These features are exclusive to the Tournament realm, and the Rewind feature was just one
of which there may be many, and certainly more to come.
It also seems likely that Riot has the ability to use the Tournament Realm on a local connection,
since larger tournaments are played on LAN to remove the influence of network lag during
a competition.
And if it wasn’t clear, the LAN tournaments that make up all of League Esports are played
on the Tournament Realm.
This also makes it quite likely that Tournament Realm users have the option to connect to
multiple servers, or even a custom server, because LAN events occur all over the world.
There still must be an active online server in addition to the LAN functionality though,
since without it pro players wouldn’t have been able to use matchmaking on the Tournament
Realm without being in the same place as one other.
League of Legends games played over Local Area Networks typically have around 7-8 ping
as reported by professional players - you might expect the server 1 ping or even 0,
but there actually will always be some form of delay even on a local connection.
Having said that, 7 or 8 is still incredibly responsive and is a big reason why so many
NA and EU teams like to boot camp in South Korea.
Not only is the competition there more challenging, but Korea’s internet infrastructure is super
advanced, with most players all over the country having around 10 or 11 ping, regardless of
how good their internet is.
For an online connection that’s insanely good, and it provides pros a much more realistic
practice environment, similar to what they’d expect when playing over LAN on the Tournament
Realm, compared to having to play with 30 or 40, sometimes as much as 60, maybe even
more ping depending on where they live and which server they are connecting to.
Either way, that just about wraps up all of the information I was able to find about the
Tournament Realm.
It’s quite an interesting server to look at, considering it’s what pros play the
LCS on.
So I hope you enjoyed this inside look, and I’ll see you guys next time.

The Secret League of Legends Server

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