Today, we are proud to announce ESEA Fast-Path, built on technology from our partner Network Next, that automatically improves your connection to ESEA gameservers!

Technical Terminology
Before we continue, it's important to describe a few key concepts which we use to judge your connection.

• Ping - Your “ping” to a game server indicates how many milliseconds it takes for your computer to send a single unit of information (called a packet) to our gameserver and for the response to arrive back to your computer.
• Packet Loss - This refers to when information being sent between your computer and our servers do not arrive at its intended destination.
• Jitter - This is where there is a large variety in the timing of data packets arriving or even when they arrive in the wrong order.

Intuitively, you want all of these metrics to be as low as possible. However, often these factors are outside of both your own and ESEA’s control as they rely on external parties such as Internet Service Providers, physical infrastructure outages, and network congestion which has been increasing with more people at home during the global pandemic.

How does ESEA Fast-Path work?

ESEA Fast-Path works reactively, by checking every second to see if a better route (the path your information takes to the gameserver) is available. If you have a perfect connection to the gameserver, then ESEA Fast-Path doesn’t need to do anything. However, realistically, an incident can occur at any time that would negatively impact your connection, such as with higher ping, more packets lost, or more jitter. In that situation, ESEA Fast-Path identifies a more efficient route, then instantly switches you to the new, better path.ESEA Fast-Path

Instead of having a spike of poor connectivity in-game, you have peace of mind allowing you to focus on your match whilst we work behind the scenes to give you the smoothest possible gameplay.

Testing Period And Results

Over the last 6 months, ESEA has been silently running Fast-Path across our platform to scale up, identify any possible issues, and most importantly help improve our players’ experience.

Today, we are proud to announce Fast-Path for all ESEA players in both Europe and North America!

Since the start of Season 36, Fast-Path has:

• Accelerated 94% of players in North America
• Accelerated 92% of players in Europe
• Accelerated over 40 years of play time
• Reduced packet loss for 33 years of play time
• Reduced latency for 32 years of play time
• Reduced jitter for 17 years of play time

During the month of February, Fast-Path:

• Saved over 91% of our players from bad network performance
• Reduced jitter for 99% of accelerated players
• Reduced latency for 88% of accelerated players
• Reduced packet loss for 84% of accelerated players
• Accelerated 15 years of play time

Moving forward, ESEA Fast-Path will continue to enhance our players’ experience in the upcoming League Season 37 - featuring $200,000 in prizes, future events and qualifiers hosted on our platform, as well as our PUGs and scrims!

Be sure to follow ESEA on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for more updates!