With 2024 marking the 15th year since its release, League of Legends’ growth only seems to accelerate, outshining all massively multiplayer games and establishing a benchmark of excellence on how to truly build a gaming and esports empire. And with the game’s player base split among 14 primary servers, Europe West EUW stands as a cornerstone of League’s global landscape through its popularity and player experience. It not only hosts the esteemed League EMEA Championship (LEC) but also holds a significant role in shaping the game's meta and strategies on a global scale.
In this article we’ll answer the most frequently asked questions surrounding this server, its rich history and its pivotal role in the League community, as well as offer insight into optimizing your gameplay experience, improving your ping, and starting your League of Legends journey on solid grounds.
The EUW server is, without a doubt, the largest western League of Legends server as it is home to approximately 35 million monthly players, and on a global scale ranking at second place falling just behind China’s 27 servers that house more than 75 million players.
This cements the server’s position as the main hub for the game’s western popularity which is demonstrated through the outstanding following of the League EMEA Championship LEC and by hosting 4 of League’s Worlds championships on European soil, with the UK following suit this year by hosting the 2024 Worlds in London.
As the name implies, EUW is home to a Western European player base. Counties encompassed by this server include France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the UK, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
The game’s servers aren’t geographically imposed though, so this prompts players from all over Europe to choose it as the League’s European hub which attracts high Elo EUNE players due to its popularity and more competitive nature.
The League of Legends EUW server is currently located in Amsterdam, Netherlands with IP 104.160.141.3
On October 27th, 2009, League of Legends officially launched and was hosted on two servers: North America and Europe. As the game got more popular over the next year however, players, especially on the European side, it wasn’t unusual for EU players to wait over an hours just to log into the client!
This ultimately prompted Riot on July 13th, 2010 to split the server into two: EU West “EUW” and EU Nordic & East “EUNE” with the logic for the geographic split being that Western European players are more likely to communicate in English with one another and that Nordic players had more eastern European friends on their account than western ones.
The community initially received the split positively, as it decreased the server load and got you to play with linguistically closer players. However, these servers, and especially EUW, started prompting some issues in late 2013 when some hardware failures would drastically increase latency and even go down on weekends as it experienced higher loads, costing players their hard-earned LP with no compensation from Riot other than shutting down Ranked queues. These problems became pretty synonymous with EUW and long Reddit threads, memes, and even parody songs were made mocking its instability.
In a move to battle these issues, Riot decided to migrate the EUW server to an Amsterdam data center where it currently resides, since it has been hosted in Frankfurt, Germany along with EUNE at the time. While this change made the server more playable, it didn’t stop the influx of memes and occasional outages, aka EUW moments. Just a couple of weeks ago German and French players started experiencing +200 ping, this one however was attributed to poor ISP routing, but who knows what kind of potatoes Riot is running down there in Amsterdam?
This server is most known throughout the community as the breeding ground for innovative playstyles and counter-intuitive strategies that go on to shake up the meta and gameplans worldwide. This is mostly the product of EU professional players who always try experimenting with different techniques, trying each champion in every possible role with the wackiest items and summoner spell. So you can thank EUW players for having to deal with that Yasuo ADC or Brand jungle in your last game or off-meta picks like Macius’ Tank Twitch or TheBausffs’ inting Sion (You can check a full analysis of his playstyle in this article).
As for your average EUW solo queue experience, it’s regarded as the highest quality player experience out of every region, especially in higher Elo, making the game more fun due to fewer trolls and better teamplay and coordination. Obviously, toxicity still takes hold, this is League of Legends we’re talking about at the end of the day, but you won’t get that “GG open mid” at 10 minutes, looking at you NA.
The League of legends EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Championship commonly known as the LEC (previously coined as the EU LCS) is one out of 8 official League of Legends esports leagues. It’s the proving ground for European teams to compete and secure their spots in international tournaments; MSI and Worlds.
The league’s structure underwent significant changes for this 2024 season so let’s go over a brief rundown on how it functions:
The esports season started on January 13th and is divided into 3 splits; Winter, Spring and Summer, rounding off in a Season Final.
During each split, 10 teams compete in a Double-elimination style tournament, where teams furiously compete in best of 3s for the first two rounds and best of 5s afterward, pretty similar to clash tournaments with winners and losers brackets.
Aside from the substantial prize pool each tournament offers, the winners of the Winter and Spring splits secure spots in the Mid-Season International qualifications.
However, the champion of the Summer season secures a seed in the Worlds qualifiers, while the remaining spots are claimed based on placement during the Season Finals.
The top 3 teams in the Summer season, the Winter and Spring champions will compete in a last showdown during the Season Finals, as it is the final trial for European teams before ascending to the grand stage of the World Championship.
Making an EUW account is as simple as going to the official League of Legends Sign-up page and picking “EU West” as the account region in the top right corner.
This however will get you to start on a level 1 account with only a couple of champions. So to give your experience a head start or to start a fresh climb on the fierce battleground of EUW, head over to our EUW unranked accounts section where you’ll find your ideal EUW Smurf accounts or go to EUW rare skins section for our highend options, we also have a ranked section where you can purchase a EUW smurf pre-ranked to specific division all come with lifetime warranty included for free!
Before hopping into a ranked game only to be devastated by +150 ms, checking your ping beforehand is a great idea and should be done at the start of every league session.
Luckily there are multiple ways for you to test your latency before queuing up for a game:
If you’re wondering what ping gives you the best experience in the game, you can head over to; What is good ping in League of Legends.
So you’ve checked your ping and it’s higher than a stoner? It’s not all hopeless as you still have some tricks up your sleeve to make it more playable:
