League of Legends fans are growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the MOBA’s client. But Riot has finally unveiled a six-month plan to fix it.
Riot addressed the sorry state of the client in a Dev post today, which outlined two phases to improve its backend infrastructure. By fixing the client’s “bootstrap time,” or how long it takes it to boot up, and champ select lock-in time, devs can also tackle bugs and crashes throughout the process.
“The client is not in great shape,” Riot said. “It’s got too many bugs, too much lag (especially in champ select), and a whole host of issues like memory leaks, crashes, freezes, and on and on. We’ve made commitments to do something about the client before, and yet problems remain.”
It can take League players up to 40 seconds to get through bootstrap, which can be problematic when your client crashes while you’re in a game. The client has to launch a wide-assortment of plugins and apps, like notifications, friends list, and the collection tab, which can cause that 40-second delay. Riot hopes to cut that down to 15 seconds for the majority of players, while also addressing “a bunch of bugs and inefficiencies” that plague the client.
Champ select has also become a laggy experience, with many players complaining of a black screen or rune pages not saving properly. Riot explained that almost everything you do in champ select, from trading champions to swapping summoners, creates new apps. These pile up when trying to communicate with the servers and can create severe latency.
To fix this, Riot plans on “fundamentally changing” its champ select backend infrastructure and reworking how data is passed from server to client.
If all goes well, client issues will be a thing of the past six months from now.
