Riot Phreak explains how LoL devs are finally fixing ‘tech debt’ issues

From the client to Summoner’s Rift, League of Legends is plagued with bugs and technical issues that either cause your game to crash or simply don’t allow you to buy a skin. Riot Games recently started proactively fixing this mountain of tech issues, and David “Phreak” Turley broke down how the company is finally dealing with these issues.

After one post on League’s subreddit praised Riot’s recent proactivity and the community wholeheartedly agreed, Riot Phreak on the weekend explained how the League team are optimizing their code that deals with calculating how much damage a spell should do and how tooltips should read. 

“I shipped an Ashe change (only internally) where I nerfed Volley’s ‘BaseDamage’ by 10 damage but BaseDamage was only a tooltip variable (this is how you can have ‘87 damage’ instead of ‘10 damage + 100% AD Ratio’). Volley was still using ‘Effect 1’ in its script. But it was also caught pretty quickly and the right changes are shipping to the live game,” Phreak said.

When asked how many champions have undergone these major changes instead of only having the spells “in the scripts,” Phreak said “Personally? Like four. Newer champions, like Samira, are already done in the newest way.”

In simple terms, Riot’s goal with this is to have an easier time when updating the game, testing the changes, and improving, albeit to a smaller extent, your performances.