League of Legends executive producer Jessica Nam detailed the current state of the game today in the latest edition of “lol pls”—the series formerly known as “Riot pls” that was given a makeover after Riot launched several new games in 2020, including VALORANT and Wild Rift.
One of the biggest takeaways from today’s game-state breakdown from Riot was how the League developers plan to tackle the issues surrounding the game’s client in 2021. Nam mentioned how the League devs made it a priority to reduce loading times for individual pages on the client, in addition to axing a significant amount of memory that each screen of the client used.
“What you should see at the end of the day is a significantly faster client compared to the start of 2020,” Nam said.
But while navigating the client has become a much simpler and more convenient process, players still might have trouble with the client’s social networking features. In some instances, players are barred from viewing their Friends List on the League client, preventing them from interacting with or making it difficult to queue up with other players.
“All those issues that you see with friends not showing up… we’re going to be addressing that this year,” Nam said.
Considering that Riot made significant progress to target areas of the League client—such as champion select and post-game lobbies—throughout the course of 2020, it wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to suggest that social panels are at the top of the developer’s priority list. Players should expect the social aspect of the client to be hit with a resolution sometime in the near future.
A more difficult problem to solve for the League developers, though, might be the client’s frequent crashes that players have been experiencing for quite some time.
“We’ve seen the crash reports that players have been sharing with us,” Nam said. “We want to take a pretty firm stance and actually do a full burndown on all the crashes.”
Most commonly, players will experience a failure on the client’s end while either preparing for a game in champion select or loading onto the Rift. Players can get stuck on the game’s loading screen and either never join at all or be forced to dodge a pick/ban phase in progress if they never load in.
While it certainly does feel like the client has a mind of its own, crashing at practically random moments in time, it should be expected that Riot will fully investigate the current issues that League players face with the game’s often-criticized interface.
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