Original Post — Direct link

Hey everyone!

I wanted to list the problems of the League+ phone app, but then decided to spare myself some time and to instead make a list of everything that worked right on that app. Problem is, League's subreddit doesn't accept submissions without text, so I had to cancel that and go back to client buglists. I was dissatisfied by the last one I made (it was rushed a bit, and lacked quite a lot of things due to that), so hopefully this one will be better.

Each point will have the "Recent" or "New" tag, or no tag. "New" means that the bug started appearing after January, and "Recent" means that it was new at the time of my previous buglist (in January) and hasn't been addressed since. Every category will be implicitly split into two sub-categories A and B. Issues x.A.n are bugs, and issues x.B.n are problems that are bad design choices rather than actual bugs.

Honestly, it's pretty annoying. The client randomly loses functionalities from one day to the next, and most of these never get fixed. A bunch of issues appeared at the start of January, I was expecting them to be gone soon since they had just appeared and had worked fine the whole time before, yet most of them are still here today – seven months later. Another big batch of issues appeared in May. I thought I'd have to hurry up to finish this buglist, expecting them to get fixed quickly. Nothing got changed until two patches later, and most of the new issues are still here now after two months passed.

Those aren't the standards that we should be made to have. The client is supposed to receive improvements, not to worsen over time, without the issues ever being fixed for the most part. And as I was writing this thread and checking my previous ones to see what I had forgotten, I realized something that's a clear bad sign – there are many problems that I initially forgot because I got too used to them (problems that the legacy client didn't have, or even that this client didn't have earlier on). Even pretty bad problems, too.

I deeply hope that someday, these issues will be tackled. I hope that bugs will be fixed, instead of being left there for us to get used to them, for us to get used to a worse client. I know it's a trend among every big product, to leave annoying issues up for years. Battle.net, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, all of them do it. But the case of the League client is worse, when it really shouldn't be. When seeing a new bug, we should be thinking "Oh, that's annoying. But I just have to wait until the next patch and it'll be gone", rather than "Well that's what I'll have to deal with for the next three years now". And I hope for things to be like that someday. "Mordekaiser's bugs leaking onto other parts of League" was supposed to be a meme, not to be made into a reality.

Anyway, let's get started!

 


1) Friends list

 

1.A.a) Receiving a game invite will not play any sound if you have another invite pending.

1.A.b) [New] When a friend is in an open lobby, the names of the players in that lobby aren't shown anymore. Screenshot

1.A.c) [New] The game created doesn't show the map anymore. Only "Creating Normal/Ranked Game". The fun fact is that Discord shows which map a friend is creating a game on, meaning that Discord is a more reliable source than the League client, when it comes to a feature of the League client.

1.A.d) [New] If you hover over a friend while they're in queue or champ select, hovering over them again while they're in game will still show them as being in queue / CS, instead of showing them as being ingame (meaning that you can't see their ingame time, or the champion picked / mode played). Changing the sorting of the friends list refreshes it and clears that problem. (Sort alphabetically > Sort by status, or the other way around. You can also switch back immediately after.) I'm just not sure this pro tip really will help anyone, because since we're already 4 bugs in, there should be a maximum of 3 people reaching that point. Screenshot

1.A.e) [New] Here's the opposite issue! Screenshot

1.A.f) [New] After logging in, and sometimes after playing as well, the Recently Played list (from the Add Friends tab) will permanently display a loading symbol. Without loading, should you be wondering.

1.A.g) [New] There's no way to watch the profile of someone who's in game on another game or region. You can watch the profile of someone who's online on League, you can watch the profile of someone who's disconnected (even if they've never played League and have only played the other games), but as soon as they log in on another game, you can no longer look at their profile from the friends list. The option simply disappears. I'm not sure when this problem started. Screenshot

1.A.h) [New] One of my two computers will often fail to show that someone disconnected, and will keep showing them as being online, until I restart my own client. It's been like that for months, while my other computer has never had that issue.

1.A.i) [New] After someone disconnects, they will sometimes (semi-rarely) show up in your friends list as being offline (or on League+ if they use it). But they'll show up this way in your regular friends groups, while they should be in the Offline (/mobile) one.

1.A.j) [New] If a friend is creating a game while being on Away, hovering over them will show them as Away instead of creating a game. Screenshot

1.A.k) [New] Hovering over your own profile will not show your correct status. Only "Online" no matter what. Screenshot

1.A.l) [New] A person spectating is now going to be shown in green instead of blue (keeping the "Spectating" tag). One good thing coming with that is that they can be invited to a lobby – however, they can't accept the invite until they leave the spectate, just like one cannot spectate while in a lobby. The problem of this bug/change is that it means that you can't spectate a spectate anymore. For as long as I've played League – and I'm on the boomer side of this game by now – when one of your friends was spectating, you could click Spectate on them in order to watch the game that they were spectating. And since you can only spectate someone from your friends list, it's been a nice thing to have. As of this patch, this is no longer possible.

I need to take some time to state what's wrong with this, because there's a bit more than already stated.
a) It's good that you can invite someone who's spectating. This should be a normal function, not something we get as a tradeoff for what's likely to just be a bug.
b) It isn't normal that we still can't spectate while waiting in the lobby. This is an upgrade that we could have expected years ago already. Ever since we've been told that a new (the now current) client was in the works.
c) If you're watching a replay, you can be invited, and you can also be in a lobby. Same thing if you're spectating a game through a file (when spectating through third party websites or apps). So there should be no reason for these two things to be unavailable for a live and official spectate (I don't mean no reason codingwise, but no reason to not make it a possibility).
d) There's also no reason to lose the ability to spectate a friend's spectate.

The way things should be is:
a) Spectating appears the way it currently does (Showing "Spectating", but in green, and being put alongside the online friends).
b) Right-clicking on a friend spectating gives you the option to spectate their game (as it used to until this patch).
c) Receiving an invite while spectating lets you join the lobby and queue up.
d) You can also start a spectate while in a lobby or in queue (exiting it upon entering champion select).

Side note – Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they're still shown in blue instead of green. But still without giving the option to join the spectate.

 

1.B.a) The friend requests that you received and left pending count towards your friend limit. If I’m not mistaken, they used to only count as they were accepted. And even if I’m mistaken, that should be the way things are, in my opinion (otherwise, why would you have a friends list cap and a pending request cap?).

1.B.b) When someone tries to send you a friend request while your list is full, the request doesn't go through, and you don't get notified of it. It would be best to at least know that someone tried to add you (and who it was, obviously).

1.B.c) The friends list notes can only be written over one line. And besides, the transition in the notes from the old client to the new client was poorly made. I used to have five-line notes such as this:
Name
Birth date
Country
Studies/Job
Details about the game in which we met
What did these notes become?
NameBirth dateCountryStudies/JobDetails about the game in which we met
They didn’t replace the line break with anything, not even a space or a slash. But the fact that notes can only be put in one line is a downgrade from the legacy client, making said notes a lot less clear.

 


2) Lobbies

 

2.A.a) [Recent] Regularly, after playing a game, the client will stop responding, for either a long period of time, or until you terminate it. In the best of cases, the honor screen will pop up, then clicking anywhere will prompt that the client stopped responding for a few seconds, and after a couple of attempts, you'll be able to honor someone, then use the post-game lobby functions, and so on. That being the best case scenario, the worst one being the client flat out no longer responding, forcing a termination.

2.A.b) [New] In the post-game lobby, the button to invite one of the game's players into your party doesn't work anymore. You can press it, but it won't do anything.

2.A.c) [New] Some of your friends will have their name show as "…" in the lobby, champ select, and post-game lobby. At first I thought this bug worked in a pretty obvious way – if someone in the party is in your friends list, their name gets replaced by those dots in the chat. Turns out it's actually inconsistent, and affects each client differently. Some people will only have part of their friends show like that, with the rest having their name written out normally.

2.A.d) The post-game lobby sometimes (fairly regularly) uses the Times New Roman font instead of the normal one.

2.A.e) [New] Occasionally, a person will be shown as having the roles of another player when entering a lobby.

2.A.f) The League voice mic settings sometimes change by themselves. I've seen cases of microphones getting muted automatically after each game, I've seen cases of the setting "Mute me when I connect to League voice" getting unchecked by itself. The latter is… not something that should happen. I can't give any additional details, as this seems completely inconsistent across people.

2.A.g) After finishing a game in a party, when one of your premades presses Play again, there's a ~5-seconds delay between appearing as having joined the new lobby, and them leaving the post-game lobby.

 

2.B.a) You can no longer press a button in a lobby to see someone’s profile. You used to be able to. And I don’t see why one would ever want to remove that feature, especially since you cannot copy someone’s name from the lobby into the Profile search if they were in the lobby before you and if they don’t type in the chat. Here’s how the lobby used to be, for reference: Screenshot

2.B.b) You can also no longer see someone’s rank as well as ranked (or normal if unranked) wins in the lobby, unless it is a custom lobby. Maybe that has been put there as a design choice, but losing function in exchange of form is a stance that numerous people disagree with.

 


3) Profile and collection

 

3.A.a) Collection > Champions: The ability videos can be extremely outdated. Shyvana's ability videos have been outdated for almost 4 years. Here's her E for one example

, as shown in the client. All of her abilities were reworked in 2016, and yet the ability videos on the client are still the ones from before 2016.

Some other examples:

  • Kha still has his old R evolution. Removed in May 2018.

  • Ryze still snares with his default W. Removed in June 2019. Additionally, Ryze's Q and E don't show these spells spreading, while that's the norm for these videos.

  • Varus' W doesn't show the active part. It was added in April 2018.

  • Aatrox's ultimate… doesn't have a video. It loads indefinitely. Screenshot

3.A.b) [Recent] Collection > Items: In the Item sets, about half of the items can only be hovered once (Hovering over an item gives you its detailed information, doing it a second time will not show anything – for half of the items, arbitrarily – until you exit the item set and load it again).

3.A.c) If you created an item set with the old client and didn’t rename the block for “Starting items”, this block is now taking the name “starting”, while you never changed its name from “Starting items”. Yes, “starting” with a lowercase s.

3.A.d) Collection > Runes: Changing a rune tree isn’t something that can be canceled in a normal way. Let’s say you have a page with Resolve primary, and Domination secondary, and you decide to change it to Precision primary, but then change your mind. Here is what should happen:
- You click on the Precision button (you can then fill or not fill the tree, it doesn’t matter).
- You press the cross icon.
- When you’re asked whether you want to save the changes, you answer no.
- You open the rune page again.
- The rune page will be back to its previous values.
All good! But here’s what actually happens (initial set-up

– yes, I'm recycling screenshots from 2018):
- You click on the Precision button (you can then fill or not fill the tree, it doesn’t matter). Screenshot
- You press the cross icon.
- When you’re asked whether you want to save the changes, you answer no.
- You open the rune page again.
- The rune page will be back to the Resolve tree… but the tree will be empty. Screenshot
- You press the cross a second time.
- Once again, you answer no to whether you want to save changes, because Kha’Zix says that change is good, but I say that bugs are bad.
- You open the rune page a third time.
- Finally, the rune page is back to its initial values. Screenshot
This happens for both the primary tree and the secondary tree. But! If you try to do that on both trees at once, there won’t be a problem and the page will be fully set back to its initial values.

3.A.e) Collection > Emotes: “Sort by acquired date” shows most recent to latest, but will always show the Thumbs Up emote almost first in spite of it always being the least recent one.

3.A.f) [New] Profile > Match history: The match history no longer includes the experience gained or grade earned in your matches. It used to randomly not display either of them, and I suppose the "fix" of the problem was to downgrade the client (and match history overall) by removing the feature altogether.

3.A.g) Profile > Match history > Overview: The gold graph, by default, shows the team gold advantage. However, the selected graph reads "Champion Gold" instead of "Team Gold Advantage", indicating the wrong category. Screenshot

3.A.h) Profile > Match history > Graphs: There is no “Total damage dealt” line in the Graphs. (There is a Total damage dealt category, but there should be a Total damage dealt line, just like there’s one in the Stats tab, and just like there’s a Total damage dealt to champions line. You currently have no way to show how much total damage you did in the Graphs tab.) Screenshot

3.A.i) Profile > Match history > Graphs: There is no “Largest critical strike” line in Graphs, unlike in Stats.

3.A.j) Profile > Match history > Stats/Graphs: The stats aren’t organized the same way. In Stats, you have one Income tab for the gold earned/spent and for the CS, while in Graphs, you have an Income tab and a Neutral Monsters and Minions category. Similarly, Stats regroup all of the damage dealt in a single category, not separated in Champions/Total.

3.A.k) Profile > Match history > Stats/Graphs: Total Damage To Objectives and Total Damage To Turrets have their place swapped from one tab to the other.

3.A.l) Profile > Match history > Stats: Jungle monsters are referred to as “Neutral Minions”. They’re called “Neutral Monsters” in Graphs. Besides, they are not minions, otherwise spells affecting minions differently would affect them that way too, while they don’t. And no, they’re not coded as such.

3.A.m) Profile > Match history > Stats/Graphs: Team totals are no longer accessible.

3.A.n) Profile > Stats: Stats are just wrong and miss plenty of games. The stats on my second account say that I have played 14 games as top lane Leona in season 2019

. In reality, according to the official match history, I’ve played her top lane 33 times in 2019 (all of them being in preseason 10). Where the other 19 went, that I’ll never know.

 

3.B.a) [Recent] Collection > Champions: The page overall was made far worse when changed for the Eternals one year ago. I've described how I find it worse in a few pages, so, I'll just redirect you there for the full write-up of how I find it wrong!

3.B.b) Collection > Match history > Overview: The champion gold graph puts all the lines in the same colour for all the champions of a team. If you want to compare the gold of all of your opponents, there is no way to tell which line belongs to whom. Not even by hovering. Screenshot

3.B.c) Collection > Match history: The fact that you can only download replays from the current patch is really not convenient for the games that are played right before a patch hits. Additionally, the fact that you can only watch replays of the current patch (and must save a copy of each older patch if you want to be able to keep watching replays of these older patches, which takes entire gigabytes of memory), while third-party softwares have been able to restore older versions of the client ever since 2014ish, is kinda mind-boggling.

3.B.d) Collection > Spells: Each Summoner spell shows the game modes it can be used in, among Classic, ARAM, and Tutorial. I don't see a point in keeping the "Tutorial" one, since first, the tutorial summoner spells are the exact same as the Summoner's Rift ones, and second, the tutorial is meant to teach you about the game, rather than the game teaching you about the tutorial.

3.B.e) Collection > Item sets: Item sets cannot be sorted by champions.

3.B.f) Collection > Item sets: Item sets cannot be searched for based on the champion they’re for.

3.B.g) Collection > Item sets: There is now a limit of 100 item sets per account, down from not having any limit. This limit was put because the item sets are now stored online, not locally. But it means that the cap isn’t enough for one set per champion, not even close to it, and overall, that limit makes little sense. The vast, vast majority of the players doesn’t hit the cap or nowhere near it. The only people who reach it are those who already were past it before said cap, and limiting them won’t change anything. The cap was probably put there as a safeguard for if people with malicious intents tried to automatically create billions of sets on lots of accounts, but considering that people who just mean to play the game normally are affected by this, the limit could surely be better placed at 200, or 250. It would still block these negative attempts, while not affecting the experience of normal users.

3.B.h) Collection > Item sets: Item sets need an option to hide event-only items, ARAM/NB-specific items, as well as champion-only items. There are currently dozens of items that are either not accessible at all, or only accessible to one single champion. Dozens of items that simply take up space while being either never used (because they can't be used, not out of choice), or almost never used.

3.B.i) Profile: The profile page lost so much information. We could have stats about our normal games (win rates then wins only, plus other stats), and the win rate in each ranked queue. Riot decided to progressively hide all of this stuff – no longer able to see someone’s normal win rate, no longer able to see someone’s ranked win rate, no longer able to see someone’s top 8-11 mastery. The argument that Riot doesn’t want people to see others’ stats like that can be made, even though that’s a philosophy that I personally disagree with especially when the ranked stats are available in the API thus on websites anyway, but even agreeing with it, there’s a big problem with that. Other people can’t see these stats, but neither can you. Why can’t I see my own win rate in ranked? Why can’t I see my own wins and losses in normal queues? And it’s not even like Riot would want to hide these away from me, I can still get those stats by finishing a game. But instead of being able to simply click on my profile to see the stats about my own account, I must play a game for it.

3.B.j) Profile: The profile background tier ordering sorts skins based on whether they are Ultimate, Mythic, Legendary, Epic or Others. I think that adding at least a “Base” category would be nice, as none of the sortings allows to only have the base skins.

3.B.k) Profile: The profile background tier ordering sorts the champions by mastery within the tiers, instead of giving a choice that would allow for more instinctive choices, like alphabetical. Because I find it easier to search for a champion based on the fact that I know that its name starts with an N, rather than based on the fact that Nami is more or less my 60th highest mastery, fact that I do not know about for any champion that is not in my top 20ish.

3.B.l) Profile > Stats: You can’t remove the Queue filter in the Stats to display the results from all queues combined, which would be really useful to have the stats be taken over relevant amounts of data. It could be solved by simply adding an “All” option. Screenshot

 


4) Custom games

 

Overall, custom lobbies run on an old lobby model, that was already outdated many years ago, and Riot has shown no interest in putting it up to date. It shouldn't be the case considering that it's a part of their client, and it should even less so be the case considering that this is what their official tournaments are run on. This is the reason why rotating game modes aren't playable in custom on the new client (the current RGM, that is), this is why League Voice isn't a thing in custom game (… remember about tournaments?), this is also why you can't hover champs, and why skin previews aren't enabled either, among other things. But, here's for a full list of the issues (grouping bugs and non-bugs, because I don't want to split this one in two parts):

4.a) We cannot play RGMs in customs. The old client always allowed it, and the “improved” one still hasn’t received it. After more than four years.

4.a) You can’t check anyone’s profile from a custom lobby, the only option for that is to go in Profile and manually type their name. Good luck with special characters.

4.c) Custom games do not have League voice. In the mode where you’re technically always with premades. Custom games are also where even League’s official tournaments are hosted, so that makes little sense.

4.d) Trying to reinvite someone who was kicked will not send an invitation. In order to have someone who was kicked rejoin, you have no other option but to create another game and redo everything.

4.e) Can’t hover champions in champ select (that will display an error message).

4.f) There is also no skin display in champ select.

4.g) The rank displayed in the lobby is random at best. It seems like most of the time, when you enter the lobby, your highest rank will be shown, but then it can switch at any time to your solo queue rank, or to any other rank at random without it being either your solo queue rank or your highest rank.

4.h) On top of that, frequently, someone in the lobby will be shown as having the rank, ranked wins, and icon of another person from the lobby.

4.i) If you switch into spectator as the owner of the lobby, you’ll lose your owner rights and they’ll be transferred to the next person who joined. I don’t see any plus side to that, it just makes the organization messier.

4.j) It would be about time we got another way to reorder the teams other than having everyone go to spectate one by one in a specific order. Especially when playing scrims where one team asks for spectate to be disabled, in which case you actually need to have people leave the lobby and rejoin it in order to change the pick order.

4.k) Passwords are the only way to make a game invite-only, since the client doesn’t offer any other. However, when someone is invited to a game with a password, they won’t have access to the chat (and also won’t have any way to type the password anywhere to be granted access to that chat).

4.l) Custom games have no "Play again" button, when they're already harder to organize and set up than normal games.

4.m) Just like how the chat box stays small when you type a long message, since the same patch as the one when this issue started happening, the box to choose bots to add in custom games has also been reduced by a lot. Instead of displaying somewhere between 6 and 8 bots, it’s now only long enough to display 4.

While they technically shouldn’t have their own category, custom games have more than enough issues to warrant one, especially as they've entirely gone unaddressed since the migration to this client.

 


5) Champion selection

 

5.A.a) [New] While I've never had this issue myself, there have been regular reports of people seeing the champ select in the wrong order. Screenshot of the wrong order (you can see the last pick having to select their champion in the first rotation) / Screenshot of the real order

5.A.b) Let's say you have a trade pending in ARAM (or any other game mode with random picks), be you the initiator or the receiver. Whenever someone rerolls a champion, trades with someone else, or trades with the bench, your pending trade will “reset”: the timer will go back to full, and the trading sound will play once more. This is the second time I almost forget to include this one, because we got so used to it. That isn't a positive thing.

5.A.c) The old client allowed you to purchase a skin during champ select. Not the new one. Maybe that’s a choice, but then the fact that clicking on a skin gives you the message “This skin is currently not available for purchase” is a relic of a past gone two years ago. Screenshot

 

5.B.a) When you have the runes open, most of the champ select screen is covered, and you can only see the champions picked, the timer, and a part of the chat. Only a small part of the chat. But most importantly: the summoner spells selection is hidden by the runes.

5.B.b) You can’t see which of your friends are in queue/champ select/in game while you’re in champ select. In most cases, it doesn’t matter, but sometimes, it’s a nice thing to know, and it’s a downgrade from the legacy client. I don’t just claim that it would be nice to have simply for the sake of complaining and to then never use it, but I am currently using the phone app whenever I want that, so it is actually something I need. It also can’t be because Riot wants it to be that way, since the information is accessible through the app. By extension, you also can’t see whether your friends are online/in a blue status/away/offline without specifically opening a chat with each and every one of them (which isn't even possible anymore), and checking all of them. This is once again something that the previous client offered, and once again something that the app allows. Similarly, you can’t open your Recently played list while in champ select.

 


6) Chat

 

6.A.a) [Recent] Receiving a message plays a sound notification, but the client icon in the taskbar will not be highlighted in orange. 6.A.b) [Recent] There is no longer a "New chat" button in champ select, to allow you to talk to someone you hadn't yet opened a chat with. This feature was added shortly after the release of this client, but has mysteriously disappeared this year and hasn't been brought back yet. So that means that if you're in champ select and want to send a message to a friend… you can't! Unless you had already opened a chat with them before during this session, it's not possible.

6.A.c) You can’t copy-paste a chat in a readable format, since a chat will be like this:
Person A: Message 1
Person B: Message 2
Person B: Message 3
Person A: Message 4
Person B: Message 5

And the pasted version will be like that:
Message 1
Message 2
Message 3
Message 4
Message 5

This is a downgrade of the old client that would show the name of the person before every message, as well as the time stamp.

6.A.d) Typing a message in the chat will not expand the size of the typing chat box as the message goes onto more than one line, preventing you from reading what you wrote before. Screenshot

- Note: This used to work fine, even in this client.

 

6.B.a) We still can’t see people’s status in the list of chats. The legacy client had that. At some point, it went down for maybe a week or so, and it was also bugged during the infamous 6.9 patch that killed the entire client. It was easy to feel how inconvenient it was. One day, Riot tried to put that on the new client. But they didn’t do that properly, as you’d see everyone status in the list of chats… as offline. That makes me wonder if it’s actually a design choice, or if it’s just Riot saying that they aren’t managing to do it.

 


7) Clubs

 

Clubs were a nice idea, back in the days of their creation, in early 2016. As of now… they feel like a thing of the past that no longer serves a purpose. They're no longer useful to gather a party to play, they're no longer ideal to chat in, they give you incentives to close them… Their implementation on the new client was really bad, and to make things better, occasional new bugs have kept making the problem worse since.

7.A.a) [New] Here's a fun one, that I can't explain. On one of my accounts, all of my clubs disappeared. I can't use the tags, can't access the chats, and the Clubs tag asks me to join or create clubs. Same results when trying from a different computer. However, when logging on the mobile app, I'm still in the clubs and can still interact with them, and checking from a different account also showed me that I was still among the members of these clubs.

7.A.b) [Recent] The club's page in the profile tab fails to display the statuses of the online club members who are either not in your friends list, or on League+. The status dot will be missing, and hovering on the player will show them as Offline if they aren't in your friends list. Screenshot

7.A.c) If you leave a club chat open, you’ll get a sound every time someone from the club logs in or out. That is, whenever someone from the club logs in, someone from the club logs out, someone from the club closes the club chat. That sound is exactly the same as the sound of a club message. For this very reason, it’s annoying to leave the club chat open.

 

7.B.a) You can no longer have interactions with other club members, as you can’t click on their name. This means:
- You can’t open private chats with other club members.
- You can’t invite club members to games.
- You can’t view the profile of club members.
- You can’t copy their names to paste it to look at their profile (for the people using special characters).

7.B.b) You can’t see the list of members without hiding most of the club chat. That doesn’t sound too bad at first, but in practice, where I used to always know the name of every single member of all of my clubs, now I pretty much have no clue about it, because I never have that list of members there to see anymore.

7.B.c) Going with the previous point, you no longer passively see which of the club members are online/available, and which ones are in game. Reminder that the original point of clubs was to play with friends.

7.B.d) You can also not see the actual status of club members, beyond just the color of the status (so, no difference between In Queue/In CS/In Game, or Online/Creating game). That one isn’t exactly a clear downgrade from the legacy client, as the latter was supposed to provide that, but would only do it for your friends among the club members, and wouldn’t display anything for the others.

7.B.e) The club chat has a very poor size optimization, with every message taking a good part of the height of the chat window due to the blank space between two messages and to the low maximum width of a message. If you use the default chat size, only three messages can usually be displayed at once. Screenshot

7.B.f) The “Message of the day” is inexistent now. It can only be seen through the Clubs tag of the profile, which nobody ever goes on, as opposed to the previous client that had it shown right next to the club’s name upon opening the club. Screenshot

7.B.g) Offline friends don’t have their tag displayed in your friends list.


[Continued in the comments, this post has reached the character limit!]

External link →
over 4 years ago - /u/Riot_Aotus - Direct link

Originally posted by Naerlyn

[Continuation of the post]


8) General / Client landing page

 

8.A.a) [New] Signing out doesn't work if an instance of Valorant is open in the background. The League client will close, the Valorant one will stay open, but when you'll click on the League client again, it'll automatically log you back into the account you supposedly signed out from. On the other hand, if you signed out from the Valorant client instead of the League one, you'd properly be signed out from both, and prompted to log in upon trying to reopen any Riot services.

8.A.b) [New] Once again, let's say that both League and Valorant are open. You close Valorant, and later on sign out from League. It should open the League login page, but will instead open the Valorant one.

8.A.c) [New] The login window is launched without being focused, meaning that the computer's focus will be on the previously used window. I can't really think of any other application behaving this way, and that's an easy way to type your username or password in the wrong window – potentially in a chat – if you're not paying attention.

8.A.d) [Recent] Inactivity is always toggled off during preseason, and you will not lose LP for not playing rankeds during the preseason. Therefore, each previous year, the inactivity notification was disabled during that time period. Not this year. Why? Because inactivity was still on for TFT, as there was no TFT preseason. For this reason, they left the inactivity notification up for every queue. Each notification saying you’re at risk of losing LP. Which you were not. Simply because of being too lazy to separate them.

I can't know whether this is still up to date. But I'll assume it is, since I'd like for it to be fixed by the next preseason.

8.A.e) The inactivity notification starts displaying random numbers once the deadline gets near. Such as saying that you need to play within one day, and a few hours later reading that you have 2 days left to deal with your inactivity.

8.A.f) [New] Attempting to launch the League while the server is down will, after a while, return a window telling that no connection was found. This window is shown as being the Legends of Runeterra app, while you launched the League client.

8.A.g) Closing the client, then restarting it too fast (before the program properly terminates) will simply refuse to open the new instance, without showing any message. This is a downgrade from the old client, that would tell you that the process is still running.

 

8.B.a) I appreciate Riot wanting to let us know that we’re gonna lose LP for inactivity ahead, and to ensure that we don’t forget. But getting one notification, per queue, each time you log in, for 10 days before you actually lose LP… that’s a bit much. It could already go down to once a day rather than once each time you log in, with up to 4 (now 3) pop-ups to dismiss.

8.B.b) Compare the gift notification now, to what it used to be on the old client. No more big fancy chest popping up, only a small dot on a bell in the corner of the client. And instead of waiting for your friend to be on the client and be happy that they received something, you wait for them to eventually notice three days later that they had actually received a birthday gift. Or well, something that was sent as a birthday gift.

8.B.c) If your server is down, if the autologin is enabled, you cannot change the region to play on another server that isn't down. Because the client will try to log you in, tell you that it doesn't work, and shut down, without ever giving you the opportunity to switch servers, towards a server that isn't down.

8.B.d) The client locking itself in focused mode is not a welcome change. Whenever a champ select starts or is a dozen seconds away from completing, the League client becomes the focused window. That’s all fine. But the problem is that the client locks itself as focused, and you can only access the windows behind by clicking over the top of the client. Clicking on the side won’t have any effect. Once you remove the client from its focused state once, the problem stops. As a note, the same thing happens when the login screen finishes loading. http://prntscr.com/ldmiyh

 


9) Store and loot

 

9.B.a) When attempting to send someone a gift, you will not be able to see the price of said gift if you don't have enough RP. This is really shady by Riot, because it means that the client can't tell you how many RP you need to buy in order to be able to get said gift. Resulting in one of four things:

  • You look up the actual price of the item through third party sources. That should never be required.

  • You buy more RP than you'd have needed, because you couldn't know how many you needed. See why I call that shady.

  • You buy too few RP, and need to buy more, still without being able to know how many more. Back to square 1.

  • Best case scenario, you buy the number of RP that you would have bought had you been able to see how many you needed. Why is this the best case scenario when it's simply the normal thing?

9.B.b) More shadiness is Riot's refusal to put an option "Skin owned" in the Chroma sub-tab.

9.B.c) After buying RP, the store asks you if you want to "go back to the store". While this button can be useful if you're just going to look around, to purchase things with blue essence, or to buy more RP right away, it's in all other cases useless. The amount of RP that you can actually use isn't refreshed until you exit the shop and re-open it. So in the most classic ways of using the store – go in the store, see something interesting, buy RP, buy the thing – you actually need to exit the store in the middle of the process, in spite of a prompt asking you if you want to stay on it.

9.B.d) The loot is still as slow as always, with no option to disable its animations or to trade several event tokens at once (for blue essence). Let’s say you have 8 event tokens remaining, each converting to 10 blue essence. You can’t “use 10 to get 100 blue essence”, as you only have 8. So you have to click on your tokens, scroll all the way down the list of options, trade it, wait for the animation, click on the tokens, scroll all the way down the list of options again… and so on.

9.B.e) In the loot, the skin shards cannot be sorted by champion's alphabetical order.


10) Missions

 

10.A.a) [Recent] The first win notification sometimes (frequently) comes out at a completely random time. As in hours after having played, for example.

10.A.b) Esport missions still don't work reliably, and won't count each game watched.

 


11) Disconnections

 

The client is very, very bad at handling disconnections/reconnections. Some of this got worse over time, too. Let's say that you have the client open, and that your computer's connection halts for three of four seconds. Here's the list of issues that this will cause the following four:

11.A.a) Any message written during the disconnection will never be sent.** It will appear as sent on your screen, but the recipient will never receive it, and you won't be able to know it without guessing. If you think this is normal, look at pretty much every other chat application – Discord, Messenger, Slack, Skype, anything – they will all hold the message, then send it once the connection is found. And if it can't be sent, you are notified of it.

11.A.b) [Potentially outdated] All club chats are closed.

11.A.c) [Potentially outdated] All muted clubs are unmuted.

11.A.d) The friends list scrolls back to the top. (This will sound irrelevant for most, yet it's actually pretty annoying for me)

11.A.e) [Potentially outdated] Additionally, disconnecting while in game and in a party used to not let you be able to rejoin League Voice upon reconnecting.

 


 

That should be it for this time! I'm probably not going to update this list until I write the next one. I'm saying this because the previous buglist gave me notifications up until it got locked for being 6 months old, from people mentioning something new and asking if I'd update it. So to prevent that, I'm commenting on it in a place that won't be read. Sounds logical enough to me.

Also, not every issue will be in there. If I've had a problem once and never since, I'm not putting it in, and if others have an issue that I don't have, without me being able to clearly see it, it's not going in either. This includes the client's performances.

For the two people who made it this far, I hope you enjoyed the read, and for the others who scrolled through the post, welcome back! You can probably stop scrolling now.

Really appreciate you putting this together! You're a true hero.

over 4 years ago - /u/Riot_Aotus - Direct link

Originally posted by Riot_Aotus

Really appreciate you putting this together! You're a true hero.

*Cracks knuckles*

Let's take a look

over 4 years ago - /u/Am1t8 - Direct link

I deeply hope that someday, these issues will be tackled. I hope that bugs will be fixed, instead of being left there for us to get used to them, for us to get used to a worse client.

This statement resonates a lot with me... we want to address as many of the bugs listed as we can. We are encouraged by our continued architecture work (as highlighted in our dev. blog post) that will help us remove these bugs, and if they do arise, allow the team to address them quickly.

Side note, we have launched a player sentiment survey around the client across various regions (random selection, some players may have got it already!), to capture the client pain points, and use this information to tackle the biggest issues for our players with regards to the client! Expect to hear more in our upcoming dev. post!

Thank you for the thorough post, this takes a lot of time and we appreciate it! We are reading this!

over 4 years ago - /u/Am1t8 - Direct link

Originally posted by sarahbotts

Is there a tracker or something that shows what’s being tackled?

Good question, very early results from our survey is that players want to know what we are doing more frequently, so a valid call out!

We have started adding our significant changes and bug fixes in the patch notes, but I am working with the team to see if there is anything else we can do to increase our communication with our community (on top of the dev. posts + patch notes)

Thanks!

over 4 years ago - /u/Am1t8 - Direct link

Originally posted by Spideraxe30

A bit of feedback regarding that, I think comms may need to be simplified regarding progress and what not. Based on comments in the past client updates, not many people understood what were the significance of reducing emberapps or what bootstrap is, they want something very simple without technical jargon (ie Client is finally fixed or whatever)

Yes! love this comment, we definitely want to be more clear on how our architecture work (reducing plugins + ember apps) directly relates to the player impact, and we hope to articulate this on the next dev. post (although I do not have an answer/date to 'the client is finally fixed'.we have a lot left to complete and we acknowledge that)

Thanks

over 4 years ago - /u/Am1t8 - Direct link

Originally posted by FeelsCactusMan2

This kind of reply is a meme at this point. Very little gets done over YEARS and then an embarrassing Reddit post shows up and suddenly rioters start to rush and talk about how they are about to fix them soon.

Yeah, this is true, I have just recently joined this team and super excited about the work ahead, and my goal is to use player feedback and data to help us get the client to a better place. I hope to change this perception, but it won't happen overnight.

Thanks for the comment.

over 4 years ago - /u/Am1t8 - Direct link

Originally posted by Ozaiko

Is creating a new client from scratch a solution ? Using an in game engine like Valorant or LoR seems to work way better. I know this games are brand new and benefits from better code architecture, but it feels like a client using ingame engine would be really better. Allow observing 3d model in the shop (a la Wild Rift) and having maybe better performances ?

I'm sure there is a reason you keep up with this spaghetti client but it feels weird from a customer pov ! ^

We are working hard to untangle this spaghetti to unlock improvements across all parts of the client :)