Y'all say you want more transparent comms, so get ready for the new strat where we talk about the sh*t that sucks as well as the good stuff.
To use a film metaphor, right now we're in Act 2, which is the part where Luke and his friends get caught in a dumpster and nearly get crushed to death
I think the bare-all approach will pay off in Act 3
A (hopefully) objective TL;DR
* A small number of the plugins and apps were removed from the client to help load times (10-20%)
* Boot times were improving until 10.3. It is suspected server strain from increased use due to.... you know... is partially to blame. Server capacity is being scaled up, which should help.
* Affinity, a tool to help reduce plugins loaded on startup, was discovered in this client review to be broken since 2018.
* Fixing Affinity is not going to address these issues, and will need to be replaced in the client.
* Client fix plans are being changed to implement something other than Affinity, which will slow down the road map.
Solid summary
I think that if you guys succeed in fixing the client while communicating the process behind it you can get some trust points back with the community but the reality is that this specific subject is one of the most controversial ones ingrained here and people don't have much hope left. I still think that this is the correct approach but you guys shouldn't hope for positive reactions until problems start to get fixed. Keep the good work little cactus octopus man.
100% agreed, I think it'd be nuts to expect an overwhelmingly positive reaction to any update that's fully honest about challenges without meaningful improvements to show.
Many (most?) people care much more about product changes than transparency about problems.
But the idea is that—since we are confident we're going to be able to make those meaningful improvements given enough time—anybody who goes on this journey with us is going to have a deeper understanding at the end of it.
The payoff will be at the end.
Sort of.
"Bloat" in this case can be referred to either as inefficient code (too many lines, takes too long to read, etc.) Or there were simply too many JS scripts to handle.
exactly, each plugin is its own script, over 100 plugins/scripts :(
They tried to make a balloon dog but instead of using the long balloons Riot tried to use the ones that are only globes (🎈). You can imagine how inneficient this would end even though the globe and the loong balloons have been a proven thing to be used many times before they tried to do this
haha sort of haha
CEF Is indeed a great framework. Ember on the other hand...
Ember is great too! However, no JS framework could have saved us from the architecture choices we made.
Of course Affinity was broken! Pretty much Turn 1 wins. Standard back in Mirrodin days never stood a chance.
hahaha I appreciate the joke, I still have my affinity deck. I even splurged on foil cranial platings.
Just wondering, is it the same team that rebuilt the client, that is now trying to fix it or is there no overlap?
The group of people that initially designed the client architecture is not the same that ended up building it and re-architecting it along the way (~2016). Ownership was then transfered to a few other teams (~2017), those still maintain it today. There was a small team that improved a lot of things, nothing visible to players, tools and code re-org (2018). The new client team is a new group of people, it came together late (2019). There is some overlap, some people were part of the different projects on and off. Most of the people that worked on it in 2016 is gone now.
I dont mean to sound judgemental but how is it possible that the new client that was literally made not to have the same issues as the old one, has the same issues as the old one?
A fair question. The symptoms the client has today are similar, or the same, to the ones the old client had. However, the problems with the client today are not the same problems that the old client had. The root causes are different. So, even though we didn't repeat the mistakes of the past; other mistakes were done that lead us here.
Diffrent question, why client wasn't written using something like Qt which is a lot faster and doesnt' have more development cost then something like electron/CEF?
When picking your tech stack you got to consider other operational concerns, like:
I wouldn't be able to tell you how well those were assessed when the decision to go with a web stack was made, I wasn't there. I do know QT/C++ was an option being talked about.
SOME SETBACKS
Affinity was broken. At some point during 2018, Affinity was inadvertently broken. Since Affinity isn't working properly, the client is defaulting to loading every single plugin during bootstrap and postgame loads.
In the bigger picture this discovery isn't a setback but rather a huge success, considering the whole point of this campaign is to fix issues. Especially when it's a tool that's been literally broken for 2 years.
Yep. It's simultaneously humbling and a validation of our approach (dig deep to discover root causes)
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get out of here with your client talk, this is a MTG thread
1000% no BS, THIS is more important to me. The janky client getting fixed has a higher priority and impact on my enjoyment/playtime than skins, events, game modes, new games, animated series, esports anything..... Knock this out Riot! u/givanse u/The_Cactopus
Yeah, we are giving it our best shot! It impacts our enjoyment too! Thanks for your support <3
existing skill pool
cost of trainning
cost of hiring
Oh Rito smoll indie company
As of Wednesday, we are a multi-game studio. Go play some legends of runeterra ;)
I understand, but thing is Qt with Qt Quick doesn't differ much to stuff you already do (JS can be used in Qt for extending stuff and QML is like JS by itself).
My problem is that you have tons of plugins and other stuff that probably Qt would provide on its own in native like performance, instead of JS scripts that have to be JITed on each start, also you don't have to load entire giant chromium (CEF) to launch everything, instead you have Qt that is using native OS calls + small JS engine.
I mean from my perspective, Qt is as well established if not even better there including tools, UX, community, and has bigger efficiency. Even biggest CEF/Electron stuff in size pales in comparison to Plasma/KDE that proves it runs amazingly. Of course i understand that Web developers are just cheaper, but considering team for client changed few times over already due to problems, costs of training long term seems to be huge from those choices.
I understand such choices for Discord/Slack etc. where you have web client and desktop client looking the same where they share 99% of code. But there is reason why many people spit on Atom, VS code and your client.
You have valid points. There is one wrong asumption.
team for client changed few times over already due to problems
That is not the reason, not even one of them. Teams change because people leave the company, leave the industry, switch careers, start their own company, they make family decisions and move away, the company does team re-arquitecture etc.
Even if we had a QT client, a lot of stuff would need to be JS. You can't escape integrations with 3rd party web services. Plus you got to consider your deploy strategy, some stuff you'll want to deliver through a CDN, that means web. You still have to hire or train for those chunks of the client, which aren't small or trivial. This is not an argument I'm making to say –web is the clear right answer–, I'm just showing you another level of nuance.
Please go thought the client pop-ups AND REMOVE THEM, i lost a promo because "lost connection to services" while i had chat and everything in champ select lobby, and client gave me no other option than "exit", which is a dodge, which is a lost promo. Happened second time today in after game lobby, i had chat, friendlist, everything. Its clearly not working, broken, and you guys ruining our promos with this.
There is no point of this popup, or atleast give us other options than "exit".... REMOVE EVERY SINGLE POPUP THAT HAS ONLY ONE OPTION WHICH IS CLOSING THE CLIENT DOWN.... I dont understand who ever made this... what kind of programmer put things like this into the client??????????????
sorry about the frustration this is causing, please contact player support about this
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