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Hey everyone! I used to be the Mordekaiser bug catcher before Riot took away that job, and today, for once, I’m here to talk about a topic that some people care about. We’ve seen countless posts complaining about “the state of the client”, most of the time without being any less vague than this, so, I’ll try to describe everything that’s wrong, as well as how, whenever that’s possible – both bugs, and things that I see as just being bad.
Numbers-wise, length-wise, this list will be shorter than the others. That is for a few reasons – I’m grouping more things together, going faster over some, skipping lots of the less important things, and I’ve had less time to do this list than any other, so I’ll naturally forget some things. Besides, I’ve also discovered the existence of this skill called conciseness, and am attempting to give it a shot and assimilate it, as this very sentence should be a good enough proof of.
Note that I am only covering the bugs that I have seen myself, and as the client has shown since its creation, not everyone gets the same problems.
New things are labelled as new (who would have thought), with "new" meaning anything from the past year.
Without further ado, let’s jump into it!
Part I: Bugs
1) Friends list
1.a) [New] I’ll start with a pair of bugs that might have been hotfixed, as I haven’t seen them today or yesterday. Still putting them here in case, as these were among the biggest. Finishing a game would still show you as in game until you would leave the party you were in. This would carry through between games so long as you’d stay in the party. Additionally, creating a game would show you in blue as if you were in queue/game, thus removing you from the list of people who can be invited. Screenshot
1.b) [New] Sometimes most friends list functions just stop working, until you restart. Problem is that I don’t know how or why that happens, but I know other people have it more consistently than I do. Anyway, when this happens, you can’t invite people (through right clicking or the invite menu), can’t look at their profiles, watch their game, send them a gift, or invite them to a club. Screenshot
1.c) [New] People have their “profile overview” be empty and with a blank icon if they haven’t logged in since you’ve gone online. In that case, you also can’t view their profile, invite/nominate them to groups, and the grayed “Send gift” button is missing as well. That’s similar to 1.c, but 1.c doesn’t depend on people being offline, so I don’t think that brings much. Screenshot
1.d) [New] There is no longer a button to create a new chat while in champ select. Meaning that in champ select, you can only message people that you already had a chat open with. This is the way the new client used to be on launch, they quickly added the button, and now it’s gone again.
1.e) If someone invites you while you already have an invitation pending, the second one will not play a sound notification.
2) Chats
2.a) [New] Receiving a message plays a sound notification, but the client icon in the taskbar will not be highlighted in orange.
2.b) [New] When receiving a message, the message will refuse to be shown as read until you answer or until two minutes pass.
2.c) 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
2.d) 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.
2.e) If your connection cuts for a few seconds, any message sent or received during that time will not actually be sent/received, and you won’t have any way to know it. (Chats on other games or programs would instead have the message as pending until it can be properly delivered.)
2.f) [New] Once again if your connection cuts for a few seconds, you will sometimes receive a new notification for a message that you received earlier on the same day. That part here isn’t new. What’s new, however, is the fact that since this patch, this notification will also appear in the ingame chat (the previously received message will appear as a message just received in yellow in the chat).
3) Pre- and post-game lobbies, and missions
3.a) Trades in ARAM. I forgot to put that in until the very end, because I even ended up seeing this as a normal thing, due to it happening all the time. Which… is not a good thing to say. Either way, let’s say you try to trade with someone, or someone tries to trade with you. First of all, the trade interface is half black and has been for months
3.b) [New] In the post-game lobby, everyone is grayed out as if they had left the lobby. Screenshot
3.c) [New?] When finishing a game and clearing a mission, you land on a screen reading “x missions completed. y new missions added.” That y still shows a completely random number, such as 30 missions added. This happened a while back, got fixed, and now happens again.
3.d) [New] Dodging a few seconds before a game starts supposedly doesn’t go through. Supposedly, as I’ve never tried.
3.e) [New] The invite list shows people in a random order in each group, instead of them being sorted in alphabetical/status order as they are in the client. The groups are also always in alphabetical order, regardless of how you’ve ordered them yourself. Screenshot
3.f) [New] First win rewards can come out at random times, hours after any game.
4) Profile and collection
4.a) [New] 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.
4.b) Match history often misses the exp gained, the grade, or both. Screenshot 1 / Screenshot 2
4.c) [New] In the Ranked tab, normally speaking, you’re able to view your rank in each queue as well as the top players of each queue. Being currently unranked in everything, I have access to my rank in solo queue and flex, and to the top players in solo queue, flex… and TFT. There should also be a tab for my TFT rank/league.
4.d) [New] 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).
4.e) [New] The thumbs up emote tends to just not appear. Screenshot
5) Clubs
5.a) [New] Any muted clubs get unmuted every time you log in.
5.b) [New] Closing a club chat can cause it to completely bug. If that happens:
The club chat will re-open every time it’s closed. Video
Going on the club chat after closing it will put an “undefined” message in your chat bar. Screenshot
You will be the only member shown online in the club. Screenshot
Any newly opened chat will go over the club chat… in the space that’s normally for clubs only. Screenshot
5.c) [New] When receiving a club message, the message will refuse to be shown as read until you answer. No matter how long you wait.
5.d) [New] Leaving a club makes all chat features die, and you have to restart the client to fix that - nothing else will work. You won’t be able to send messages, open a new chat, switch to another chat, close the chats…
5.e) Most of the time, club messages aren’t going to highlight the League icon in your taskbar, because they shouldn’t. But a club message in a then-inactive club will.
5.f) Muted clubs still play a sound whenever one of their members logs in or out, if you have the club open.
5.g) Clicking “Show this club tag” while you have a club invite pending (and dismissed in the notifications) will give you the notification for the invite again.
5.h) [New] This
6) Custom games
This is going to group both bugs and non-bugs, because I don’t want to make two categories for that one. Custom games feel like they’re stuck to where the client used to be years ago, and didn’t receive any of the features that the lobby/champ select for the other modes got. Oh, and custom games are also in a worse state than they used to be on the old client, for this one reason:
6.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 three years.
6.b) 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.
6.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.
6.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.
6.e) Can’t hover champions in champ select (that will display an error message).
6.f) There is also no skin display in champ select.
6.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.
6.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.
6.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.
6.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.
6.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).
6.l) 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.
7) Others
7.a) 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.
7.b) The server status notifications aren’t guaranteed to update/refresh if you don’t restart your client. I can see how disabled the practice tool was.
Part II: The other issues of the client
I’m gonna make this part shorter, partly because I’m tired of saying the same things on 4 different buglists.
1) [New] The champion list in the collection tab… Instead of saying anything, I’ll just link you to my comments on it from when this tab was changed, last Summer. Exact same problems now.
2.a) [New] Inactivity. 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.
2.b) 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.
3) Sorting chromas in the shop. There is no reason for chromas to not be filterable/sortable the same way skins are. Where is the “Champion owned” toggle? And “Skin owned”?
4) 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.
5) Stats – why can’t we group all games together in the stats, instead of having to pick one queue?
6) 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.
7) 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.
8) Clubs. a) 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.
8.b) 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
8.c) 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).
8.d) 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
8.e) You can’t see the list of members without hiding 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.
8.f) 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.
8.g) 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.
8.h) Offline friends don’t have their tag displayed in your friends list.
Alright, there it is. I left many things out (though I got all of the non-minor things, besides the ones I haven’t seen myself, the ones I forgot, and the ones I got so used to that they didn’t even come to mind – which should, indeed, simply be counted among the ones I forgot. If the quality felt lower than usual, that's normal, I couldn't invest as much time into it this time around, both for the research and for the writing, and tried to do my best given the circumstances.
I hope that was a nice read, for the two of you who got there without skipping, and, that'll be it for me!
Edit: Just realized that I forgot something that had been on my mind for a while, something major enough to warrant going in there. 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.
TLDR:
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