[2021] League Client Team, AMA about the client

Enabling low spec mode in the client will definitely improve your looting experience!

Could you please be a little more specific? :)

Good question, LCT made the fixes on the front end last year for EOG (End Of Game), with the reconnect button showing when it is not supposed to & it freezing due to a sync issue with another service.

As we continued our investigation early this year, yes , there is a problem with players seeing skip waiting for stats, and the service is sluggish and not sending stats over to the client in a proper amount of time, this leading to the button not even working. We have started our investigation and could have some potential fixes to help with this, and LCT is coordinating with other teams on the services side to see how we can improve EOG long term

Are you referring to an in-game crash it seems?

I do like your point on GPUs though, we plan to do a chromium upgrade this year, and we are working on tech tasks to get us ready.

The player benefits can be huge, as with every chromium (the front end of the client) release, they perform a full regression test of GPU/CPUs combinations, so as they encounter issues, it will be resolved with their releases. We also have a lot of client crashes that will hopefully be eliminated when we perform this upgrade. The last upgrade of chromium we did was Nov of 2019, so this is long due and the player benefits will be highlighted in our next post, we are looking at faster animations, potentially higher fps (less sluggishness), reduced crashes

We are going to kick off this discussion soon! version yet to be determined, we would love to be at the latest! once we move to the upgraded version, we are going to ensure we have proper cadence to update way more frequently, so we aren't stuck with a version over a year old.

A goal of the LCT is to reduce the number of libraries and frameworks that are all accomplishing the same goal. The current state of the client is that the majority of the UI is written in Ember, so it is a natural choice, rather than picking something new and continuing to have two different UI libs/paradigms

The problems with the client are not inherent to the tech stack, web in this case. Many of the issues stem from the way its plugin architecture is implemented. Not even a plugin architecture is necessarily the culprit alone.

For the tech-savvy, picture this, at one point, the client was made up of over 150 plugins (web apps). All of them had their own build config (Webpack), and then, most used different versions of Webpack, Ember, Babel etc. The lack of uniformity and the boundaries that exist between features (plugins) made it very hard to maintain a improve the client.

We try to upgrade to the latest stable version. But that it isn't always possible within a reasonable amount of time.

For example, the last time we upgraded Chromium we wanted to go all the way to version 80+, but had to settle for 74. On 75, some core APIs changed and upgrading our code would delay the upgrade for a couple of months. Since then, as we do other work, we improve the old code knowing that another upgrade is imminent.

A lot of the issue players see in the client are inconsistent at best, due to many factors like hardware, connection (yes, sometimes it's lag), antivirus software, and other programs a player might have installed. The things we can get accurate repro’s for are the things we can start fixing (depending on the severity of the issue). Depending on the type of work we do during a given patch we will run focused testing along with regression testing (full sweeps of the client) on the areas we specifically touched. At the end of each patch we run what we call an exit sweep to make sure everything in the client is working as we’d expect.

Something to keep in mind is that not all bugs are seen the same. If something is ear-flicky, that bug might sit on our backlog longer due to us prioritizing more critical work.

See this answer, happy to elaborate more if you would like.
https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ldd2am/league_client_team_ama_about_the_client/gm59rgc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Good question, I am fairly new to the team, it will be one year In May!

One thing I wanted to do when I started on this team, I wanted to get a survey out globally to get a measure of sentiment around the client (you may have gotten it). This gave me a good idea of what we should work on in the second half of the year, which was champ select and End Of Game, since players reported issues with those two the most. As we implemented fixes over the past 5 months, we have seen really good trends in these survey results.

For example, the % of players who are very/somewhat dissatisfied with the client when we launched the survey was 50% in Brazil, North America, and South Korea. We are now trending towards below 40% for those three regions combined, which is a really positive trend, but we still need to do more to continue to move in the neutral/positive direction

We have also made good trends in month-over-month sentiment, with more people saying the client has improved with each patch, but again we still have 10% saying it's gotten worse (but was at 29% at the launch of the survey)

I love responding to player concerns around the client on Reddit, I have done it frequently since I started, because I truly do care about getting this product in better shape, and I am confident with our plan over this year, it will continue to get better.

Thanks for the question! This is a deep one and is going to take a bit of history, so let's go for a little walk.

League, since the very beginning, has had two pieces of client software - the out-of-game client and the in-game client. For brevity, let's just refer to "the client" as the out-of-game one - the in-game one isn't what this AMA's about. Originally this was implemented on top of Adobe AIR, and went through a major rewrite a few years back, implemented on top of web technologies.

This split is not something that many games do. I struggle to think of an example really - the vast majority of games, including the other ones Riot makes, implement their out-of-game experience in the same piece of software that the in-game experience is delivered on. This has a lot of benefits, but the biggest of them is that the same experts that are tasked with making the in-game experience snappy and responsive can apply the same techniques to the out-of-game experience. The artists know how to make optimized assets for out-of-game because they have to for in-game, designers....ect you get the idea.

I can't speak to why the original split happened in the long, long ago, but when it came time to re-write from the AIR client, League's in-game UI technology was in absolutely no place to hold all the features required to execute the out-of-game experience League deserves, so the split had to remain. Web technology was chosen as the new fundamental base because the in-game UI tech could not be brought up to capability in a time frame that matched the urgency of the project. League invested in all that it took to make that shift, and the result really is considerably better than what we had on AIR, lest anyone get rose-tinted glasses about that.

So back to the point - pros and cons of making it from scratch? Well, if we were to do so without changing anything fundamental, there's no reason to expect the result to be any better. In fact, it'd probably be a lot worse - the current implementation has gone through a lot of battle-hardening and while it has its problems, they're a lot fewer in number and lower in severity than a fresh implementation off the press would have. On the other hand, changing fundamentals can take a very long time, which makes the investment quite large.

When it comes down to it, there's two routes available - change the fundamental technology again, or iterate on the existing product. The ingame UI technology has advanced considerably since the last time it was evaluated for this purpose, which makes it the clear choice for the next big leap. In fact, the out-of-game experience of TFT on mobile is implemented on top of it. There's still a sizable gap to close there in order to capture all that League would need, and even if it were ready today there's a helluva lot of software to create if we were to bite off that project. For now, we're committed to iterating and improving the existing, but that does not lock out the option for us to undertake the huge project of moving to in-game tech somewhere down the road.

anything you desire!

Hi, my friend and colleague penrif gave a good explanation above :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ldd2am/league_client_team_ama_about_the_client/gm5c0nl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

We need more engineers, they are hard to find, send them our way:
https://www.riotgames.com/en/work-with-us/jobs

I would like to know too.

u/Am1t8 when? #RitoPlease

The major difference is being implemented with game engine technology vs web technology, for the most part. This allows for all the optimizations and standards that make the game run smooth to apply to the out-of-game experience as well.

I went into a fair amount of detail as to where League's on that in a different reply.

The question - Why should we be forced to re-evaluate our opinion on the rune edits.. not once, but two times ["Save > Yes/No"] instead of it being auto-saved immediately after the edit?

The player that is opening Rune pages is doing so with intent to edit or just check the current selection. It should be logical that the game auto-save any edits done while the runes are open since your sole purpose of opening it was probably to "edit" the selection. This would also allow us to easily switch between different pages without being forced to save previous edits.

Hello, I just poked the team working on this;

re: account transfers - They have uncovered more problems are originally anticipated, but the good news is that they are actively working on it and should be available soon. The bad news is I don't have an exact date to share.

Hey! This is an answer from one of our engineers, not me :)

• This is an interesting question, and one possible explanation is that differences in network conditions, regional services, and the state of a player's account can all play a part in bugs that show themselves in the client. In the best case, the client has a way to handle a downstream issue and degrade the experience gracefully,  but there are also times where the edge case isn't covered, which is something we continuously look for to patch.
• For work? JavaScript. For fun? Rust is pretty cool.
• Cloud9 has always been a favorite of mine
• I don' think there is a date set for this, or whether the LoL dev team has finalized the plan around any sort of transition. Stay tuned. If or when this happens we will communicate it broadly.

These are all good feature requests to enhance the collections tab. Unfortunately, the team's primary mission is to make the client more performant and reliable. We are not there yet, but as we move closer, we can look to introduce feature enhancements, we just can't commit to them until we are happy with our client improvements.

Addressed in a different reply

Okay, pull request incoming.

Hello, I just poked the team working on this;

re: account transfers - They have uncovered more problems are originally anticipated, but the good news is that they are actively working on it and should be available soon. The bad news is I don't have an exact date to share.

I would love to be in a position where we are doing new features or enhancements. The team's mission is to make the client more performant and reliable, and we are not there yet. We have made really good progress, but we have a good amount of work to do until we can say we are happy and met our mission.

Have you noticed if you crash after you’re clients been running for a long time or are you seeing this after starting up and playing a game or two

This one has been a tricky one. We haven’t found a definitive way to reproduce this yet. Have you noticed any patterns for when this happens? Does it happen every single time you receive a key frag?

@amit8- what’s a hidden talent no one knows you have?

It can make it harder sometimes. But a lot of that toxicity exists within Reddit only and not the broad player base. Sometimes players will message me (in-game) to offer encouraging words and report that they've never had a significant client issue. When that happens, I appreciate it very much, it helps too!

Season start notifications as well as several of the popup modals that are shown when a player first logs in are implemented using the same system.

While we have made improvements over the past year to the system (with our data, after we implemented multiple fixes we have seen a dramatic drop in this issue), We know that there are still problems where the local settings file resets on players' machines.

This is especially true when multiple accounts share the same PC. We have work on our backlog to holistically address how we save player preferences and persist the state of what they have seen or not seen, and hope to have more details later.

Season start notifications as well as several of the popup modals that are shown when a player first logs in are implemented using the same system.

While we have made improvements over the past year to the system (with our data, after we implemented multiple fixes we have seen a dramatic drop in this issue), We know that there are still problems where the local settings file resets on players' machines.

This is especially true when multiple accounts share the same PC. We have work on our backlog to holistically address how we save player preferences and persist the state of what they have seen or not seen, and hope to have more details later

Season start notifications as well as several of the popup modals that are shown when a player first logs in are implemented using the same system.

While we have made improvements over the past year to the system (with our data, after we implemented multiple fixes we have seen a dramatic drop in this issue), We know that there are still problems where the local settings file resets on players' machines.

This is especially true when multiple accounts share the same PC. We have work on our backlog to holistically address how we save player preferences and persist the state of what they have seen or not seen, and hope to have more details later

It's not using Electrion ;)

It's built on top of the Chrome Embedded Framework, with a custom-built foundation underneath.

As to your larger question of why the JS stack is sometimes picked over native solutions - I can't possibly speak for the entire tech industry on that, but I'm happy to give my personal opinion based on what I've seen in general industry trends.

I think there was a lot of hype super early in the development of the interactive web that had people believing the future of the native application was limited. The Google suite in general gave that a lot of ammunition - if you can compete with MS Office using web tech, what can't you do? That's a sane, reasonable conclusion to make if you aren't aware of the massive amount of work that goes into making those products as smooth as they are. As with much tech industry hype, there is a lot of value inside of it. Web-based applications are hugely valuable and solve many problems that native cannot. But native solves certain classes of problems categorically better, and as the hype cleared, their value was sort of re-discovered by those who were caught in the hype.

lol ;)

Native by default, with CEF to cover the pieces that truly are best covered by JS stack. Best of both worlds.

Don't suppose you have a magic wand I could borrow?

We really do appreciate and read this type of feedback, and our devs talk about these types of changes all the time.

Our specific team is focused on improving the overall client performance and reliability, while feature teams across League of Legends maintain many of the features you ask about. While I can't speak specifically to the features you ask about, we can ask our colleagues on the teams that own these experiences to see if they are got any plans to adjust and/or update

Please take a deep breath and re-read my post. At no point am I blaming the backend, and the fundamental change of going to native is what most of the post is talking through. The part you quoted is covering the idea of re-implementation without any fundamental changes - ie, take another swing using the same tech stack, which I think you'd agree would be folly.

I do look at every client related post when they are posted, and I respond when I feel like a have a good answer to the concern, and I am extremely data-driven. For Example, we have data from our survey results and show a positive trend from people being very upset with the client towards the more neutral/positive side. I want to share more of these findings with players when I can. Does this mean we are done? hell no, if you see in our latest post, we need to do many things to upgrade chromium, which will provide big player benefits, and fixing JS errors, continuing to reduce memory leaks, etc.

I deal with the constant complaining by looking at the data we have, and it provides me comfort knowing we are making the client better for our players globally, and if this trend reverses, I will be the first to tell you.

"Never" is not applicable here. It is a large effort, but League has invested in large efforts like that before - we just don't do so lightly.

We posted our latest this AM, the link is in the post.

Hey, Response here

We just did!

Thank you, appreciate the feedback, but we still have more to do!

Hey, i posted this in an earlier thread

re: account transfers - They have uncovered more problems are originally anticipated, but the good news is that they are actively working on it and should be available soon. The bad news is I don't have an exact date to share.

We are down to:
- 48 plugins
- about 4 build configurations

It breaks down to 3 plugins with 3 special configs and 45 with the same build configuration. The ideal would be to get rid of the plugin system and have a single app. We are working towards that. The last few special configs are very tricky to get rid off.

Common store so that code is never duplicated.

This is in for the core missions, but unfortunately the weekly missions got messed up :(

Hopefully we'll have that fixed soon.

Bingo. Hindsight being what it is, it's possible to think through what the other option would have taken and think it was obviously the right choice, but that's using information that was not available at the time, which is deeply unfair to the individuals that made the call in the moment.

Sorry, I did miss this, so we do not have any plans to make this change to runes at the moment. Prioritizing this against the massive amount of work to get the client continuously better takes priority number one. I look forward to the day when we are talking feature changes/enhancements because this community has a lot of good ones we do read all the time

I Love this question, because I do think about it often. You have a number of players that get told about the client and its issues, yet as in your example, do not get issues themself. I think more communication would help, I try to keep up with as many posts as I can here.

A good example was the doublelift post last week, where his champ select experience caused a dodge, but we unfortunately had a completely random database outage outside the client that booted thousands of players from client and in-game that caused that. We have looked at messaging displayed to players that explains the errors, but that investment would be massive since so many services connect to the client, and specific messaging around each would be tough

Takeaway, I would estimate that over half of the issues posted on this reddit marked as client are actually services related outside the client, but to a player, they see them in the client, so its a client issue.

All teams on League work on the same exact release calendar

Good question, we try to publish all of our changes in the patch notes, so continue to read them, they will be there. As far as dev posts, it does take time to write them up, and they have to go through a process called localization for each country. I can't make a commitment that we will increase the cadence. If you see something in a patch note regarding a client, and want more information, send me a private message here on reddit

I have responded to some similar questions, but I like to use data to back up our success. We have seen really good trends in our survey results, and will hopefully continue as we deliver more work.

How long it would take to do so. Webtech offered the ability to start work immediately, while going the game tech option would have required an unknowable amount of up-front development work to create the framework for content implementation before anything else could be done.

Having now put in that work in service of TFT mobile, we know how much it was. But that's not something that could have been known before actually doing it. Software development estimation is notoriously fraught.

We don't have a large enough of a team to do this split, and love the second part of your question. There are over 30 engineers outside the client that do feature dev. in the client. We have kicked of syncs with them to knowledge share and most importantly show them our crash rates and errors metrics, so they can ensure any code they deploy doesn't impact these numbers in a negative way

Hey, not ignoring, just sorting through, but as for Voice and allowing chat outside party, I will need to find out the team that made the decisions to make it party only, is this your concern?

Hey, not ignoring, just sorting through, but as for Voice and allowing chat outside party, I will need to find out the team that made the decisions to make it party only, is this your concern?

Hey, im asking some engineers around for this issue, but i do not know why this would happen. Have you checked your memory as the client freezes? it could be an out of memory issue, which freezes up all those apps at the same time

Appreciate the feedback, thanks!

Hi there, I am going to use this similar response to a general theme I am seeing around 'it not getting any better'. I responded to a question above but we have data from multiple regions around the world that is showing improvement in perception with the client. More and more players are moving away from being very upset towards neutral/positive. This is because of the number of changes/fixes we made over the last year, as highlighted in our latest blog post.

Hi there, I am going to use this similar response to a general theme I am seeing around 'it not getting any better'. I responded to a question above but we have data from multiple regions around the world that is showing improvement in perception with the client. More and more players are moving away from being very upset towards neutral/positive. This is because of the number of changes/fixes we made over the last year, as highlighted in our latest blog post. We do still have work to do, and are confident that the client will continue to get better over the year

Hi there, I am going to use this similar response to a general theme I am seeing around 'it not getting any better'. I responded to a question above but we have data from multiple regions around the world that is showing improvement in perception with the client. More and more players are moving away from being very upset towards neutral/positive. This is because of the number of changes/fixes we made over the last year, as highlighted in our latest blog post. We do still have work to do, and are confident that the client will continue to get better over the year

Just a cup of coffee haha

Regions where folks play is a big factor. For example, players in South Korea are the least upset about the client, while players out in Brazil are more upset. The biggest difference between the two regions is infrastructure and network, where folks in Brazil may not have the best/fastest internet available, while in South Korea, it's super fast. These latency issues can have a significant impact on client & in-game experience.

I have also Vacationed in both countries, and loved them! highly recommended!

Transfers were re-enabled this past Friday