League of Legends Dev Tracker

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

anything you desire!

wont be able to dodge karthus ult either

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....

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 i...

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

honestly it probably wouldnt be that bad

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.

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.

someone pls tell me what the adc's name is

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.

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

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.

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

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

Could you please be a little more specific? :)

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

I'm not sure where u read that, but at no point were we ever working on VUs or VGUs for Diana and Leona

I am the product manager on the League Client Team here at Riot, and along with my team, would love to answer any questions that revolve around the client! I suggest you take a look at our latest blog post launched earlier this AM PST (and previous dev posts linked there), since it may answer your question. We will make our best effort to try and answer as many questions as we can!

Edit -- HI all, thank you for the questions, we will be stepping away for now and getting back to work, but I, along with the team will continue to respond to questions over the rest of the day when we can (we got a lot). Thank you all for the ...

Yup I totally did