Riot Games Introduces Client Cleanup Campaign
It’s no secret that League of Legends client is a bit of a mess. Ever since Riot Games switched the client over from Adobe Air to its current version several years back, countless bugs and glitches have popped up. From slow load times to being unable to lock a champion or change runes in the lobby, players have become frustrated over the years.
Now, the developer is looking to make right by the player base. They are finally going to do a major fix of the system. In an article on their website, Riot Games detailed a new project called Client Cleanup Campaign that plans to address these issues over the next six months.
Speed and Embers
According to the post, Riot has two priorities to fix during the campaign. That’s improving the team it takes for the League of Legends client to boot-up and how long it takes someone to lock-in a champion in champ select.
The client’s load time has been okay for users with high-end machines. However, for below average and standard PC’s it takes too long. Players on the lower end of machines could take up to a second longer to register a locked-in champion.
The company already worked on this in patch 10.2 earlier this year, nearly halving champion select lock-in times in the process, but wants to push it further and reduce it to 100ms, or one-tenth of a second, for players on the low end.
Also, the company detailed its use of the JavaScript framework known as Ember. Misusing it caused bloat in the League of Legends client architecture that could increase load times by as much as eight times what they should be. This caused significant issues when players boot up the client. It pushed load times over a minute for some folks. It also gets worse as the user plays more games in a session, adding more Ember apps for the system to process which slows load times further.
The team plans to reduce the number of Ember apps utilized by the client. The long-term goal is to condense the client down to a single app to prevent stacking problems. With the acknowledgment that these apps cause a lot of issues, condensing them should help clear up the bugs. However, the team assured fans they would be going after other bugs “opportunistically.”
We’ll have to wait until six months to see if this campaign worked. It’s a step in the right direction for the developer after years of frustration with the League of Legends client.
Comments