Anyone who has spent much time using the League of Legends client has probably noticed that it functions like a complex machine held together with gum and duct tape. After continuous complaints over multiple years, it seems that Riot has finally decided to make fixing the client a genuine priority.
“The client is not in great shape,” the devs state in their announcement earlier today. “It’s got too many bugs, too much lag, and a whole host of issues like memory leaks, crashes, freezes, and on and on. We’ve made commitments to do something about the client before, and yet problems remain.
“Instead of talking in vague terms about our plans, today we’re sharing specific performance targets and clear details on the changes we intend to ship over the next six months.”
So what are the changes that Riot is intending to implement to fix the many issues? The first issue that they’re targetting is the amount of time it takes the client’s “bootstrap,” or the amount of time it takes the client to get up and running. Currently, they’ve found that it can take the client as long as 45 seconds to even a full minute just to complete bootstrapping.
Additionally, they’ve looked at the champ select lock-in time – the amount of time it takes the client to register you’ve locked in your champ after you click lock-in. While calculated in milliseconds, Riot has seen swings as high as some players taking more than four or five times than other players to finish locking in due to the slowness of the client.
The two specific target goals for the long term are to get the bootstrap time to about 15 seconds maximum, even for players running slower machines, which would make it about four times faster than it currently is. Second, they would like to get the champ select lock-in response times to around 100ms for all players – eight times faster than today.
So why are they processing this instead of bugs, crashes, and memory leaks? “The reason is that, in the process of addressing bootstrap time and champ select lock in time, we’re going to be cleaning up and reworking certain fundamental aspects of the client’s architecture,” the developers state. In short, they hope that fixing these two issues will give them the opportunity to address a variety of bugs and crashes.
It’ll be a long way going, and Riot definitely have a good amount of work ahead of them to fix these issues. They intend to check in every couple of months with dev blogs to share their progress, along with hard numbers on performance and any tweaks they’re implementing. For now, all League of Legends players can do is wait.
