League of Legends' Client Update Data Shows Significantly Reduced Crashes

Riot Games recently announced its plans to update the League of Legends client by bringing the Chromium Embedded Framework web browser up to date. After testing out that change first, Riot released the client update in Patch 11.17 which was the first time the CEF had been updated since November 2019. In an overview of the results of the update shared this week, Riot's stats showed significantly fewer crashes after the client update compared to before.

Following the release of the client update, Riot said the number of crashes happening now has dropped by 61% compared to the average rate for 2021 up until that release. There's still more work to be done, but Riot said the data from the release of Patch 11.18 shows an even greater decrease in crashes.

"Upgrading CEF helped us address a lot of client crashes, and our goal is to continue addressing the ones that impact players the most," Riot said. "We're happy to see a 61% drop in crashes since 11.16 and a 38% drop from the average rate in 2021 so far, and we plan to keep driving those numbers down. In fact, early data from patch 11.18 shows another big drop in crashes! This is a huge win since we have a large number of client startups in any given patch (which can be upwards of 240 million in our Riot Regions!)."

A table shared in the post showed that in Patch 11.14, there were 2,349,865 client crashes. Patch 11.15 showed a larger number because it fell during a longer patch cycle, but Patch 11.16 had a similarly high number with 3,161,145 crashes recorded. Patch 11.17, by comparison, had only 1,214,155 crashes following the release of the client update.

Other improvements made by the update include a "significant decrease in the client's front-end memory usage during a single session" as well as "decrease in the amount of CPU power the client now uses." The same post included data for those areas, too, for those interested in seeing other ways the newer version of CEF improved the client.

For the rest of the year, the team working on the client said it plans to focus on the client's reliability as well as the End of Game experience players see once they conclude a match and go back to the client's interface. Another future Client Cleanup posts should detail what progress Riot's made between now and the next blog.