New League of Legends Team Tackles Major Client Issues

A new League of Legends team has been put together internally to tackle some of players’ largest concerns with the new League client.

Within the announcement that came this week, Riot Zerocontext provided quite a bit of context for the Client Strike Team and discussed some of the player concerns that they’ve taken notice of. While some aspects of the new client were received well, others have caused some concern from players that the team hopes to fix.

“You’ve been clear that while the new client’s visuals and sound effects are generally meeting your expectations, there are other elements that aren’t — particularly in the categories of performance and reliability,” the Rioter said. “We’ve also gotten feedback (relatively less, but still significant) around UX design.”

There are three main issues that the Client Strike Team is hoping to target first that’ll receive the majority amount of work:

1. Improving the time it takes to start up the client and to return from the game. (Changes here will be noticeable primarily on lower-performance systems.) You might have seen that we’ve already shipped some enhancements in this area with a recent patch, and we’re on the lookout for additional room to improve.
2. Fixing crashes and bugs, particularly those impacting flow into the game, thereby resulting in unintentional dodges
3. Reducing lag for the client, which disproportionately affects lower-performing systems. Cutting down on the amount of system resources that the client requires is likely to be a byproduct of this work.

The three issues above were selected to work on first based on a number of player feedback sources that include players’ support tickets, in-client surveys, and bug reports. Social media and players’ comments in the League boards are also used to assess what issues should be prioritized, all feedback that led to the above list being created.

Riot Nocontext also added that the Client Strike Team might not always be needed once several client issues are resolved, saying that it wouldn’t make sense to have a full team dedicated to client issues if major problems are eventually eliminated. But for now, the Client Strike Team plans to continually address players’ feedback and hit the most important client issue first.