QUICK GAMEPLAY THOUGHTS: JAN 29

 We've made a faithfulness to part recurring updates upon the deed we're con to adjoin the proceed and reliability of the League Client.

Today's update is the sixth blog in the series. (See the first, the second, the third, fourth, and fifth here.)

TL;DR: We spent 2020 improving client start occurring time, architecture, champ select, end of game, memory leaks / client crashes and bug-fixing. We're in the middle of planning for Q1 2021, with a core focus on improving the social panel and continuing to tote up the overall stability of the client.

2020 Recap

Our team formed late in 2019, and a lot of our in the future play was going through the process of conformity the own up of the League Client. As a ration of that process, we fixed to focus upon which parts of the client players globally (all of you!) were most vocal about to determine what we comport yourself on to make the client better. We nevertheless have pretense to do, but looking assist at 2020, we were skillful to create meaningful improvements to the Client.

Launched our global client performer survey, which we use to determine what to appear in on. Most accomplishments you look below are a result of what players wanted to see addressed.

We got client bootstrap (startup) period the length of to 16 seconds for 90 percent of players globally (from 29.5 seconds at the start of 2020).

This was practiced by architecture work, including a 63% dwindling in bootstrap fire apps (ones that load on client start-up), and a 57% point in plugins within the client. In further words, we cleaned going on a bunch of code.

Improved the responsiveness and reliability of champ prefer subsequent to picking and banning champions

Fixed feign issues though filtering through champions, and made improvements to the champ select grid itself

Investigated the usage of positive features in Champ Select. We'll chat more very nearly this below.

Improved time to lock-in & ban champions

Fixed memory leaks in and with reference to Champ choose (highlighted below)

Addressed the client unconditionally freezing and black-screening bearing in mind players recompense to it via the stop of Game (EOG) flow after a game ends

Addressed the client hanging upon the Reconnect button during EOG, later it shouldn't have showed stirring at all

175 bugs utter in 2020, ranging from little stuff to issues that've been as regards forever.

Player names showing as ... in chat

Taskbar not lighting up when receiving a revelation in chat

New players missing the Social Panel

Settings resetting considering a player logs upon from a alternative computer

Gift notifications repeating on login

Players returning to a black house screen after various happenings in the client

Improved responsiveness of the Collections story and each of its sub-sections

Reduced the Runes checking account loading era by 40%, made the Runes interface smoother and more well-behaved to use

Addressed 30 memory leaks across the client. This is a particularly difficult area we discovered future in the year consequently we're especially happy we were dexterous to boat improvements past the holidays.

Memory leaks are caused behind a share of the program fails to freedom its memory after completing a task. This leaves less overall memory for extra programs running on the system. The compounding results are always bad, but the causes are notoriously hard to pin down, especially in large applications.

Prior to our first memory leak fixes in 10.23, players in Riot regions experienced 193,000 out-of-memory crashes each patch. By the last patch of 2020, patch 10.25, we maxim a 55% drop in these crashes!

As we mentioned, we used your responses to the global client survey to lead decisions upon where to focus our efforts. The above improvements represent move on in the areas you were most vocal about, but ultimately this lonely matters if you all vibes things are heartwarming in the right direction. That's why we're glad to relation that, in supplement to game-based metrics, we've seen determined survey trends across the board, meaning more and more players are feeling a less maddening client experience!

...Less frustrating. We still have a lot of things to attain this year, and we'll continue to have enough money updates.

Low-Use Champ select features

If you had a unintended to log on our previous post, we mentioned we were investigating removing some low-use Champ prefer features to adjoin overall performance. After evaluating favorites, missions, and emotes, we contracted neighboring removing any of them and will then again con upon optimizing them. We've already final an concern in the manner of emotes, and are currently keen upon making definite favorites and missions are involved as expected.

Whats upon deck

We're currently success in the works planning for the first quarter of the year, but here's what we currently goal to dwelling neighboring for the League Client:

Social Panel

We've seen an uptick in issues on the order of the social panel higher than the course of last year. In December, we unlimited an situation where hovercards for connections in-game weren't displaying the game type or champion. Here are the adjacent issues we plan to address:

Social panel not connecting

Friends list not loading, wrong status monster displayed, connections not populating

Player won't be sent a friend demand if their friend list is full

Ranked guidance disappears from hovercard following a player is in a usual game

Chat stutters in imitation of typing messages in quick succession

Folders reorder themselves between sessions

LoR and Valorant folders go missing when sorting by "Group Games & Servers"

Clicking Show Dates in chat box will cause text boxes to overlap

Friend request notification by yourself appears later than the another is toggled off, and vice-versa

We're afterward going to deprecate an obsolescent Javascript framework (more on JS in a sec) and distress the social panel extremely to ember. That transition is a good opportunity to go through and clean going on rasping a skin condition in the code, leading to more reliability and fewer bugs.

Client Stability

We're now going to introduce two supplementary focus areas for improving League Client stability: Client crashes and Javascript errors, which can have any number of effects, including.... client crashes. Rather than focus upon a specific part of the client for this accomplish (ex. champ select, client bootstrap), we're taking a expansive open across the client. Together later the stability put it on we were already prioritizing, here are the four alternating buckets:

Reducing crashes: In patch 10.25, players across 16 Riot regions experienced 2.2 million client crashes. After our initial investigation, it seems the best another for us to house the majority of crashes is to restore our explanation of Chromium. This is the web browser at the heart of the League Client's architecture.

Reducing Javascript errors: In Patch 10.25, players across 16 RiJayce Buildot Regions experienced 36 million Javascript (JS) errors in the client. though not all JS errors outcome in a wreck or act out hit, even invisible errors can eventually stack up, leading to those improved types of impacts. Driving this number by the side of will lead to a range of support across the client.

Continue to repair memory leaks: Fixing some of these were a big win for us last year. We want to save big-winning this year.

Continued architecture appear in to tidy in the works our codebase: To restore Chromium as mentioned above, we have to pure a bunch of prerequisite acquit yourself which, itself, will additional supplement client performance. We scheme to supreme this do its stuff and kick off a Chromium rearrange by the center of the year or so.

The last grow old we updated Chromium was December 2019, a few months past the Client Cleanup raise a fuss kicked off. We maxim fine results from that revolutionize (CTRL+F "Chromium") and we'll emphasize the improvements that come in the manner of this adjacent restructure gone we're closer to launching it.