Today's red post collection includes the next update on the Client Cleanup campaign, Riot Scruffy's quick gameplay thoughts for June 26, including details on upcoming Tahm Kench changes, TFT's 1 year anniversary and a free gift, and more!
- Red Post Collection: New Universe Stories, Updates on Little Legends in ARAM, & more
- 6/24 PBE Update: Skin Tweaks & Chroma Assets
- /dev: Return of Nexus Blitz
Table of Contents
The Client Cleanup Continues
"Earlier this year, we made a commitment to share bi-monthly updates on the behind-the-scenes work we're doing to improve the performance of the League of Legends client.
Today's update is the third in the series. (See the first blog here, and the second blog here.)
TL;DR: We're making consistent progress on our goal of cleaning up the code that powers the client. We're also smashing troublesome bugs along the way, which we've shared below. Despite progress, much work remains to be done. The Cleanup Campaign continues.
RECENT PROGRESS
As we said in our first client blog, we believe that the best way to solve some of the client's performance issues is by consolidating and reducing the number of plugins and ember apps in the client.
Plugins—for those who don't know—are tools that allow us to break the client's code up into useful chunks. Ember apps help drive the client's user interface.
We've continued to make progress toward this goal. The chart below shows the total count of plugins and ember apps over time.
If you're reading the chart above, you're probably thinking okay, but how exactly does this impact the client's performance? The answer to that is complicated, but at high level: fewer plugins and Ember apps means more efficient client code. Leaner code equals better performance and also results in a client that's easier for devs to maintain.
One of the ways we've been measuring the impact of our work is by tracking the amount of time it takes for the client to boot up. Below you can see a chart showing how that metric has been tracking over time:
As you can see, bootstrap times have mostly been holding steady over the past couple of months. We actually consider this to be a moderate success, given the risks inherent to the work we're doing. Shuffling around big chunks of code and rewiring plugins could cause some unforeseen issues if we're not careful—but so far that doesn't seem to be happening.
We're hopeful that we'll start to see more improvement to bootstrap times over the next few patches, especially now that we've developed a new solution that allows us to more intelligently specify which plugins load in whenever you boot up your client. (See the most recent client blog for a deeper discussion about this topic, in the section labeled "The Trouble With Affinity.")
Our plan for now is to continue the consolidation work for at least the next couple of months, as we believe there are meaningful long-term benefits of reducing the number of plugins and ember apps—by cleaning up the overall code environment, we're making it easier to solve bugs, memory leaks, and crashes.
Speaking of bugs and crashes, let’s talk about some recently-shipped fixes.
RECENT BUGFIXES
The client team has been opportunistically tackling tons of bugs over the previous few months. Starting with patch 10.13, you'll see client bugfixes in their own section of the League patch notes.
In the meantime, here's a list of some of the client bugs the team has addressed on a per-patch basis since the beginning of the year:
- 10.1 - The client's position no longer resets after finishing a game
- 10.1 - Fixed an issue that sometimes caused the League logo next to the "Play" button to disappear
- 10.1 - [MAC] Fixed an issue that sometimes caused the client to crash when regaining internet connection after having been disconnected for over a minute
- 10.1 - Profile background changes are now properly displayed to other players
- 10.3 - Middle-clicking links no longer breaks the client
- 10.3 - The Store icon is now properly highlighted when selected after using a Hextech Chest in loot
- 10.3 - Sorting the Collection no longer defaults to reverse-alphabetical order when changing sorting filters
- 10.3 - Sorting by "Milestones Passed" in the Collection now works properly
- 10.4 - Addressed an issue causing the social panel and chat window to break in Champ Select if certain actions (removing a friend, being removed, being blocked) were taken
- 10.4 - Champions are once again searchable using alternative spelling methods in the Collection
- 10.4 - Searching for champions in the Collection is no longer case-sensitive
- 10.4 - Sorting champions by alphabetical order in the Collection is now accurate
- 10.4 - The client no longer shows a black screen after clicking "Play Again" if the player went into game while viewing personalized offers
- 10.5 - Removed an unnecessary scroll bar from the bottom of the champions page in the Collection
- 10.7 - Fixed an issue causing the "Send Friend Request" button to become non-functional in custom lobbies
- 10.7 - The "View Schedule" information screen no longer appears blurry when viewing upcoming tournaments in the Clash hub
- 10.8 - When leaving the emotes tab with unsaved changes, the save prompt will now appear as intended
- 10.8 - Exiting the End of Game screen no longer brings the player to the Profile page
- 10.8 - Summoner icons now display properly when logging into the client
- 10.9 - Fixed an issue that was making the Blue Minion Bruiser summoner icon unselectable
- 10.9 - Players no longer receive the wrong error message when attempting to log in while League is closed for maintenance.
- 10.9 - Fixed an issue preventing blocked players' names from being visible on your blocked list
- 10.9 - Various fixes to address memory leaks caused by an older version of Ember
- 10.10 - Addressed a bug causing Rune Pages to appear missing or deleted upon login
- 10.10 - Rune pages now automatically close when the "Play" button is clicked
- 10.10 - Rearranging rune pages no longer creates duplicate rune pages or causes crashes
- 10.10 - Addressed an issue preventing some players from editing rune pages
- 10.11 - The "Enable Low Spec Mode" and "Close Client During Game" settings are now properly saved when the settings window is closed
- 10.11 - Fixed an issue causing the "skin rarity" button in the Collection to become partially blank
- 10.11 - Addressed an issue that sometimes prevented players from entering Spectator mode
- 10.12 - Addressed some issues affecting rune page functionality in Champ Select
That's the list for now! If you've found a bug that you'd like to report, please feel free to submit it through this form. You can also always submit feedback by clicking the "bug" button in the bottom-right corner of your client.
NEXT STEPS
As we work on the client, we keep asking ourselves a fundamental question: Is the League client worthy of our players?
The answer, of course, is that it isn't. Not yet, at least.
There are many more bugs to solve, crashes to prevent, and deep architecture problems to root out. The work we started earlier this year will continue until we can answer that question—is the client worthy of you, our players?—with a resounding "yes."
It will take time to get to that point, and we'll keep you updated along the way. For the next few patches, we intend to continue consolidating plugins and ember apps while smashing bugs as we see them. By the time we share our next update, we hope to be ready to enter a new phase of our campaign, whereupon we'll specifically focus on improving Champ Select responsiveness.
As always, thanks for playing, and we'll be back with another client blog in a couple of months."
Quick Gameplay Thoughts: June 26
"Disclaimer
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.
Tahm Kench Small Update
We’ve got a small gameplay update in the works for Tahm Kench. It’s still a good number of patches away, but the game designer working on it, CaptainGameplay, has some goals and a preview of our current direction:
“Let's talk Kench. It's no secret he is one of the champions most famous for being weak for the vast majority of players because his kit is so strong for pros. With a semi-global ultimate that requires him to plan map rotations ahead of time with his allies, and his marque Devour that both negates opponent playmaking and enables his allies to position in ways that would otherwise be incredibly dangerous, Tahm has a lot of power that specifically requires the highest degree of coordinated play. On live, this means when he ever rises above 44-45% win rate (in support) he takes over the professional scene.
In testing right now, we have moved Devour to his Ultimate slot, where it gets to be significantly more powerful as a spell cast and therefore less dependent on allies playing around it. It will both deal more damage to any enemies you may manage to eat, as well as better protect allies you are trying to save by granting them a shield and slowing you less. With a longer cooldown and no access to the ability before 6, opponents should also be able to capitalize on it's down times. The open W is becoming a new engage tool that will similarly be less coordination reliant than his live engage ultimate. Think a faster, shorter range personal Abyssal Voyage that damages and knocks up enemies on arrival. We are also taking this time to adjust his sustained combat pattern and give him some cool tricks. We are trying out a self heal on Tongue Lash, as we've identified that his combat pattern tends to be very one-and-done due to the all or nothing nature of Thick Skin's defenses, and we are trying to encourage offensive uses of Devour by allowing Tongue Lash to once again stack An Acquired Taste - as well as letting you use it to Devour enemies at range who are fully stacked.
The current timeline for this work is after our worlds patch, to avoid potential upheaval to Summer Split/Worlds and to give us the most time to tune and adjust him before the professional scene picks back up."
-Riot Captain Gameplay
Reducing Autofill
Earlier in the year we made the autofill parity feature, focused on ensuring it resulted in fair matchups between teams. Since then the team has mainly moved onto other projects, but we've still been working on smaller-scope optimizations to autofill aimed more at the individual player experience. We recently found a minor but successful change that increases our weighting to preference secondary position over autofill. The result is that you should see about the same amount of games in your primary position, a few more games in your secondary, and even less autofill.
For all regions combined:
- BEFORE: 91% Primary,4.2% Secondary, 4.8% Autofill
- AFTER: 90% Primary, 7% Secondary, 3% Autofill
And here’s a graph showing our data for NA:
Blue line is primary position, orange is secondary position, red is autofill.Ranked Seeding Moved to Preseason
Ranked Seeding is the feature we discussed in our last Ranked blog, which would use MMR data from other queues to provide an initial ranked MMR when players are just starting out in ranked. We’re seeing a few more challenges than expected translating normal MMR into ranked MMR due to the nature of the two queues. The normal queue has a significantly larger population of players that includes many who never make it to ranked or just opt out. This creates a MMR distribution with both a different shape and different center points. We’re going to do the necessary work to correctly translate between the two MMRs so we’re seeding ranked players much closer to their skill level—the core goal of the project. In short, it’s not coming soon as we originally planned, we are aiming to include it with a bunch of other features (like division promo removal) in the preseason.
Little Legends ARAM Removal on Hold
While this isn't strictly a gameplay topic, we wanted to share a followup to Meddler's post last week, which some of you might have seen on Meddler's twitter by now. We're putting the plan to remove Little Legends from ARAM and refund them for players who haven't played TFT on hold for now. We'll get back to you when we have an alternative or modified approach to share.
Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there."
Miscellaneous
- The TFT twitter noted that the Pengu-versary emote seen in the 10.14 PBE cycle would be a gift for their 1 year anniversary:
"One year ago we started on a journey with a sword-wielding penguin and all of you. To celebra
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