Long-standing Spectator Client Bug (Death Sentence for Amateur Tournaments)

So, this is something that mostly affects amateur tournaments (very heavily), but might not have much an effect on individual spectators. It is, however, incredibly disruptive.

What is it?

The spectator bug in question is the series of micro-delays you might see while spectating a game. It seems to be some sort of desync between the client and server in terms of the game's current progress. You get a short freeze, then are slightly behind the live game. There is no way that I or any of the other amateur casters have found to avoid it, and it just seems to be an artifact of the spectator client.

How long has it been happening?

As best I or anyone else I've talked to can tell, it's been an issue since Riot added the replay system -- so a few months at least. I can personally attest to it happening for at least the last two months, which is when I really started to notice it.

So what?

Alone, this isn't too big a deal -- just hit fast forward for a few seconds or ignore it entirely. You lose no information or time, just a little tiny freeze and then everything is okay. However, as an amateur caster streaming to an audience, it suddenly becomes much more disruptive. The problem here lies in the fact that the delays don't happen equally for everyone. One person could get a .5 second skip at 1:02 in the game, the other could be fine until 1:30, where they're frozen for a full second. By itself, it doesn't seem too bad. But they add up, often pretty quickly.

The problem is, when you're casting with someone else online, you rely entirely on seeing the same things at the same time in order to properly cast a fight (just think of how many fights start with little to no warning and then are an explosion of action for a good half-minute). With these delays, the casters are given two options: risk being desynced, or constantly spam the fast forward button for the duration of the cast. The former isn't really acceptable, and the latter is problematic for not only the viewer experience (as the stream experiences these jumps and fast forwards) but for the caster experience as well. Instead of focusing on the fights and information at hand, you have to spend time and effort watching for little skips and fast forwarding by spamming a button. Needless to say, it gets very annoying very quickly and is incredibly disruptive besides.

Even when aware of the issue, sometimes casters will miss a skip and then be out of sync for a game-winning or heavily influential fight. The viewers then have to deal with this terrible experience of watching a bunch of random skips and have the casters out of sync for an important fight. It's pretty crap for everyone involved. While I can't imagine it's not been mentioned before, I wanted to make sure with this post that Riot is at least aware of it.

I'm not asking for it to be instantly fixed and everything is sunshine and rainbows from then on, but some sort of indication that Riot has noticed would be a step in the right direction. As of now, I'm not aware of a single instance in which Riot has even acknowledged its existence, so hopefully this post will get some much-needed traction towards a fix.

Steps to reproduce

All you need to do is hop in a spectator game and watch it, wait for the freeze, and...well, there you have it. You can either fast forward to catch up to live or leave it as is. I have not had a single game in which it has not occurred, so it's as far as I know a 100% reproduction rate (and every caster I have talked to has said the same thing), including casters for Riot's own Collegiate league.

tl;dr Spectator client constantly freezes and or skips, leaving the casters and viewers with a terrible experience consisting mostly of hitting the fast forward button. Multiple months and no fix or mention in sight.

Thanks for reading.