There are a lot of memes about how bad the client is, but it's a disgrace to software engineering

There have been a lot of complaints about how the new client is bad - it's inefficient, it's worse than the custom client that was shutdown because Riot was making a new one, it's made in a super unstable framework of a very shitty language. But you know, people are used to it since the game is also implemented just as badly.

So here's the story. I'm sure it's not the first time.

Since patch 9.4., I have noticed that a lot of people have this problem with some kind of weird disconnecting. Well, it's not disconnecting as much as it seems to be a bug, because when you disconnect, everything stops. Not in this case. First what happens is that you lose control of your champion. I presume your upload is cut off, but you still get to see what others do. This, depending on the circumstance can last from 2-10 seconds, and then you stop seeing what others do - they just freeze. After another 10 seconds, because frankly I believe that's how bad LoL's implementation is, 10 seconds for the evaluation of a single condition, you get the message that you're attempting to reconnect. But you see, the funny thing is the client either doesn't recognize that or it's a game bug. It's so obscure that what happens if you play with your friends is usually that they are connected to literally anything but the game - you can voice chat through league with them normally, as well as type messages through the background instance of the client. So what gives? Selective disconnecting? Am I, as well as some of my buddies getting DDoS'd? Who knows.

Well, what do you do then? The game is so badly coded that attempting to reconnect takes actually more time to reconnect than simply ALT+F4-ing the game and reconnecting yourself. In what world are a few handshakes and pings costlier than loading the whole game into memory? In Riot's world. But it doesn't end there. The client is so aggressive with the management of its resources that in the event you wish to close it and try again, it doesn't let you see anything else if you're full screen. At this point you already know how good Riot's coding practices are, you're aware that you're endlessly trapped in a frozen loading screen. Now, this even applies to people without SSDs, but god, if restarting a computer and restarting the game is faster than your recovery mechanism, for gods sake you have to fire the people who did it. I run Windows, the biggest piece of trash in the history of software aside from League and its client and I run it only to play games, and even with how much spying it does and how inefficient it is, it's still infinitely faster than something 20 times smaller you worked on with a god of custom clients for several years. But OK, let's relaunch my computer.

After a 20 second reboot (still faster than loading into a LoL game), you enter LoL. The client loads and then crashes and you manage to catch a glimpse of your login ID not being displayed as usual. So you start worrying. After the client relaunches and I have to accept the ToS, you see an eerie sight - 1.1 GB need to be downloaded? There was no patch today. So I wait for it, it's patching, the client crashes again. It reopens and I have to re-accept the ToS. It crashes once more and then successfully loads. I re-enter a game 18 minutes later and we lose because 4 people cannot hold of 5 people in URF.

You know, I'm studying CS. I'm literally at the bottom of the bottom in terms of competence, my code is not only exotic but a lot of the time inefficient, but you know what? Even if I have to use something like Python I can make it run quick and correctly, because that's the bare minimum. You are working on a game for more than 10 years, have people who hold papers that say they're more capable than me, you're using vastly superior technologies yet you can't make things work right even if it works badly. I know people often give you flak for having an utterly miserable balancing team, but boy oh boy, if they had to deal with your engineering team every game, I'd bet that they'd be way more pissed. I have no idea why you had to make the client run on browser technologies, it's not like you're gonna make LoL a browser game, but even if you do not decided to scrap this steaming pile of garbage you have blessed us with, you should likely think a bit harder when you decide to do something new next time - you didn't learn from the mistakes of Adobe Air, you didn't have the privilege of learning from the mistakes of Flash or Silverlight, but for god's sake, you must have found a pattern that web technologies you're employing are immature and unstable and way too inefficient for games; software failure shouldn't happen in a competitive game (even though this was just a warmup game for me).

Sorry if this came out of a rant, I wanted it to be a critique of the things I find most out of place in the game, even though I might've come out as somewhat emotionally invested in this, I'm way to disappointed to care in that way.