Riot puts so much emphasis on making this game "Toaster Friendly"

Welcome to the world of memory optimized applications. Client? Not optimized. Game? Optimized. Now ask yourself why Skype takes 130MB of memory when it has less than 10MB worth of assets loaded.

Nothing is really very optimized here. The reason this game isn't toaster friendly is, frankly, Riot's programmers aren't very good.

The game loads often slower, for the average user, then a Crysis multiplayer map.

Crysis 2 & 3 will be fairly playable on low spec machines that struggle to run LoL despite having an immensely higher asset count and quality, particle effects, environment, advanced lighting and shaders, etc.

In fact LoL has such simple assets that even with a fully loaded running match if it were running in a top tier game industry engine (Unreal/CryEngine/etc.) it should produce fps in the thousands on a single high end GPU setup if vsync were disabled (perhaps the artists didn't do a good job with the assets, I haven't looked, personally).

Let's not forget the lack of advanced shaders such as global illumination, DoF, etc. I would argue they aren't even utilizing extremely basic techniques such as instancing for particle optimization based on what I have seen of performance when fights break out across other user's hardware and my extra laptop that I pulled from storage.

They would have abandoned Adobe Air for a full DirectX client (which would take less then 2 months to develop and have ready to beta for a high quality client). It would not have an alternate client from the game and would instead have necessary features that tween/expand/pop up when activated (friends, profile, etc.).

I doubt its the assets, I'm pretty sure its the engine. You have to remember Riot started out as a no-name company with everything to prove. All this time later they have yet to do an overhaul on their engine, probably because the sheer number of champions and mechanics, it would be a nightmare to try to reproduce in a new engine. Thus we are stuck with graphics that were easily possible over a decade ago running very poorly.

Welcome to the world of memory optimized applications. Client? Not optimized. Game? Optimized. Now ask yourself why Skype takes 130MB of memory when it has less than 10MB worth of assets loaded.

Nothing is really very optimized here. The reason this game isn't toaster friendly is, frankly, Riot's programmers aren't very good.

The game loads often slower, for the average user, then a Crysis multiplayer map.

Crysis 2 & 3 will be fairly playable on low spec machines that struggle to run LoL despite having an immensely higher asset count and quality, particle effects, environment, advanced lighting and shaders, etc.

In fact LoL has such simple assets that even with a fully loaded running match if it were running in a top tier game industry engine (Unreal/CryEngine/etc.) it should produce fps in the thousands on a single high end GPU setup if vsync were disabled (perhaps the artists didn't do a good job with the assets, I haven't looked, personally).

Let's not forget the lack of advanced shaders such as global illumination, DoF, etc. I would argue they aren't even utilizing extremely basic techniques such as instancing for particle optimization based on what I have seen of performance when fights break out across other user's hardware and my extra laptop that I pulled from storage.

They would have abandoned Adobe Air for a full DirectX client (which would take less then 2 months to develop and have ready to beta for a high quality client). It would not have an alternate client from the game and would instead have necessary features that tween/expand/pop up when activated (friends, profile, etc.).

That's because they are all about getting it done fast not getting it done right.

there is a reason Shen was broke for so long with his ult. they would "fix" it, exclaim it was fine then say a week later it was broke. It took like 6-8 months that he was disabled in the LCS because of his TP bug that they fixed it...which took someone new coming in, having to redo the HORRIBLE coding, and finally it worked.

Is the same reason their Network Infrastructure as a whole is one light sneeze away from catching on fire at any moment, because they did things the fast and easy way and now have to redo it all to make it normal let alone good.

When they first created...well everything it was so half assed, the client, the servers, the art assets (the first Summoner's rift compared to even the current one, not including the new one is just terribly terrible). They have a wave of new people the past year or so that look at stuff like code and do the O_O face at how much of a mess it is.

When you play Crysis, you're already in the Crysis game. When you play LoL, it has to launch the entire game from scratch. (The lobby client is completely separate from the game client)

Starting a LoL game is more comparable to starting Crysis from scratch off your desktop, and once it's oaded, THEN also loading the multiplayer map.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/update-summoners-rift-headed-pbe At this very moment, the new map is more memory (RAM) intensive than the current map. See FAQs.

Well It wouldn't be a single college student working on an engine, it would be a collaboration of 20-30 including post grads that would develop the engine while the rest who were hired help with transitioning the servers and client onto the new engine. I understand that Direct X is a bit complicated, but I think that you as a 5th year student should be able to easily create a game engine, don't doubt yourself man, you can always end up surprising yourself when you least expect it.

But still, to this day, the client takes up just as much memory as the game itself.

Why?

I'm surprised anyone has problems. My desktop is closing in on 8 years old now, and I could run 4 LoL games at one time and not have a problem. Pretty much always first to load, and never had any graphical hiccups in-game except when I'm recording with FRAPS.

What I'm running is about 3 years old but very outdated even by those standards, even so, I can play other AAA games fine on very low settings (Dishonored, Call of Duty, ect..). And yet, even with every other program closed, League still drops frames and the client still leaks harder than Edward Snowden, and with over $620 million in earnings in 2013, there really is no excuse for such poor optimization.

Money itself won-t magically bring the needed solutions.

But still, to this day, the client takes up just as much memory as the game itself.

Why?

I'm surprised anyone has problems. My desktop is closing in on 8 years old now, and I could run 4 LoL games at one time and not have a problem. Pretty much always first to load, and never had any graphical hiccups in-game except when I'm recording with FRAPS.

What I'm running is about 3 years old but very outdated even by those standards, even so, I can play other AAA games fine on very low settings (Dishonored, Call of Duty, ect..). And yet, even with every other program closed, League still drops frames and the client still leaks harder than Edward Snowden, and with over $620 million in earnings in 2013, there really is no excuse for such poor optimization.

I really hate it when people throw around the term "memory leak". Please stop using it, you have no idea what it means if you think LoL has a memory leak (currently).

it does increase performance