Tech idea: preloading during champ select
This is just a simple idea, but I was thinking that during champ select, once summoners have locked in their champ, the clients could start preloading the data right there, in the background while the PvP.net client is still up. This could drastically shorten waiting times, in many cases eliminate them altogether.
I know for people like me with a fast PC and SSD, load times are fast, but there is almost always one or two people with much slower computers taking a few extra minutes while everyone else sits at 100%.
This seems like it would be somewhat easy to implement, by launching the game client early and having it wait in the background, listening for messages from the PvP.net client to tell it who to load and when to pop into the foreground to start the match.
It would save 1-2 minutes per match, times 10 summoners, times thousands of matches daily, for the sake of, well I don't know how ugly the code is but maybe a couple days of coding and testing. It might be even simpler than that, since the client already manages disconnected summoners by showing a blank portrait, so perhaps that functionality could be adapted more easily.