Future plans for the client

Hi beautiful people.

The client update beta is officially complete. The rollout went pretty smoothly, and we've seen no widespread technical problems after the launch. But we're not done making the client better.

Throughout both the alpha and beta for the client, we've been listening to player feedback. Today we'll walk you through our plans to address it. We've got a lot of new features, bugfixes, and UX upgrades in the works, and it's all in direct response to things players have been saying. If you don't see something on this list, that doesn't mean we don't care about it—these are just the changes which will be highest priority.

So, without further ado...

Things we’re working on RIGHT NOW.

This is stuff that's actively in progress or which we'll be doing on a continuous basis. These are the highest priority client changes.

DONE - Start new conversations and see your friends list in champion select. We recently added this functionality with patch 7.9.

DONE - Personalized store offers.

ONGOING - General client stability and bugs. We've gotten performance to a pretty good spot in recent months, but we think it's important to keep improving things and squashing bugs. This is work that will probably continue forever—like until Earth is destroyed by a meteor or the release of a new Yorick skin (whichever comes first).

ONGOING - Improving the time it takes to get to the end-of-game screen. Most of the problems players have with this are as a result of enabling the "close client during game" option in settings. We're working on some fixes to improve the transition time.

ONGOING - General champ select performance. Specifically, we want to improve the time it takes to get into champ select and eliminate any stuttering during the pick/ban phases. Work is being done on this now.

IN PROGRESS - The item set creator tool. All your old item sets should still be working, but we know it's a pain to not be able to edit them in the client. This feature is currently in PBE testing and should go live soon. We'll keep you updated as development continues.

IN PROGRESS - General chat window improvements. The chat team is focused on addressing complaints from players who are finding it difficult to tell who they're chatting with from the list of open chat tabs.

Things we’re planning to do.

Most of these things will be finished this year. Even if some take longer, we're committed to making these changes.

HIGH PRIORITY - Purchase skins in champ select. This is a feature that only worked in some queues in the legacy client. We'll make it so it works everywhere so we can always take your money.

HIGH PRIORITY - Make it so editing Masteries doesn't hide vital champ select information. This makes the ban and pick timers difficult to see while players edit their masteries, and it keeps them from seeing which champs are being selected. We'll address this.

HIGH PRIORITY - Let you choose a skin in champion select immediately after locking in.

HIGH PRIORITY - Improve client button responsiveness. Along with the general performance issues listed above, we think we can improve the "feel" of the client by reducing the time it takes for buttons to activate or show hovered text.

HIGH PRIORITY - Improving the implementation of the "recently played" list. You can still find this in the "add friend" menu (launched from the social panel) but it's not as accessible as it was in the legacy client. We'll implement the recently-played list in the lobby and as an "accordion" tab in the friends list. Also, we've already implemented the ability to block people from the recently played tab.

PRIORITIZED - Make switching between Runes/Masteries pages faster and cleaner. We're looking at a few different possible design changes here—nothing decided just yet. We'll address the problem where hovering Rune page menu items obscures on-screen information. This is work we also intend to address as part of broader upcoming changes to Runes and Masteries.

PRIORITIZED - Unlock skins from the champion detail page in the Collection. Currently the unlock button is greyed out and all sad looking. We'll make it into a happy button.

PRIORITIZED - The client takes too many clicks to get into game. We’re committing to reduce the time to get in game, both with changes brought by the 10-bans system and with little tweaks to the mode select screen.

PRIORITIZED - Make the champion detail page accessible from champ select. Currently it's only accessible in the Collection.

PRIORITIZED - A separate "skins tab" in the Collection. Players want a way to see all their skins in one place. We'll give you one.

PRIORITIZED - Queue information in champ select. The legacy client clearly showed the title of the queue in the top-left corner of champ select, but the new client doesn't yet.

PRIORITIZED - General improvements to the client's navigation bar to make it more visible. In particular, we feel that the Store and Loot buttons lack visual distinction and should feel more like buttons.

PRIORITIZED - The chat box "pop out" option should stick between play sessions. Currently it just reverts to its default state every time you log in.

PRIORITIZED - See summoner icon descriptions when you change them. So you can reminisce about the time you spent a week collecting a half-dozen extra dank Bilgewater icons.

PRIORITIZED - The "first win of the day" timer should show the countdown down to the minute or second. Currently it just shows hours, and this tilts some players super hard.

PRIORITIZED - Show players in non-Draft-mode games which side they'll be on during champ select. This is currently a problem in blind pick.

PRIORITIZED - Further audio balance across client. This means more options and consistency around champ select pick/ban/timers.

Things we want to do but currently haven’t prioritized:

These are changes that make sense, but just aren't high-priority enough to take precedence over the changes listed above. We're open to making these changes eventually.

LOW PRIORITY - Preview chroma packs from the champion details page.

LOW PRIORITY - Edit in-game video settings from the client.

LOW PRIORITY - See information and videos for all champions including those with secondary abilities on the champion details page. There's actually a few things we can do to make champion detail pages more consistent, but it's work that may need to wait.

LOW PRIORITY - Spectate high-elo games. This was removed from the legacy client early in 2016—way before the client update beta—because of a security vulnerability involving the spectator service. This isn't something we think we can solve immediately, but we are considering tackling this in other ways (perhaps by offering downloadable replays of other players' games).

One thing we're still trying to figure out:

Hella stats.

WILL REASSESS IN A FEW MONTHS: Career stats on the Profile page. This includes the ranked stats which were available in the legacy client. We're waiting a bit to see whether upcoming work we have planned for the Profile page solves this work.

And one thing we don't plan to do:

Just one thing we're explicitly not prioritizing.

NOT PLANNED: Minimize the social panel. This is a design choice we made for the sake of supporting additional future functionality. Unlike in the old client, there's nothing hiding behind the social panel—every screen was designed to fit alongside it to leverage more information we plan to display. It already has the ability to hold additional info like your time in queue, game invites, and club information (whereas in the legacy client all of those things were relegated to individual little tabs and popups). So, later on, we'll likely use the space for other things as well so it feels more valuable to you.

Now that we've killed off the legacy client, we're finally able to focus our resources on all these goodies, so expect more work like it in the coming months. Also, in the next few patches, you'll notice us automatically removing legacy client files from your machine to free up space.

In the meantime, continue sending in your bug reports and feedback so we can keep making the client better. We'll hang out in the comments below to answer any questions you've got.