Ask Riot: League Client Update and Death Recaps
Welcome to Ask Riot!
This week, we’re talking about why we’re updating the Client and what’s going on with Death Recaps.
Why are you updating the client?
Most games don't ever need to replace their client. But League has been happily chugging along for the better part of the decade, and some of its parts have started to show their age.
We've pushed our loyal little client to its limits, but it's built on old, outdated tech—it just isn't designed to support the things we want to do for League's future. So, we're rebuilding it. The client update is a from-the-ground-up rework of League's home. Outside the game itself, the client affects every aspect of your League experience: the store, lobbies, chat, champ select, all that jazz.
For players, the client update matters for two main reasons: better visuals and better tech.
Visuals
Look at the legacy client. Seriously, look at the profile page. What is that, a scrapbook for wizards? Now look at the runes page. Why are there conch shells on magic resist glyphs? The answer: nobody knows. Because the League client was put together in pieces over many years, there's no visual consistency between pages. With the update, we’ve redesigned it with Hextech magic for a cohesive visual experience that fits the look and feel of League of Legends. It looks like this.
Tech
The current client runs on Adobe's AIR technology, aka the hottest tech of 2009. We decided to build the underlying technology from scratch based (more or less) on Chromium. It's allowing us to fix longstanding client bugs and deliver new features like replays.
cCc Grumbles cCc, Publishing Brand Management & Cactopus, Senior Writer
What is up with the Death Recap system?
Short version is the Death Recap system has some pretty large structural flaws that make it hard to incorporate new things and a pain to maintain.
Last year, you might remember when we did a large pass on Death Recaps. We were able to make them more accurate (people were no longer “dying” to flash), but we hit an impasse: without rebuilding the entire system, death recaps would require significant, ongoing maintenance to stay accurate. We are already seeing the improvements we made then start to unravel.
If we decide to focus on Death Recaps again, we would want to rebuild the entire foundation to correct its flawed structure. The reason we have not done this yet is because it would require shifting resources away from something else, and, as of right now, there are other things we are prioritizing. If Flash pops up as a thing that killed you (again), we may do some maintenance work.
Meddler, Lead Gameplay Designer
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