Former professional player Yilliang "Doublelift" Peng was streaming his climb back to the top of the ranked ladder when tragedy struck. Unfortunately, his progress was severely hampered when his client experienced an error during champion selection of the final game of his series. It remained stuck on the same screen for more than a minute before crashing which forced him to restart. Once it had started up again Doublelift found himself alone in a champion select screen before being forced out and handed a queue penalty for dodging.
Match losses caused by server problems are not supposed to for promotion matches, but this client crash bug doesn't appear to be counted as a server issue therefore he was penalized despite having no control in the situation which was labeled a dodge.
League of Legends last major client overhaul came more than four years ago, during the 2017 pre-season. It did come along with better graphics and user interface, however, players have consistently complained about the client’s bugs, unreliableness, and loss of certain features. The games developer Riot even admitted that the client was a mess within a blog post made in 2020.
“The client is not in great shape,” they said. “It’s got too many bugs, too much lag (especially in champ select), and a whole host of issues like memory leaks, crashes, freezes, and on and on.”
League of legends Youtuber Vandiril known for documenting bugs with champions and items in games, has several videos called "Why we 'love' the League Client," showing a number of bugs that he and other players have encountered within the past seven months. Loading screen bugs have resulted in afk penalties for a number of players similar to what befell Doublelift.
Riot has pushed out consistent behind-the-scenes blog posts about its ongoing client cleanup campaign every two months. The fifth and latest in these series of posts was published three months ago. It sadly looks like what was initially planned to be a six-month project has now transformed into an almost year-long job where there looks to be a significant amount of work left to be done.
League of legends still remains one of the most popular video games in the world and is still the most popular MOBA in the world. With all this support backing them, it is truly a shame that its players have to tolerate a rather poorly implemented client. An unfortunate crash shouldn't be the deciding factor in a match for a game of its size.
Unfortunately for Doublelift his journey to return to the hit a speed bump he couldn't see coming. This shouldn't be too big of a problem for a player of his caliber. The eight-time League Championship Series winner is undoubtedly skilled enough to attain whichever rank he desires. But the game's client shouldn't be one of the opponents he needs to face to attain these goals. Hopefully in time Riot can achieve their goal of a perfectly functioning client.
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