Nearly six months after the release of the new League of Legends client beta, Riot Games has confirmed that it is ready to fully replace the legacy client.
Last week, all players from Oceania were automatically upgraded to the new client. This means that the legacy client, which we have been enduring since League of Legends came into existence, is essentially dead in the particular region.
Riot Games has already begun replacing the legacy client in some parts of China and South East Asia. This is likely to shift to a larger scale in the coming weeks. Assuming that there are no technical issues, the developer will then begin automatically upgrading more regions.
While no time frame has been mentioned for the public, Riot Games is very keen to be done with the legacy client as soon as possible.
“The sooner everyone’s using the updated client, the sooner we can start delivering cool new client features,” explained lead writer Riot Cactopus in an announcement.
He also pointed out that the new League of Legends client beta is far from perfect. There are various shortcomings and concerns that the developer is aware of. A list of complaints has been shared with the community, acknowledging that they are being worked over by the engineers at Riot Games.
Champ Select
- You can’t tell which type of queue you’re in once in champ select (ranked or normals). The legacy client clearly showed the title of the queue in the top-left corner of champ select, but the new client does not.
- Drop-down menus makes editing masteries take more clicks (and scrolling) when compared to legacy client. The new client’s drop-down menus in general are disliked by some players, as seen elsewhere in the client. We’ll think about how to solve the UX issues they’ve been causing.
- Players are forced to wait until pick phase is over to choose their skin. This was not the case with the legacy client.
- Champ search could be improved in a few different ways to let players sort the list how they want.
Chat and the Friends List
- Players dislike being unable to close or minimize the friends list. This could potentially be solved by allowing players to cover that area with other content.
- The chat module covers up vital parts of the client, including the “confirm” button which lets players get into game. This can be solved by popping out the chat module and moving it wherever the player wants, but further work could probably be done here.
- Public chat isn’t being rebuilt, which makes it harder for players to find people to play with during events like party IP weekends. We’re working on some other chat features that might alleviate this problem, but it’s good to keep it in mind in case it’s something we need to tackle more directly.
Profile and Collection
- Profile is missing many of the “career stats” which were available in the legacy client. We’ve actually committed to rebuilding more stats into the client during upcoming work on the profile page.
- Players are unable to unlock champs or skins from collection. This is a feature on the legacy client that hasn’t yet been brought over.
- Players generally don’t like the drop-down menus on the Runes page. This is probably something that we can solve with future work on runes that we’re planning to do anyway.
- The “first win of the day” timer should show the countdown down to the minute or second rather than just the hour.
General Issues
- Some notifications hover for a long time on screen and can’t be manually dismissed.
- The item set creator tool isn’t yet in the new client. There’s currently a team developing it, but I expect it’ll take some time before it’s complete.
