Riot looks to improve champion select and LoL’s end-game lobby

More improvements to the League of Legends client are underway, with the latest targeting things players experience before and after every game they play.

Riot Games recently released its fifth client cleanup report, with a focus on champion select and the end of game experience. Riot is primarily looking to make champion select more responsive and to improve the user experience by potentially removing features that are taking up space unnecessarily.  

All year, Riot has worked on cleaning up the many issues with the client. The latest focus was on improving the client bootstrap time, which is now down to 15.5 seconds for 90% of all players according to Riot. The bootstrap time is how much time it takes for the client to start up, and now that it has improved, Riot is shifting focus to the next assignments in line. 

Riot to improve champ select UX and UI in League client

One of the main focus points for the League client is to improve the overall look and user experience for the champion select. Riot will be looking to identify parts of the champion select that players care about while removing things that players either don’t use or care as much about. 

Riot has relied a lot on survey data to find out what players think about the whole champion select experience. The first thing that has been reported is that players want greater responsiveness and clarity from interactive buttons. This is mainly for picking or banning champions. Riot will improve the speed and reliability of the visual and auditory feedback to achieve that clarity here. These changes will hopefully prevent players from accidentally failing to lock in a pick or ban. 

Some of the things that players don’t find very useful is the ceremonies around the selection of summoner spells and ward skins. Riot will be removing animations from the summoner spell and ward skin tabs. 

Riot might completely remove certain champion select features that players don’t care much about. The features in consideration are the emote panel, champion favoriting, and missions. Riot will be looking at more survey data before they make the final decision on these features. 

End-game and post-game to be improved in League of Legends client

Not only champion select will be getting some tweaks in the upcoming patches. Riot will also be looking to make the end of game transition to the lobby more smooth. 

Over many patches, players have reported issues with getting from the end-game screen to the post-game lobby in the League of Legends client. Many players are currently getting a “reconnect” button when they exit games, instead of being sent directly to the honor screen. This issue prevents players from giving honor to teammates and looking at post-game stats. 

According to Riot, they are investigating the cause of the issue and will be looking to fix it. Some “promising fixes” are on deck and should go live with patch 10.23. 

While there is no exact date on all of the client improvements, the goal is to have everything improved as desired by the end of the year, according to Riot.