There’s not much that even a legendary ADC like Doublelift can do when League of Legends itself decides to give up on him.
After starting his stream last night with a dominant Miss Fortune win, Doublelift was up for a promotion series to Master and swiftly began queueing. The League client, however, had other plans for him.
After accepting a match, the client was stuck on the same screen for more than a minute before crashing. Upon restarting, Doublelift found himself in a champion select screen with no other players before being booted out and dealt a queue ban—and he was noticeably frustrated.
While match losses caused by server problems are supposedly discounted for promotion matches, the bug caused by this client crash might have superseded all sorts of preventive safeguards.
League’s last major client overhaul came more than four years ago, before the start of the 2017 season. While the graphical improvements were obvious, players have consistently complained about the client’s bugs, unreliableness, and loss of certain features. Developer Riot even admitted as much in a blog post almost one year ago.
“The client is not in great shape,” Riot 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.”
Riot has pushed out consistent bi-monthly behind-the-scenes blog posts about its ongoing client cleanup campaign, with the latest, fifth post in the series published three months ago. What was supposed to be a six-month project has morphed into an almost year-long marathon and there looks to be a lot more work ahead.
League remains one of the most popular video games in the world and is still the king of the MOBA world. Longtime fans have learned to tolerate its poorly implemented client, but sometimes, an unexpected crash can kill the mood for a planned night of enjoyment.
Unfortunately, Doublelift was unable to turn around the unfair deficit and failed to complete his promotion series. North America’s greatest retired ADC will need to come back another day to continue his grind back to the top.
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