5 ms·

It's baffling seeing all these credentialed people talk and the game still having an utterly horrid bug riddled client for so long now.

Karunamon 7y ago
I think that's less on the talent of the people and more what they're being directed to work on. Riot management would rather prioritize new shiny stuff like new gamemodes, champions, reworks, etc, and otherwise stuff they can charge players for, instead of cleaning up their messes even if it would be a massive QoL improvement.
frozenlettuce 7y ago
Did they implement replays in the client? The last time I played it was '11. Even a 20+ year game like Starcraft could do this.
- Karunamon 7y ago
  Sorta, but it's limited in silly ways. Saved replays are basically dead after every patch since they are a hack around the spectator system.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Are you talking about LoL or Starcraft (whose replays also randomly stopped working after patches)?
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      In LoL's case it's explicitly enforced. Every time there's a patch, old replays go away.
jrockway 7y ago
My impression from playing games is that bugs don't kill the games, stopping feature releases to fix bugs kills games. Everyone just laughs at the bugs, even when they change the outcome of an esports matchup with millions of dollars on the line. In the end, the players keep playing and the sponsors keep buying ads, so it's no biggie. Looking through Blizzard's tech talks about Overwatch (they do exist!) is that they focus their testing on making the game fun. They do not say that this comes at the expense of thorough unit and integration tests, but from playing the game, my impression is that it does. Sometimes a patch will come out and the patch notes will be along the lines of "that ability didn't actually work in the last release, but hey we fixed it". Unit tests always notice abilities not working; playtests don't always pick them up. But unit tests will never make your game fun, and nobody will play a game that's not fun. So I'm guessing they don't work on that. (This video shows what happens when you uncover a lot of untested corner cases all at once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc) There are many software engineers that do enjoy bug-free software. Nobody cares because people are given passes time and again for bad software. Some bugs in a game? "OMEGALUL". Some credit card numbers stolen? "Oh, we're deeply sorry." The software crashes the plane from time to time? "Hey, we'll fix that in the 737 MAX v2." If engineers working on safety systems don't really care about bugs, why should a game whose competitors don't care either? It's just throwing money away. When Dota2 starts stealing LoL users because of their amazing bug-free client, then suddenly everyone will be working on testing frameworks. Until then, I expect some bugs in my games.
- pingyong 7y ago
  It should be noted that the client and the game are two completely separate pieces of software. The game itself certainly has a bunch of bugs, but those bugs tend to not be game-breaking, and are mostly "this doesn't behave as described" - for many of these things, it's not even clear anymore what the intended behavior even is. Until it's fixed, it's intended, for better or worse. But apart from that, the game is actually somewhat bug free. The client however, is just an honest to god embarrassment. It is legitimately terrible in every aspect that could possibly be terrible. It's slow, so slow that many things temporarily break on laptops, like opening rune pages in champion select. It uses more RAM than the game itself (?), it runs on like 4 different processes that interact in who knows what ways, but if the client crashes and you're trying to kill it that often (but not always) initiates a repair for no apparent reason. Often it doesn't even shutdown properly when you close it. On a friend's computer it one day just died and didn't start at all anymore, with no indication of what went wrong. He had to reinstall the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/epm9c8/all_the_things_that_are_wrong_with_the_league/ https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/epm9c8/all... It's a mess. And not only it is it a mess, it's an embarrassing mess because the client was always a pain point of many players, until they decided to completely re-write it in 2015. From the ground up. Clean slate - scalable, durable, lightweight, all that jazz. And now it's widely regarded as worse than the original client. If there was ever an example of how not to rewrite something, that would be it. Just a catastrophe on every level.

Karunamon 7y ago

I think that's less on the talent of the people and more what they're being directed to work on. Riot management would rather prioritize new shiny stuff like new gamemodes, champions, reworks, etc, and otherwise stuff they can charge players for, instead of cleaning up their messes even if it would be a massive QoL improvement.

frozenlettuce 7y ago

Did they implement replays in the client? The last time I played it was '11. Even a 20+ year game like Starcraft could do this.

Karunamon 7y ago
Sorta, but it's limited in silly ways. Saved replays are basically dead after every patch since they are a hack around the spectator system.
- taneq 7y ago
  Are you talking about LoL or Starcraft (whose replays also randomly stopped working after patches)?
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    In LoL's case it's explicitly enforced. Every time there's a patch, old replays go away.

jrockway 7y ago

My impression from playing games is that bugs don't kill the games, stopping feature releases to fix bugs kills games. Everyone just laughs at the bugs, even when they change the outcome of an esports matchup with millions of dollars on the line. In the end, the players keep playing and the sponsors keep buying ads, so it's no biggie. Looking through Blizzard's tech talks about Overwatch (they do exist!) is that they focus their testing on making the game fun. They do not say that this comes at the expense of thorough unit and integration tests, but from playing the game, my impression is that it does. Sometimes a patch will come out and the patch notes will be along the lines of "that ability didn't actually work in the last release, but hey we fixed it". Unit tests always notice abilities not working; playtests don't always pick them up. But unit tests will never make your game fun, and nobody will play a game that's not fun. So I'm guessing they don't work on that. (This video shows what happens when you uncover a lot of untested corner cases all at once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc) There are many software engineers that do enjoy bug-free software. Nobody cares because people are given passes time and again for bad software. Some bugs in a game? "OMEGALUL". Some credit card numbers stolen? "Oh, we're deeply sorry." The software crashes the plane from time to time? "Hey, we'll fix that in the 737 MAX v2." If engineers working on safety systems don't really care about bugs, why should a game whose competitors don't care either? It's just throwing money away. When Dota2 starts stealing LoL users because of their amazing bug-free client, then suddenly everyone will be working on testing frameworks. Until then, I expect some bugs in my games.

pingyong 7y ago
It should be noted that the client and the game are two completely separate pieces of software. The game itself certainly has a bunch of bugs, but those bugs tend to not be game-breaking, and are mostly "this doesn't behave as described" - for many of these things, it's not even clear anymore what the intended behavior even is. Until it's fixed, it's intended, for better or worse. But apart from that, the game is actually somewhat bug free. The client however, is just an honest to god embarrassment. It is legitimately terrible in every aspect that could possibly be terrible. It's slow, so slow that many things temporarily break on laptops, like opening rune pages in champion select. It uses more RAM than the game itself (?), it runs on like 4 different processes that interact in who knows what ways, but if the client crashes and you're trying to kill it that often (but not always) initiates a repair for no apparent reason. Often it doesn't even shutdown properly when you close it. On a friend's computer it one day just died and didn't start at all anymore, with no indication of what went wrong. He had to reinstall the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/epm9c8/all_the_things_that_are_wrong_with_the_league/ https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/epm9c8/all... It's a mess. And not only it is it a mess, it's an embarrassing mess because the client was always a pain point of many players, until they decided to completely re-write it in 2015. From the ground up. Clean slate - scalable, durable, lightweight, all that jazz. And now it's widely regarded as worse than the original client. If there was ever an example of how not to rewrite something, that would be it. Just a catastrophe on every level.