Come April 24, League of Legends’ legacy client is going off to live on a farm, but don’t worry, kids. It’ll be happy there, and you’ll get a brand new client that’s better and shinier.
Catch up with the latest doings in League of Legends with our notes for the developing patch 7.8.
Here’s the announcement, alongside a handy FAQ. Much like the Cybermen, everyone will be upgraded to the new client – whether you like it or not. Riot say the new client “has been built from the ground up to use newer technology that allows us to develop features faster” and that dropping the legacy client will cut development costs and enable them “to go full steam ahead on new client feature development”.
There are also a number of quality-of-life improvements:
- Pop the message window out, move it wherever you like, and resize it as you wish
- Choose to automatically hide mobile or offline friends in a group on your friends list
- Drag and drop to rearrange rune and mastery pages
- Shift and click to assign nine runes at once
- Change in-game settings from the client
- More control on sound settings tunings than in legacy
Riot go into more detail about the reasons for the change on their blog. They acknowledge that the new client isn’t perfect, that it might need some time to earn your love, and mention a few of your concerns that they will consider as they teach it to do better. These include the chat module covering up important buttons, forcing you to wait until the pick phase is over to choose a skin, and missing career stats.
Top of the comments thread is KuroFenikkusu’s concern about item sets, a feature that isn’t in the new client. Riot say they initially hadn’t planned on bringing it back due to low useage, but after feedback they “now intend to rebuild the item set creator tool”. They warn that it could take quite some time as development hasn’t yet started.