Greetings! My name is Andrew McVeigh, and I'm a software architect at Riot.

We're in the latter stages of re-engineering the League of Legends client. We're calling this the League client update. In this post, I’ll outline the software architecture of this update and provide some background to the choices we made by pointing out some of the limitations of the current (original) client. The journey to our final architecture has been technically fascinating, and I’m excited to be able to share it with you!

Hello all, Leigh Estes, aka RiotSchmick, here. I’m a software engineer at Riot Games, working in the Service Availability initiative. Today I’d like to discuss the beginnings of one of the products our initiative owns, the public Riot Games API, including why we built it and how we think we’re doing in light of those goals.

Hey, everyone! I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, a League of Legends gameplay engineer. Many Rioters in engineering focus on the delivery of awesome content directly to players—a couple of my recent favorite examples include the newest champion, Jhin, and the support item reworks. My team, on the other hand, works to make that process faster and easier.

We have a simple goal: to allow Rioters on gameplay projects to create twice as much content for any given LoL patch. That’s easy to say, but it’s a challenging task.

Playing League of Legends for years now, I’ve formed a meaningful network of social connections with other gamers around the world. Whether they’re friends from work, former classmates, or players I’ve been matchmade with, they all have an important place on my friends list. The ability to easily play with these friends greatly enhances my experience with the game. It would be disastrous if something ever happened to that social graph—trying to remember and re-friend all of my 200+ friends would be as bad as losing my phone and all of its stored contacts.

My name’s Cam Dunn, and I’m the Tech Director for League. I’ve always found it interesting how much we don’t know about human history simply because no one made a record at the time. Who first invented the hammer? Hammers with handles have been around for tens of thousands of years, but nobody knows who made the first one for sure. Sometimes, history feels like we’re collectively waking up after a drunken night out and asking, “My god, what did we do last night?”

League of Legends players collectively send millions of messages every day. They're asking friends to duo-queue, suggesting a team comp on the champ select screen, and thanking opponents for a good game. On July 21st of this year (I picked a day at random), players forged 1.7 million new friendships in the game—that’s a lot of love! And each time players send a message they trigger a number of operations on the back-end technology that powers Riot chat.

Greetings, skill-shot savvy summoners, Brian "Penrif" Bossé here to talk to you about some new technical underpinnings behind missiles. We've been rolling out a new implementation of missiles in the past few months (as mentioned in recent patch notes). If we did our jobs right, you didn't notice the change while playing.

Some games of League of Legends I know I’ll love even before the loading screen appears. Take last night, for instance. I logged in to find a couple of fellow Rioters available to play, and while we queued together in a pre-game lobby we had a great discussion that led to smart role choices and an intentional team composition. That connection and strategic communication doesn’t guarantee victory — we lost — but win or lose that’s my favorite way to start.