Playing one game of League of Legends on PC is a multi-step process, and players are getting tired of it.
The current path looks like this: open the Riot Client, the multi-game hub that also shows Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, and 2XKO. Pick League. Hit Play. Wait for League‘s own separate client to boot. Queue up, lock in, and then the actual game executable launches. Riot Vanguard runs in the background the whole time.
That means a single match can involve four active pieces of Riot software.
The bigger issue is what happens when a step in that chain fails.
Players report pressing Play and getting nothing. Others say the game opens as a background task and never becomes visible. Some describe the League client freezing until it’s killed through Task Manager, or both clients needing to be closed before anything works. A few say they’ve had to log out of Windows or fully restart the PC.
There are also reports of the client opening half off-screen, launches taking several minutes, and updates forcing the Riot Client to reopen even for players using a direct League shortcut. Community-made shortcut tricks exist, but they don’t remove the launcher when a patch is waiting, and they aren’t endorsed by Riot.
Then there are the in-client bugs. One player says a champion ability tooltip got stuck on screen during ranked, covered the Lock In button, and cost them a dodge. There’s a setting to prevent that one, under Settings > General > Interface > Disable Champion Ability Tooltips. Others report friends lists taking ages to load, chat and invites breaking until a restart, and the rune editor freezing at the worst moment.
Heavier reports include mid-game freezes, stutters, full PC lockups, blue screens, and Vanguard errors that block a match from starting. One player with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D says they fixed their crashes by using Process Lasso to keep League off virtual cores. That’s a user fix, not a confirmed cause, and plenty of players say they never see these problems at all.
The sting is what comes next. Several players say crashes left them missing from live games or blowing through champion select, then getting hit with AFK penalties, dodge timers, low-priority queue, and long waits before they could play again. One says Riot Support reversed a low-priority queue once, then stopped replying. Riot’s automated systems act fast because a missing player ruins the match either way, and waiving every crash would be an obvious loophole.
Why League still has two clients
Riot began rolling out the modern Riot Client as a central launcher in 2021, back when the publisher went from one big PC game to several. It handles login, patching, and game launching for the whole portfolio.
League‘s separate pre-game client is older than that. It’s been rebuilt before, moving from Adobe AIR to a Chromium-based, web-tech interface, and it still carries years of layered systems. TFT‘s history as a League client mode also means League players can end up downloading TFT content, and some say uninstalling TFT through Windows removed League too.
Not everyone is angry. Battle.net, the EA app, Ubisoft Connect, and the Epic launcher all work this way, and some players point out the extra click costs a few seconds. Others actively prefer League‘s small windowed client, because it lets them use other apps while sitting in queue.
Talk of a future unified League client keeps circulating, helped by the Riot Client quietly picking up social features like invites and cross-game chat. Riot hasn’t confirmed a timeline for retiring the standalone League client.
