In recent days we have all experienced massive crashes in the League's client. Riot have found a cause of this issue and will look into whether there are still enough Windows 7 users to keep the minimum system req on that level.
Upgrading CEF helped Riot to address a lot of client crashes, and the goal is to continue addressing the ones that impact players the most. We can all be very happy to see a 61% drop in crashes since 11.16 and a 38% drop from the average rate in 2021 so far, and Riot plan to keep driving those numbers down. In fact, early data from patch 11.18 shows another big drop in crashes! This is a huge win since there are a large number of client startups in any given patch.
The top culprit behind the remaining crashes seems to be machines running out of memory. After digging a bit deeper, Riot noticed that almost half of these out-of-memory crashes were on old PCs running Windows 7. While some players worldwide do play League on old PCs running Windows 7, which is the current min spec, Riot said that there will be an investigation to find out how many of these cases are bots, unlicensed/out-of-date copies of Windows, or other circumstances that aren't representative of regular players legitimately playing League.
Riot Games
There has been a significant decrease in the client's front-end memory usage during a single session. The front-end of the client refers to the visual elements that players interact with like buttons, text fields, and pretty much everything you can see and click on.
Memory in this context is sort of like attention—the more it's freed up, the more room your computer has to multitask or focus on what it's already doing. This means fewer client crashes and more memory available so you can watch LCS streams and queue up for ranked at the same time!
