User blog comment:Alartan/League of Legends as software, according to CapoFerro/@comment-1330314-20150528172321/@comment-26442788-20150529054422

I'm not sure how much detail I can go into with respect to the out of game client, but I do know that we are working on it very actively and I'm excited about what we're doing there. As far as priority, the out of game client is definitely toward the top of the list. I can't promise you any features or delivery dates here, however, as those are still somewhat in flux.

The shop is a separate application and is updated independently of the rest of the client. You're right that the UI has not been updated in some time. While I don't work on that team, I do know that a major part of the work they do has been on the back end, scalability of the shop. Large portions of the backend of the shop (maybe all of it?) have been rewritten to be much higher performance over the course of the last year or so. As a result, they have spent less time on the UI. I don't know if they are planning to update the UI in the near future, however.

My work is on scaling the back end services of LoL (and future games, for when we have more than one game). For the last year, the team I was on wrote cluster automation software that automatically schedules processes across a cluster of services based on resource availability and application requirements. If you're interested, it's similar to Kubernetes: https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/kubernetes, just tailored to our needs. Now that that software is reasonably stable, I've shifted over to a new team to focus on scaling the build server cluster with similar tech so we can enable teams to build, test, and deploy their projects without relying on other teams. There's a long way to go on this project, as the original build cluster was designed with a much smaller company in mind, so my team is in the process of writing tools and processes to make such independent ownership possible.

The end goal is that all new features can get in front of players faster. If another feature like Team Builder is being built, they'll be able to write their software, build it for every region around the world, automatically test it to ensure it works as expected, get compute resources in the needed data centers, then deploy their software to all the production datacenters at once without ever having to wait for another team to complete a task.