League of Legends - Mac Client
I managed to get my hands on the Mac Client for League of Legends… and that’s about all I was able to do. The download and install went just fine. Updating AdobeAir was fine. Downloading the first two steps of the patches was fine. And then I hit the third step of patching. It eventually patched, but the time remaining kept switching between 0:00 and negatives such as -54:-37, and the negative times weren’t ascending or descending, but seemingly random times. Also, the progress bar started going from 33% at the end of step two, to 35% at the beginning of step three and then all of a sudden both bars looked empty and I was back down to 33%. I decided to let it sit and see if it would just give me an error message and self-quit on me, but it didn’t! Eventually I just checked back and the updater had finished. So I clicked that lovely large, orange PLAY button.
The sizing of the browsing client was a little weird, but my laptop screen is only 15”, although I don’t think that should matter. Anyway, starting up a game was fine. The load screen worked just fine as did champion selection. Then we got in-game. Luckily for me, I had queued with another person in the same room as me. We queued for a Co-op because I had no idea how bad “glitchy” meant the gameplay would be. Glitchy apparently meant really glitchy.
I’m not sure how else to describe it past my screen constantly “derping.” It looked like what I can only imagine an acid trip must look like. Occasionally I got lucky, and my screen would refresh for the most part, but I never really got to see what the champions looked like. If I managed to mouse-over a champion, or turrent, my mouse would change to the little sword or the outline of the champion/turret/minion would should up and that’s how I managed to target things, but my screen would not constantly refresh, nor would the colours stay the same. Everything turned neon and it honestly looked as though I had dropped my laptop and broken my screen. The health bars would “trail” along the screen, leaving an image of itself and show the path of the moving object on my screen. Enemy or allied health-bars did the same thing, so I could sort of tell where enemy champions were and where my allies were, but even when my screen refreshed I couldn’t see the actual champion.
I was laning with Akali, and all I could see of her was a little green glowy ball of light that looked like a Wisp from WarCraft III ((Wisps are night-elf ‘worker drones’ if you’re not familiar with WarCraft III)). Potion animations showed up just fine, too. I don’t remember if buffs appeared or not. Afterall, I did play most of the game with leftover images all over my screen because the couple times that my screen did refresh, it wasn’t for long.
The minimap, store, and all other UI graphics seemed to be unaffected by whatever gameplay “derping” was going on over the rest of my screen, so it was possible to navigate and get a general idea of where I was standing based off the minimap.
I felt badly for my team, but it was only a Co-op vs. Beginner A.I. so I didn’t feel too badly. Plus, I only died once… Granted I didn’t help all that much, but I didn’t feed at least. I got a couple kills and quite a few assists given that I could hardly see what I was doing. I kept checking-in with the other person in the same room that I was playing with and occasionally asked for a screen check, but it was marginally playable.
We did win that game, and I had made sure to let my team know before the game started that I was trying out the Mac Client. The end animation of “flying” to the enemy’s nexus and then the nexus exploding looked… indescribable. If I can, I will record that animation. It was epic in every sense of the word.
That said, I wouldn’t normal queue using a Mac Client and most certainly wouldn’t play any ranked games, but if you wanted to get your First Win of the Day bonus from playing a Co-op it’s definitely doable. A glitchy Mac Client, and one in production, is a lot better than no Mac Client at all.
I’ll try to either screenshot or record some of that epic gameplay to post so you guys can see what I’m talking about.
Now, currently, Mac-Beta is closed, so I will not supply any links to any downloads for it-please don’t ask-but that doesn’t mean you can’t still find it out there. No beta keys are required, you just need a League of Legends account.
If you would like to try out League of Legends you can go to the League of Legends website, or if you’d like to help me out, you can click on THIS referral link.
Forums for the Mac Client can be found HERE. There you can find more information and updates/potential fixes for the client.
