We all know the feeling of meeting up with our friends on voice chat, all ready to hard carry that Ranked Flex ladder, just to find out that there's a big update and you have to wait to patch your game. Well for the next few patches you may want to leave your computer updating in the wee hours, because Riot announced that patch 8.6 up until 8.10 will likely be heavy updates.
But rest assured, you won’t need to relearn how to play the game like in pre-season, or most recently in 8.4 with the AP items change. These upcoming heavy updates won’t touch the mechanics of the game like balance changes in champions and items, but will be more on the data that the LOL client deals with. There will probably still be balance changes, but they will be minor, so the data fixes will take up the majority of the update.
We can split these data fixes into 2 groups. The first and most heavy data fix (around 2 GB) will consist of a full upgrade of the audio engine. Since League of Legends started, it has worked with a third-party audio engine, and similar to what Riot did with the new client a little more than a year ago, they will start to work with an audio program controlled by them, and for that they need to re-patch all audio data. Fortunately, we can expect far greater audio quality in the future after this massive update.
The second group of data fixes will take place between patches 8.6 and 8.8, with the possibility to carry on until patch 8.10. It will consist of what they call a Content Efficiency update, which is the system that controls and manages all data for the game, and also all the tools in the code used by the creative team to alter the design and model of champions, skins, spells, the map, basically everything we see in the monitor.
The Content Efficiency team said that they were trying to slowly update all these components of the game, putting very small changes in each patch, but to finish completely it would take them more than a year, so they decided to implement a few heavy patches and change all champions and components in a few weeks, because it would mean the improvement of the game in the short and long term. To improve the Content Efficiency data in League of Legends basically means to change all the aforementioned elements (champions, skins, powers, etc.) and turn them into WAD files, so they can be managed by Riots own Game Data Server more efficiently.
Maybe the only thing we should be concerned about is the fact that most of the skin generating programs will stop working, as part of the engine change. But considering all the new content Riot releases with each patch, and having better graphics and sound management within the game, I would say the extra patching time is worth the wait.
