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Why is League of Legends Client Not Opening on My Mac

Published: May 3, 2021
League of Legends Not Opening on a Mac Computer

There comes a time in every player’s life when they have dealt with all of their commitments and are ready to play League of Legends. Unfortunately, for some reason, the game is telling you that it won’t be that easy for you today and will refuse to run. There have been reports from so many Mac players in recent years telling that their device suddenly stopped opening League of Legends, so we will look at some of the usual suspects and offer some solutions that you can try on your own!

The Internet is Usually to Blame (or your ISP)!

Please don’t give us those eyes ! It is a prevalent problem and a significant cause behind League of Legends not opening. There have been days where I had blamed my system for being terrible when in fact, it was my internet hiding behind the curtains! A good way is to check your internet speed first. The best site to check on your current actual speed is Speedtest.

If your speed is acceptable, we can conclude that it’s not the Internet causing the problem and leave out the poor soul from our further investigation.

The League of Legends Servers may be Down!

If your internet was fine then it’s time to check the other network problem we might be facing here: Riot Servers! It is definitely something that happens once or twice a year for a longer duration but there have been many instances where Riot Games servers crashed for a few minutes. We have got the perfect way for you to check if everything is working fine on the backend with a very simple command. You need to open your Terminal and enter the following command:

ping -s 500 104.160.131.3

If you get a response from the server then it means everything is in order from Riot’s side and they aren’t the one at fault for your game not opening.

Application Settings

The first thing we can do here is to log out of League of Legends or restart the whole application. It has been a meme but believe us sometimes closing and opening again does wonders for god knows what reason. If the problem persists then a good idea would be to check if there is a lockfile activated. You need to search for applications through your finder and then select League of Legends. A simple right click will allow you to locate the lock file option. You can remove that and try launching your game again.

None of that worked. The League Client is Still Not Opening on Mac. What now!?

It seems we have reached the part where we have to deliver the bad news. It is highly likely that something is wrong with your system at the moment, and it needs to be looked at by a professional. If you want to avoid such problems once and for all then we recommend you to install Windows 10 as the secondary operating system in your devices. It will not only ensure the game runs smoothly but will also give you an opportunity to try other games!

If problems persist despite that then it is highly likely that your device needs an upgrade, and you are trying to play the game on outdated hardware. It won’t cost you lots of money if League of Legends is the only game you are trying to run as any MacBook released after 2017 will run the game without any problems but be careful to not have Catalina as your operating system. Catalina doesn’t really work well with League of Legends and even if you have the game installed prior to updating your OS to Catalina, you are bound to run into problems.

If you are having problems even installing League of Legends on your Mac or Macbook Air, check out our other guides.

Images Courtesy of Riot Games.