This is kind of a rant.
I just tried to play league with my friends since classes are now over and we wanted to relax. Queue installing it on our machines. I've only played a few times before so I figured it'd be a relatively simple thing.
Let's walk though the install process.
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Download the installer off the site. Unhelpfully the site lists a bunch of different mirrors and defaults to EU West, as I live on the West coast of the united States, it's not a particularly good default. (Riot, why offer a choice at all? Just look it up via geoip, or use a CDN which will do it for you automatically).
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Launch the installer and download the client. This takes under an hour and is about 1.4GB in size.
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Click the launch button to trigger downloading the actual game. My girlfriend and I didn't realize this until we checked back later. (Riot, why don't you automatically start downloading the actual game?)
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Wait several hours while it downloads 13.5GB. Interestingly, the one machine that was fully updated only has an install size of 5.7GB. (Riot, why do we have to download way more than is actually installed?).
My theory is they follow the world of Warcraft approach of releasing a base game and then hundreds of smaller patches. This is terrible UX for new players.