The two issues are unrelated. The issue with particles are simply an issue with your game loading, as Schism said in his comment. I've had a lot of these issues myself, although never quite to the degree mentioned here. I see lower quality spell and item icons, and blue blocks in place of particles. If you have a fast enough computer I recommend restarting the game itself. First, you want to alert your team by saying something along the lines of "BRB, need to restart to fix a bug." Then you need to quit the game itself. You have two options to do this. The first is to quit by opening the menu (Escape
) and clicking the 'Exit Game' button. This will display a prompt that warns you about the potential penalties of quitting. Click 'Quit Game' after the 5 second wait period, and the game will close. The other option is to pull up your task manager or force quit on Mac. This would be Control+Alt+Delete
on Windows, or ⌘+Alt+⎋
(Command+Alt+Escape
), on Mac. The simple act of summoning either of these from within the game will cause the game to 'crash.' From there, the LoLClient should bring itself up, and display a "Reconnect" button. Click this and you're done. Keep in mind, both methods of closing the game incur the same penalties, should you not reconnect before the game finishes. Also, no matter what the cause, you should always immediately move your champion once the game re-loads, in order to prevent being kicked by the LeaverBuster system. If your game can load within a few seconds, then it should be worth it to do this, however, depending on the glitch and your system, you may want to consider just dealing with it for the duration of the game.
As for the ping and disconnect issue, I've been having similar issues. The solution I've found is that my ISP is in fact dropping chunks of data packets. Because the game has not received any of it's packets in return, the system cannot update the ping. The game stops as it tries to reconnect, and will more often than not finish and re-establish connection before the "Attempting to Reconnect" icon appears. Call your Internet Service Provider, and have them double check the equipment they gave you.