This question is for anyone and everyone: is a hot dog a sandwich? Why or why not? Please defend your position.
No way is a hot dog a sandwich. This is one of those over reductionist things, and frankly calling a hot dog a sandwich is an insult to sandwiches.
Who's going to win the Riot Race to Challenger? My vote is on Kent (sorry Mort).
I'm winning right now...Kent's stuck in D3!
u/Leelor, can you talk a bit about the process of creating the introductory tool tips and mobile onboarding in general?
Getting people into a new game can always be a tough challenge, and there’s lots of strategies people take. Were you able to base yours on initial user testing, or did you have to wing it and guess what people might need the most help to grasp? / how did deciding to include the team builder feature play into this?
Oh this is a great question, thanks for asking! Designing tutorials and onboarding is actually something I'm really passionate about; I could probably talk your ear off about it, but I'll try to keep it short.
The first thing most designers say is that you should always design onboarding for HYPE! Players must be EXCITED above all else! But that's not entirely true. The first thing to consider is the genre of the game when deciding how heavily to invest in excitement vs comprehension. In my opinion, the tutorial for an action RPG should probably be higher on hype than for a strategy game, where comprehension is truly critical for helping players learn to love the game. Having worked on the tutorial for Legends of Runeterra, and seeing that it was pretty successful in labs, allowed me to continue that approach of prioritizing comprehension for TFT because it's also a strategy game.
The easy part is making a list of things to teach. Game devs are always testing the ga...
Read morePORO LITTLE LEGEND PLEASE ??!!
SERIOUSLY!!! I WANT IT TOO RIOT MUMBLE
How does the team plan to keep developing TFT from the assets of League? Coloring units and reusing skins for different sets has been really creative but I'm wondering if running out of ideas is a concern for the future?
Not a major concern for the foreseeable future! Shoot maybe one day /u/Riot_Mort will have no other option but to release Foodfight Tactics :)
The shadow qss and the shadow zephyr seems like unstoppable object meets immovable rock. How did the team decide which works against which?
We didn't like how you could get a QS, put it on a carry in the corner, and solve ALL your problems. It was too easy to just do every game and led to a very large lack of counter play. So we decided that Zephyr got to be the one thing you always had to play around no matter what, leading to a deeper late game positioning play.
Quick and simple, if im in the last place, why do i have to fight with the one who is in the first place (sometimes with streak)?
is "kinda" unfair and sometimes estressfull
It's easy to index on any particular moment and think it may feel unfair, but the reality is you're probably facing that person because you haven't faced them in a while. It wouldn't be fair to 2nd place if they had to keep fighting them.
Our matchmaking isn't perfect, but generally will have you facing a wide variety of opponents over the course of a game in a way that is pretty fair, without being so rigid as to always face everyone in the same order every time.
Thank you for doing the ama.
I have friends ask me all the time why in the TFT tab in the client, there is only data about the pass and no data about the actual game.
Are there any plans in the future to add in more data about TFT in the client?
Kinda like how for League you can look at all the items, patch notes, and champion details. It'd be really cool if the TFT tab had more sections to it like all the other tabs in the client.
Great question!
We have talked as a team about wanting to improve the TFT experience in the client, and what you mentioned are some of the problems we would want to solve if/when we take on this project :)!
Will u plan to add chromas for victorious little legends for each tier? so far its pretty unsatisfing to get in masters+ the same reward as someone who played just 5-10games to get gold.
Its not that i just play for reward or so but it kinda feels meh at the end of the season..
And the emotes are also kinda meh, when u just can equip 4 at a time
if there would be some higher chromas for victorious skins i probably would use them instead of my beloved spacemolediver :D
Little Legends, probably not, but I hear your feedback on the emote part! We may consider additional rewards in the future or alternatives to emotes :)
This is not a question, so feel free to skip it if comments aren't allowed. (I kept it brief, I swear!)
I just wanted to express a little gratitude and say thank you for the hard work and effort all of you invest into this game. I also would like to commend you, as a team, for the dedication and time you devote to the players and to your involvement with the gaming community. I've been a gamer for quite some time, across many genres and platforms, and in the past it has been all-to-rare to experience the level of transparency that I've witnessed with TFT.
You are all crucial to the overall success, but I think Riot_Mort deserves an extra amount of recognition for making himself even more available, often donating his personal time to provide information and answers to players. (P.S. I apologize once again for the Discord pings...😉)
So, thank you all, and I hope to see you in a game lobby sometime!
<3 Good luck with your climb and we're so glad you're enjoying TFT
How many people total are on the TFT team? How many people does it take to make this game?
I'd say combined at least 200 years of developer experience
What is the best tft-related twitter post of all time?
Hi everyone at Riot, I love the game, and played from set 1, played LoL before that since season 2 or something.
First question: Do you consider ever doing a "cooperative" mode, something like the Dota Underlords one ? Like a 2v2v2v2v2v2v2v2 ?
Second question: how did the covid impact your production process ? Are you working remotely? Do you consider foreign developers now that remote working is more widespread ?
Last question: do you recruit game developers ?
Keep up the good work and see you on TFT or LoL, or runeterra !
Hi :D! Thanks for being such a long-term player!
To your first question, we have considered it :) New modes are something we have been thinking about a lot! and something to do with your friends is for sure on that list!
For your second question, it wasn't easy in the beginning, especially because it was when we were shipping mobile. Communication was hard at first, and meetings or habits we had built for creating things on TFT sort of got thrown out the window. But fast forward a few months and we are doing well! Some parts are actually even easier at home, while others remain a challenge. And in terms of developers not in the same timezone as us, we do that already! even pre covid :)! We have folks who help us around the world.
To your last question, keep an eye out on our careers page! The TFT team is hiring and growing!
I loved the Ornnaments, who’s idea was that??
Giovanni was the set lead of Fates and Festival of Beasts, and came up with the concept of Ornn giving powerful artifacts. From there the team helped with each individual artifact (For example I came up with Trinity Force being tons of 3's everywhere lol).
What are each of your favourite champions and/or favourite synergies in this set?
Brand is my favorite champ. I love the "Put a dot on everything" fantasy, and I loved Cassio in Galaxies.
And because of that, Abomination has been my favorite synergy. I love the way its a cool itemization puzzle figuring out how to get Sion the best items possible. Sadly it's been a bit on the weak side, but I was still able to use it a lot on my climb to masters.
I feel like there is this trend of resistance shred on 5 cost units coming to dominate the unit's kit - we saw this with Yone and we see this now with Garen and Darius. It seems like these units eventually get balanced around how powerful this effect is, to the point where the rest of their kit becomes almost totally irrelevant. (At least Garen is also a super tanky boi.) Additionally, the existence of these units makes items such as Ionic Spark, Last Whisper (and especially Final Whisper), and Dragon Claw less than desirable considering how finite your item pool is.
Has the team thought about removing the shred effect from these units entirely to allow both the units' design and all these impacted items to really shine? And if the answer is "yes, but we decided not to," why?
Yeah, there's some good learnings here. Shred needs to exist as a counter option for sure. You don't want to play a magic comp, see a single Dragon's Claw or 4 Mystic and go "Well its now impossible for me to win", both because that's just not good game play AND it feels bad.
That being said, the conclusion we're starting to realize is that AOE Shred specifically being so sharp is hurting the game a lot. Last Whisper being 70% is probably OK, while Garen being 70% is extremely limiting. Ionic spark at 40% for example is totally fine. In Patch 11.11 you'll see some changes to shred based on this logic.
1) Any plans on changing the 1/3 hotkeys to rotate vertically vs around the minimap?
2) Regarding the item layout that briefly appeared in PBE where they were in neat rows + could view in carousel but couldn't see opponent items, has their been any movement on that potential feature?
Thanks for doing this! How much do you have to keep the four cost carries in mind when you make a design choice, knowing that the majority of the metas will revolve around them?
A lot! A healthy meta usually revolves around the 4 cost carries, which is an intentional design decision. So a lot of the balance work can be getting them to a healthy level, then balancing around them in the other areas (5 costs slightly better, 3 costs slight worse, etc). Reckoning for example launched with 4 costs being a bit over tuned, which then warped the meta around them.
In league, you can easily measure frustration by looking at champion banrate (maybe in the context of pickrate and win% too). For example if something is banned often but has low winrate and is not picked regularly, it's safe to assume that people find the champion frustrating to pay against.
Without an obvious proxy for frustration like league has, how do you measure this in TFT?
Thanks for the AMA (and an amazing game)!
Honestly this is one of the reasons I set up Twitter and stream and discord and things. There is something to learn about the VOLUME of posts and comments. That being said, there is also a difference between usability frustration and game play frustration.
In the case of usability frustration, it can be really helpful to hear how many people are struggling with not being able to inspect the carousel when a new set comes out, as it can give us insight on how to prioritize the player pain being felt compared to other opportunities.
Gameplay frustration is different. Since TFT isn't direct control, a lot of "frustration" comes down to "I made a plan, and it wasn't effective and that was frustrating". The most common example of this is "I made a 3-item backline carry (Draven/Velkoz/etc) and it got CC'd over and over and I didn't get to play the game"...but the reality is TFT wouldn't be nearly as deep or interesting of a game if every comp was front to back DPS races. C...
Read moreHi! Is there a chance to have an ingame tooltip for all the spatulas combinations? By default it's only with pure/uncorrupted one, and i dont really like having a cheat sheet to tab to for this...
Yup, we are working on the design right now! The idea is to add more information to the trait tracker, in the form of additional tooltips. I can't promise a patch when it'll arrive, but we want to make this happen as soon as we can.
Aside from that, a longer term solution would be to expand the Team Planner (seen only on mobile) into a fuller-featured in-game wiki. This isn't something we are actively working on since it would be a pretty large body of work, but if this is something you all are very interested in, it would be really helpful to let us know!
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