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.
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
What is the best tft-related twitter post of all time?
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.
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 moreI want to talk mid set updates. Are the changes made typically targeted at units/traits the team considers problematic? Or is it for other reasons? I've enjoyed both of the ".5" sets more than the previous iterations, but it sucks seeing awesome units like Set4 Jhin or Set3 MF go. Thanks for all your work!
It's much less about units or traits that are problematic. When we start developing the mid set, its likely too early to tell what was problematic long term anyway.
The primary goal of a mid set is to create a good moment for players to consider coming back (ranked has reset, and there's a bunch of new stuff to play with), so our goals are often around making sure the set feels different. In Galaxies, we didn't quite achieve this since Jinx carry (as an example) still dominated so games felt pretty similar. With Fates, we ended up swapping out a lot of the carries, which let to them feeling very different.
And yeah, it can feel bad if your favorite carry rotates out, but our hope is there is something new you can play with as well.
Hey y'all! Thanks for doing this. Question, do you think we'll see any adjustments to unit traits in the near future?
This could just be my opinion, but Nidalee and Riven feel backwards on Skirmisher vs Legionnaire. Additionally, Skirmishers could use a true ranged character (I wouldn't consider Nidalee one because she converts after ~3 seconds) and once she's in cat form, AP benefits her more than AD but she gets Skirmisher scaling for AD, so she just feels clunky and I think Legionnaire fixes this by giving her attack speed.
Legionnaire seems to make her item build path a bit more logical.
Just curious if there have been thoughts about this for her and potentially others.
Typically we try to avoid major trait shifts like this unless they are absolutely necessary, as the learning cost to players is extremely high as well as the domino effects it has to the rest of the trait system.
The obvious swap here would be Riven becomes the Skirmisher and Nidalee becomes the Legionnaire...however that leaves Skirmisher with ANOTHER melee champion which they already struggle with having too many, and Riven's spell would likely need to be redesigned since getting more AD would make her spell unsustainably powerful.
If we ABSOLUTELY had to make a change like this we would, but I'd also ask the team to retro how we ended up in such a dire situation where it was necessary to make such a large change.
Im not sure how feasible it would be to implement but I think it would be fun to include some of the old sets as a temporary game mode. I know this is not a question about set 5 but the set is great and I have nothing to say about it, keep it up!
The honest truth here is that there is a LOT of work to be done to bring back an old set. Even just basic stuff like getting it up and running again and updating some of the code, then there are the more complex questions like "Should the items be the same as they were for that set?" If yes, thats a ton more work. Should Launch Set board size be used? Etc. So it is a TON of work to get right.
Then assuming we did all that, the question is how valuable is it? I think playing Launch Set or RoTE for a weekend or something sounds awesome, but we see this with other games like HS or MTG that the appeal very quickly loses its luster. We also likely wouldn't have ranked queues for multiple sets at the same time, and we know players really lose motivation without ranked.
All that being said, it's still on the wish list. Lots of players didn't start TFT until Galaxies or Fates, so giving them a chance to try the old stuff would be fun. We just need to find the right time to ...
Read moreRead moreI've been wondering about the spat items. With the previous sets, they all had their own unique item icons, but this time they just have the trait's icon itself. I can see why that'd be desirable when there's effectively double the spats, but I was wondering- will this system continue for future sets when there's not so many spats?
Also, I was wondering what the idea behind revenant spat is. It's effectively just a GA, isn't it? It's not bad of course, but what's the point of putting it on someone when you can just give them a GA?
In that same line, there's a couple synergies that don't have higher, normally-impossible tiers while others do. For instance, Revenant only goes up to 3 with there being 3 revenants and a revenant spat. Abomination goes up to 5, but there's 4 abom units and the abom spat. What's the decision behind this? If I remember correctly, in earlier sets (set 3 at least, I think?) Mort said you try to have a breakpoint if you could reach one wi...
We think the new "Emblem" system helps a lot with initial readability and learning the system, and especially with 16 spatula items. So we will likely be continuing this system moving forward with every set. We know its not perfect right now (Looking at you Dawnbringer vs Nightbringer), but things like the colors we added near the end of PBE should help it out a bunch.
For Revenant Spatula, it's a slightly more complex GA since you need the trait to activate it AND it comes with the 30% damage increase which can open up some cool strategies with champs who can lifesteal it back up.
Finally for the extra chase traits, we didn't want to overload the set at launch, and were finding things like Ironclad 4 were confusing players asking "How do I get this, there are only 3 champions?" To be honest we probably should NOT have shipped Abomination 5 at launch. All that being said though, or plan is to add these once the set has been live for a bit, looking to be likely aroun...
Read moreThis is a very bad strawman argument. The point wasn't about the average probability of such a drop or how often it happens, but about how it is fair for other players, that don't receive such a good drop (in the same round or match, of course). You're basically not giving a proper answer as to why such a drop is fair or balanced. You're basically just saying "If a opponent gets such a lucky drop, you just have to accept that you didn't get one too, because it happens so rarely, that it is insignificant."
It may suck less, because it's rare, but it still sucks full scale, when it happens.
Perhaps you could simply change it, so that every player gets a great drop, instead of just one player. This way these drops would remain super fun, but also fair. The way it is right now however is like giving one single player at the first carousel a Full item, while the others just get one component and then saying they simply have to accept it.
I know using big words like "strawman argument" can help try to make a bad argument sound valid, but what you're arguing for is a different game.
TFT is closest to things like Poker or a Magic the Gathering Draft. They are not "fair" by design, and the skill expression is measured in how you use what you are given. In such a system there are going to be moments where someone else had an extreme moment of luck (perfect drafts, hit on the river, etc). Doesn't mean you played bad, but also doesn't mean "Every game should give everyone the exact same thing".
Same for me, rewards like this are destroying the balance of the whole game. Like, what should you do against this teamcomp? Correct, nothing!
Already saw ppl getting 3 Spats and stuff like this from neutral rounds
In any individual game, luck will play a factor. Over the course of many games, consistency and skill play a much larger factor. When this happens to an opponent, your goal is Top 4.
Something we need to work on making clearer is that Top 4 is A WIN, not just 1st place.
BOW DOWN TO YOUR ITEM OVERLORD
Get it...? Bow?!
LOL
Good write up!
Have we got the mode for you
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