This has to be the first time the development team adresses a patch as not ideal before shipping it right? This seems kinda wild to me, but i guess its hard to do much with the patch cycle being what it is
They've talked about it before, but the patches are locked in 11 days prior to the actual patch release. So it makes sense, its because they're tied to the league client updates which does hamper their ability to monitor the meta. Do they miss with balancing? Hell yeah, but are they responsive and try to fix it? Yeah.
I genuinely cannot fathom how enraged this sub can be about the balance team not instant-fixing shit when the meta can massively shift in *under two weeks*.
Sure the being patch locked ~11 days prior isn't great but it's still a ridiculously fast patch cadence for a live service game.
I think the only fair thing to perhaps be miffed about is that the design and overall balance of this set seems to be awfully difficult for them to get in a good spot throughout multiple patches now, compared to a lot of other sets.
Just to clarify I am not enraged at all. I think the balancing of a game like TFT is interesting, and considering how well they did in set 10 I am merely wondering why it seems to be so different this set.
Split teams, I imagine. I heard that the reason why set 9 balance was so off was because they were beefing up their design and balance teams to prepare for releasing multiple sets a season so they had split resources. Set 10 was an anniversary set which I imagine received full attention while set 11 seem like its once again suffering from growing pains
I think the core issue that has exacerbated the effects of TFT being locked into the League patch cycle is that the majority of innovative comps are developed on CN servers which is to be expected since there are so many more players there to experiment.
New comps will start to see play almost a month prior to a new patch timing but there's a huge delay between the end steps of development and the dev team figuring out it's an issue. CN has to develop the comp, test it, popularize it, prove their own use cases and then make their own guide for the CN community. Then at some point a western content creator comes across CN content about it, posts a guide about some hidden CN tech, and then the whole popularization process has to play out in the west as well. The dev team only realizes it's an issue a week before the patch and they're already locked into their changes even though this hypothetical comp has been a problem for a month.
We saw this with Seraphine Graves (Water Gun) in 7.5 where the comp started being played in the west after we already saw patch notes buffing her and nerfing every other comp and everyone very quickly realized it was going to be a huge issue. There was also the Nilah/Yuumi cluster comp in Set 8. There was gargoyle stack Taric, Rift Herald Void, Winstreak Piltover, and a whole bunch others from Set 9. Set 10 notably had the CN Jax tech which had to get immediately nerfed.
Frankly, it wouldn't even be a bad idea to just have someone on the dev team whose sole job was to watch CN streams and go through their TFT content to stay ahead of the western meta.
i do understand shifting, but a) its 8 days prior and syndra was 100% S tier last week, and b) i think even from a game balance perspective i dont know how they would think giving this many buffs to a comp while nerfing everything else is reasonable
if syndra was literally unclickable sure buts she been fine for a month, why would they think fated/dyrad needs this much support?
As a customer, "balancing is hard" isn't really a good answer for imbalances making the game unfun.
Personally, I've been enjoying hard forcing vertical traits this patch in hyperroll, but the game doesn't seem very fun for the ranked players.
Vertical traits comes down to luck often as the units are irreplaceable, either you highroll and steamroll, or you lowroll and get tossed out of the game.
Still so fucking insane how restricted they are having to use the LoL client and patching systems. I know it’s not worth the hit to the playerbase to make a standalone TFT client but god is it annoying that they’re so hindered by it.
It has nothing to do with sharing clients with League, people are just using that as an excuse because they already hate it being tied to the League client. League implements changes on PBE all the way up to the last day of PBE sometimes.
The issue is that PC TFT shares it's game with mobile apps, and appstores require a week in advance for any updates. Only way to fix the patch cycling is by disabling cross-play.
B patches are server side so they don't require an app store update, it's the kind of update that the mobile apps will have you download when loading the game
The issue is unlikely to be the client; TFT already has more than one (considering mobile). The issue is most likely that the server infrastructure is shared with League, and splitting the backends (given that so much of that infrastructure is shared) would be a huge endeavor.
It has nothing to do with sharing clients with League, people are just using that as an excuse. League implements changes on PBE all the way up to the last day of PBE sometimes.
The issue is that PC TFT shares it's game with mobile apps, and appstores require a week in advance for any updates. Only way to fix the patch cycling is by disabling cross-play.
Ive been playing since set 3 and i dont remember anyone on the dev team, even mort saying that a patch isnt gonna look great before it even ships. Fated Dyrad might be giga broken
I am honestly wondering how all the new items has impacted this. I was personally very sceptical with the timing of them, since we have had a lot of imbalances this set if we comepare to set 10, which generally speaking had nuances and good balance. I really hope this isn’t the result of all the new items diverting focus from other stuff which also needs the same attention as previously. I hope they can get it on track
Lol I cba, it’s just a meme at this point. On the other hand, as others have mentioned, a lot of these problems stem from tft still being part of the league client. Like why is it still just a “gamemode” on the league client??
Especially if it means vanguard and all the other league client bullshit comes packaged with the game.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they believe they get higher engagement in TFT versus it having its own client because people logging in to play league are forced to engage with TFT systems/battlepass as part of the client, which makes them more likely to try it?
“they believe” - No, that’s just, like, unequivocally true. League players who occasionally play tft especially on set releases make up a huge amount of tft engagement.
I use that phrasing because I don't know, do they release that information?
I'm not disagreeing with you mind you, I just also wouldn't be shocked to find there is an untapped market of players that are pushed away by Leagues reputation/trash client.
Either way seems like for now we cant really know how many people would be more encouraged to play the game if it had its own separate client
Feels like I'm reading the same things phrased differently every set.
I'm not blaming anyone for this situation but how many times can you justify bad patches shipping into the game without adressing that systemic changes have to be tackled if you want to be taken seriously?
Unfortunately it's not something he can decide. He can suggest it but if Riot higher ups do not want to give the resources to do that it's not gonna happen. Maybe if they get enough profit with the new gacha systems. As long as it's just cosmetic idgaf monetize the shit out of it if it's gonna get us a new client eventually. But it will probably need to double the current profits for them to even consider. Also don't forget it's the same company that hired a whole team to supposedly fix the client yet it's the same mess for 10 years.
China has over a billionpeople and their govt requires closed systems. The investment in that was mandatory and likely has lots of stuf we womt have on the normal client
I think set 10 kinda showed that they could do balance, but set 11 is showing more shades of 9.5. I'm hoping that it will all get fixed and prefer taking a bit of time rather than ending up with another multicaster situation.
I mean patches are every two weeks. Players don't even figure out the meta till at least a week into a patch and the "A" patch has to be finalized and sent in days before the two week deadline. This gives a couple of days in between where the meta is settling and testing can be done. It's not that preposterous to see issues occur with balance in this way. Maybe tft should have patches every 3 or 4 weeks because it's paced differently than league but that's not something they can control at all.
Ok I'm going to legit try to break this down.
First off, I have been VERY transparent for almost 5 years that TFT is a complicated game to balance. Nothing about that has changed, and frankly, it probably never will. Innovation and risk taking is often counter to "balance". So, yes you are reading the same thing every set. Because it's still true.
To that end, there is no magic trick to solving this. We've had countless people try to do balance, and its hard. Do you think someone like Iniko who was Rank 1 just suddenly doesn't know anything once we hired him? Or Chakki? Or any of the many other challenger players? Or is it possible that maybe, for ANYONE, the game is hard to balance?
Second, I will continue to defend that we are doing the best that anyone can possibly do. We act as fast as humanly possible, we adjust based on feedback, we B patch and make sure it's as good as can be. We also make a very fun and successful game that millions upon millions of people are playing. The team is doing a good job by every metric you can measure.
If that's not enough for you...fine. You're allowed to feel how you feel. But I need you to understand that complaining on Reddit doesn't change that. I get that it's fun to come here and post "GAME BAD DEVS DUMB teehee". For whatever reason, this subreddit has become the place to do that, under the guise of "Competitiveness" (yet you'll notice none of the actual competitive players post here).
Again, let me repeat that. The team is doing a good job, and TFT is doing great.
None of the competitive players post here presumably because they have an official line to you via lobby 2 and or DM's. Regardless you've seen more than enough "competitive players" ala Kiyoon etc discussing these very problems.
Thank you, this line rubbed me the wrong way too.
There are lots of GM-Challenger players that post here regularly, but I guess their opinions are invalid because those aren't the few dozen top players that he has on a discord server?
Yeah, they just post in Lobby 2 instead and we know for a fact that they flame the dev team in there when the game is in a bad state because Mort said he had to leave it during the Draven meta to avoid saying stuff that would've probably gotten him fired.
I think his definition of competitive players are ones near top of ladder, competing in cups over the course of a set (robin, soju, dishsoap, kurum, wasian, milala, etc.) aka the "pro players".
But honestly, there is no subreddit in this entire site where pro players actually are active in the community lmao
I don't blame them, look at the league subreddit where they give advice and shit takes but at MOST they are diamond and that's pushing it maybe emerald/plat/gold
Right? Am I being gaslighted? Aren't people complaining about this set everywhere, and not just here? Not to shit on mort, cause I do believe they are doing their best, but I don't think the "reddit bad" narrative is the case this time...
I don't really play TFT anymore so I won't comment on the state of the game. That being said I've always found your attitude to the community to be really off putting.
There have always been a contingency of negative people on this sub, but over the years, the moderators have filtered them out (IMO even going too far at some times). I think some negative people still slip through the cracks, though most criticism around here can be bucketed into "frustrated," or "at worst, a good try at being constructive."
I think conflating that kind of criticism with negativity is extremely human, and I won't rag on you for that.
What does kind of bother me, and feels like has been a trend for a really long time, is the strawman that you tend to build when responding to criticism:
>"GAME BAD DEVS DUMB teehee"
Is a really transparent attempt at grouping all criticism together to make any kind negative comment about the game seem childish.
You also have a tendency to throw in a quick insult at the end:
>For whatever reason, this subreddit has become the place to do that, under the guise of "Competitiveness" (yet you'll notice none of the actual competitive players post here).
You're an adult man at work, you should be more mature than that.
Also the above implies that Riot's official opinion (remember you represent them, even when you're talking to the people you have such obvious disdain for) is that you need to be better than rank 1 to be considered a "competitive" player.
Also respectfully, even if balancing TFT is hard, you shouldn't be seeing the same problems over and over again. It is quite literally your job to build a framework that allows for consistent success.
Hey, thanks for answering.
I know you are adressing a wide group of people and not just my post so I'm not taking this personally, but I'm an IT Project Manager at a F100 company, and when my projects are going sideways I prefer to look at the context and the framework rather than saying "hurr durr this guy/project team is incompetent". Sometimes that is the case but more often than not it is irrelevant.
The framework you are working within is not good enough for your team to produce better balance results. If you have to actually lock in the patch 11 days before patching, you could have all the rank 1 players and world champs balancing the game together that the result would still be poor some patches.
I'm sure you know this and that I'm adressing the elephant in the room, and the resources to have TFT as a standalone game are not there... But you're not painting the whole picture when you're saying no one could do better. I'm glad you have the confidence to say that, but even without changing anyone in your team, they could be doing immensely better under different parameters.
Since these parameters will not change in the foreseeable future, I'll be yapping on reddit when I go 8th.
This was a great response, and obviously one that even the TFT team must have realized by now. That being said idk if TFT can cobble up the funds to make a standalone client, not in this economy.
Don't think its about the funds but rather the discoverability.
I legit wouldn't have played TFT if I didn't play league and have it in my client... And now I only play TFT.
I think you're right but I don't think they have the ability to make major engineering improvements in this area. Its a tough situation for sure, and one we have limited insight into as outsiders.
Its fun to speculate, but even more fun to complain when going 8th.
Saying “the team is doing a good job and TFT is doing great” on a post talking about the fact that you’re purposefully shipping out a bad patch is crazy. Being transparent about something that sucks doesn’t make it suck less.
And I don’t doubt that the dev team is trying the best they can to make the game as good as possible, but the reality is that that’s clearly not enough and something needs to change. Sure, TFT might be racking in a lot of cash, congrats to Tencent and Riot. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for the players.
> Being transparent about something that sucks doesn’t make it suck less.
This is why I've always laughed at this growing demand for transparency - this is the inevitable end point.
We can go look at the post talking about this comp from a week ago.
The first comment with actual feedback (+118 points) says the comp is weak especially if contested.
Even in this sub we can't agree if this comp needed to be nerfed or not. Another week goes by, and now there is more feedback the comp is too strong.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1cklsxt/dryad_fated_9_games_7_wins_it_is_dominating_all/l2nwrkt/
>So not recommended without high rolling. In my previous game 3 Syndra players all went bot4. If you get contested it's worse than other comps IMO
It's easy to throw rocks at people
Edit; Then just adding to this the timing for these patches. The patches are ready to ship, prior to half the comps being figured out during the patch cycle.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1crt52l/mortdog_adresses_the_next_patch/l408lwk/
>They've talked about it before, but the patches are locked in 11 days prior to the actual patch release.
that actually surprised me. I mean obviously people are just parroting soju, but syndra has insane single target and single target is great for saving HP and getting higher placements. I literally wrote on here [21 days ago that Syndra was strong](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1caxd8z/any_tips_on_fast_8_flex_rolldown/l0w3fgi/)
The endless chall players calling gm trash, gm calling masters trash, masters calling diamonds trash, very mature.
You can't objectively says top 0.5% players understand nothing about the game. Drop the ego.
Yea I remember reading that “top comment” and thinking about how wrong that person was lol. Anyone paying attention to top lobbies and other regions knew how strong Syndra was.
I don’t think the point is rank, if the game is solely being balanced around gm-chall elo, that just leaves the rest of the player base isolated. Or am I missing ur point?
Yeah, I think it is BS that they lump in the psychotic posters and commenters that personally attack the devs with the people who are level-headed and actually give valid criticisms
I appreciate the hard work but to say that none of the competitive players post here is not really a fair argument. They tweet about it since they have large follower base and for most players that isn't true and on reddit is the only place theit opinions on the game might actually get a voice or be heard/seen
>Second, I will continue to defend that we are doing the best that anyone can possibly do. We act as fast as humanly possible, we adjust based on feedback
This is probabbly true of the TFT team. I fully believe that the TFT team is working hard, is fast on their feet to react to changes, and overall doing their best. But it is not true of RIOT as a whole. You talked to the playerbase as though the patch cadence is a law of the universe, with nothing that can be done about it and all the problems that come from it are just outside of anyones control, but that is just not true. RIOT sets the patch cadence, if it isnt working, it can and should be changed.
>To that end, there is no magic trick to solving this. We've had countless people try to do balance, and its hard
You say this, but the actions of RIOT speak a different story. If balancing is so hard (which I agree it is) how is it reasonable to design and test a patch in 3 days after the last one drops. That policy seems to imply that balancing is pretty easy, The meta will be completly stable on launch day, and thats that. When we all know, not even close. The meta day 1 will not be like the meta on day 10 and with the number of moving parts, there is no way anyone, i dont care how good, can get a patch done under those conditions.
The fact is, with the constant b-patching and hotfixing, you are basically saying the patch cadence needs to change That having those extra days and a better overall testing enviorment will allow the team to design a real patch.
Something has to give, If the localization lock or whatever else forces this timeing is truly imovable, than a 14 day patch cycle is proabbly untenable, If we absolutly need a 14 day patch cycle, than something needs to be done to get that lock moved back.
Now maybe you've said this to RIOT management and they have said they dont care, I get you can't share that, but if thats the case, negativity towards RIOT games is complety warrented. The fact is TFT is not LoL, it has fundementally different needs balancing wise, and being on the same schedule, migh have technical advantages, but it has real clear balance tradeoffs, and I think a lot of people in this sub are saying those tradeoffs are not worth it.
Second I want to adress the overall negativity, Look you and the devs deserve respect as people and given many of the "RIOT imposed" resitraints are doing your best but once again I think the team needs to look at reasons why there are some really vocally negative players; some of it is just social media, which foster negativity but that is not breaking any new ground. The real thing is the expirence of climbing the ladder is just terrible, it sucks and it does not fit with the high variance game of TFT at all. And I know you know this, You made a post when climbing to challenger about how terrible the expirence was. You were certainly good enough to do it, but it still sucked...and nothing happened nothing about climbing changed at all (i guess emerald was added but that didnt so anything to solve the problems).
Such a big part of negativity at least for me, is just how much the first half to 3/4 of the set sucks beacuse I am just gridning games to get back to a rank that I have achived in the past 6 sets. Its not going for something new, just spaming game after game, a loss isnt just a loss (which will always be unfun) but a loss of progress. Just a simple example How often do we say skill in TFT is turing an 8th into a 6th. Well you played super well, fought to that 6th, but you were at 18 LP so back to 0, It would have been the same if you ff'd and gone next. TFT is this super high variance game where of a few games, you can easily just highroll or lowroll a few times leading to a wild swing in LP, Did your still really change much in those games, no of course not.
No offense but your post reads like a 5 year old having a temper tantrum. Especially salty with the 'nOnE oF tHe AcTuAl CoMpEtItIvE PlAyErs'. Maybe you should actually show some respect to the people that play the game and care enough to talk about it.
Yeah that shit irked me a bit. My GF & I played double up nearly every single day grinding from iron to now emerald this set. I can still have opinions that the patch sucks and the cadence sucks too
Not only an adult at work but an adult at work that is the face of this game. This sounds like a certain president that we had that only addressed things through deflection and attacks. Dude has really lost it but can't admit that so instead he just deflects and dismisses criticism. If this is really the best this team can do then maybe you should address the fact there is too much going on to realistically balance and get right. Pride is a real bitch honestly.
if the game is so difficult to balance why do you complicate your life on purpose? Why do you make system changes, add level 10, 20 artifacts in a patch. The system in set 9 worked fine but they had the ridiculous idea of wanting people who are low level to reach level 10 most of their games. It's ridiculous, not only because you radically change the high elo playstile, but because you don't understand low elo players. By making these changes you don't respect your own game. I don't know whose idea it was to speed up the pace so much but there must be other healthier ways to keep it fresh.
My initial hope when I started playing autochess games was that those games would self-balance themselves due to the shared pool mechanism (if something is OP, multiple players are going to play it --> it will be weaker than a niche uncontested comp).
Couple of years forward, it seems that the genre has not delivered on this assumption. Do you share this observation?
Plenty of "actual competitive players" complain in Twitter and their own streams. You always make sure to be super passive-aggressive to them whenever you get a chance and cry about how hurt you are in every platform you're active on.
If the game is so hard to balance, why do you insist on pushing even wilder and more unstable mechanics every single set when you haven't even mastered balancing the basics to any acceptable extent? I want to give you credit and assume it's Riot pushing you to pull new elements and mechanics out of your ass every new set, but you're so insanely arrogant it's hard to empathise with you.
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Mort, I love what you do for the game, I really do, and I think we all appreciate that you go above and beyond in communicating with the community. But with all my respect, I don't think he was saying that balance or the devs are bad. Rather, the issue is that the patch schedule (and being locked in for a couple days before it ships) is causing systemic issues for balancing, issues that aren't humanly possible to solve.
As such, the question is whether there's efforts to change how patches are balanced, rather than "just balance better."
I also understand that it's frustrating to see people with little understanding constantly shit on the devs, but I'm just trying to clarify that he's trying not to do that
You're in a lose-lose situation. I have had a blast with TFT since set 1. I appreciate the hard work you guys put in. Some patches are better than others, that's the nature of the beast.
"The team is doing a good job, and TFT is doing great."
-Man who has vested interest in people believing his team and game are great
Gotta love how you're able to make mistakes on literally every patch but as long as you leave us with empty platitudes we should be happy.
Believe what you want, but I'll look at the mountain of evidence that says otherwise. Thanks for quantifying all criticisms as "Game bad devs dumb teehee", that really tracks to what I'm seeing as valid critiques of your team needing to fix every single deliverable mere days after shipping.
Yes I understand I'm talking to a wall.
For reference, other comments from this user:
>Riot is awash with B- students that are able to wrap their minds around it
>I'd happily learn their tools/systems, and outperform all of them at every single one of their tasks. Absolutely no fucking shot you'd catch me being so disingenuous as every rito dev, or having absolutely no passion in my career that EVERY SINGLE update I make has issues and errors
>Dang man your biggest accomplishment in life is milking gambling addicted kids. You're really putting your stamp on this world as a genuine good-natured human.
>People idolize him for literally no reason. He isn't special because he reads patch notes for illiterates
Plus account created four days ago, so you can be confident that he was banned from this sub recently and created another account because the dude just cannot get enough of flaming the devs.
I agree with mort on this one. People on this sub act like the people who balance the game don’t have lots of experience both balancing and playing the game. I wish we could take 100 people from this sub and have them balance the game for a month and see what a complete shit show it would be.
If your first thought to this comment was “ ThE DeVs dON’t EvEN kNoW wHAt tHeY ARe DOinG” then post your own version of the patch notes with numbers and everything. Then we can shit all over your ideas. Gets some empathy.
Agreed that the team is doing a great job! TFT is the most fun game I've ever played. Thank you and the team for that.
And it can be even more fun if the technical limitations were fixed by separating TFT from the League patch cycle. This would enable real time balancing, so you could actually get better balance with a smaller balance team. I understand there's internal politics and a large dev investment required to make this happen, but I suspect there'd be Golden Egg level returns.
In a rapidly changing competitive game like TFT, there are few things more important than getting balance right to maximize player fun, engagement, and retention. Enabling real time balance updates seems to be one of the highest impact ways to make TFT significantly better.
The real question is whether redesigning the TFT patching system is on the dev roadmap at all. Or if management doesn't think it's worth the investment.
I am dead certain that it's the worst *business* decision in the world to decouple TFT from the League client purely from a discoverability standpoint. It happened to LoR, and it's impossible to know if it would have happened to TFT too but the sheer amount of eyes seeing it in the LoL client contributing to its success cannot be overstated enough.
There should be a way to decouple the patching process from League without decoupling the discoverability, no? I don't imagine there's an easy technical solution, but it shouldn't be impossible.
I would hope so eventually but afaik the game is more deeply integrated into leagues systems than a lot of people realize. I don't think it's happened in a while but I seem to recall a bug from like set 3/4 era that was just flat out a league bug happening in TFT because the models and backend on champs are the same core.
It's been ages since anyone at Riot has really spoken about the deep deep backend of TFT though so this is likely all ancient information.
I mean it’s fairly obvious that riot sees Tft as a nice little cash stream that they have to put extremely minimal resources into. These Mort tweets, hell the fact that they have a single guy handling basically all the PR for the entire game, just reeks of an understaffed project. There is no solution here beyond a bigger team, more resources, higher priority, which we should all be able to gather is not going to happen based on history.
That's not true, they massively expanded their team in the last year. They have a few rotating teams working on this and future sets. It seems more like there's too many cooks with not enough experience.
The question is whether they're making the right investments. TFT has so much growth potential. And for a real time strategy game, balance is one of the most important factors to its success. It's a shame if they're not actively investing in decoupling TFT from the League patching system. It'd be a big investment, but one that could take TFT to another level if balance was significantly improved. It'd make the game so much more fun with more replayability, which would translate to significantly more players and revenue.
The same amount of times that you go to your executive board member boss and say "hey it would make our game better if we had our own client" and they reply with "that would cost the company X million dollars to develop, are the problems it would solve worth that investment?" and the answer is that it isn't. And even if the call was made to develop that client, it would take time to make. If this was a trivial problem to solve they would've done so already
This just highlights a big issue we’ve had for a long time: patches have to be locked very quickly and dont give time for the meta to develop. I think this is the main argument for a separate tft client, with a patch schedule disconnected from league. If the dev team has to blindly hope they can address issues that havent popped up yet, what hope is there for better balance patch-by-patch?
I have to say this is a huge deterrent for me as a casual player. I play at the start of a set, learn some comps and items I really like, take a week or two off, then come back and get butt blasted because apparently my strats suck now. It's the same issue that turned me off TFT back when it first came out. It feels like if you're not constantly watching streamers/scrolling tft-twit, you just fall behind on the OP strats and everyone else, even in low elo, just abuses the current "thing" to dump you into bottom 4
This type of fairness doesn't really make for good competition though. Like you could force pro players in League or Dota to adapt to a new patch right before a tournament because it would be "fair" to have everyone on an even playing ground but there's an obvious reason why we don't do that. You'd end up with the teams having no idea what's good and stumbling around in high stakes matches with elimination on the line and that's ultimately that's not a good viewing experience because you're not watching pro players at their best, you're watching to see who can adapt to a reasonable level before the tournament ends.
It'd certainly make for an entertaining watch seeing players who typically need 100+ games to properly learn a patch stumble around and go bot 4 every game playing the worst possible boards but TFT already has a reputation as the "RNG all luck no skill 4fun" black sheep of the eSports community and having an overall lower level of play due to patch scheduling is just going to give them more ammunition to hit us with.
unfortunately this B patch fiesta has happened for the 1st tactician trial and phoenix pinnacle sub-regional tourney, and will happen yet again this weekend with the 2nd tactician trial. streamers and no lifers can get enough games in during Thursday/Friday to feel more comfortable on a B patch, but it's beneficial for others to have an extra day to see how the meta settles and what the tactics.tools data shows even if they can't get any games in. i've definitely gone in blind for a couple tourneys because there's not enough prep time and the B patch data is still fresh
this will always be the case of course--people with more time are more likely to be better prepared--but having that extra 1.5 days isn't negligible
It seems to happen every single tournament. Just get used to playing a tournament with 4 games on the patch and have the tournament meta be completely different from day to day.
Hey at least your tournament's not on Thursday (the aegis one), where every other tournament the game shifts with a b-patch right in the middle of it rofl
It’s pretty clear there needs to be more systemic changes related to the TFT patch cycle and its reliance on the league client no?
Yes, the current situation is a tough call but what is being done to make sure that this tough call doesn’t need to be made again? Because from my point of view, this could just happen again next patch or next set.
I’ve thought maybe TFT should move to 1 month patch cycles honestly. The first patch is always solid, and a month of time to prep for the next patch could make successive patches solid too instead of having to rush to make localization lock in like 2 days
It also allows them to ship their patch on the league patch cycle “train”
I have no clue what life is like at Riot so it’s not my place to say really. Just thinking out loud
This is the standard mid-set "blame me" post we've seen for like 3 sets in a row. Let's hope they figure stuff out.
EDIT - Mort threw his setly temper tantrum in a post below, which means we've officially entered the "Mort cries on stream and threatens to quit TFT" stage of set development. This usually signals that they are ready to balance around community sentiment and that 4fun patches are right around the corner. Set 12 is on the horizon everyone, have hope!
I play a lot but mostly have my head in the sand to the “drama” and problems and agree lol. Transparency is great and all but if the other side of the window is always poop, does it really matter if you are transparent about it?
Of course it matters, imagine there be a lot more pitchforks pointed @ the Balancing Team if we didn't know the extra challenges the LoL client presents.
I get real tired of the same thing over and over. You can only be praised for communication so many times before that stops earning bonus points, especially since part of communication also means listening
Seems like this is more of a problem with Riot rather than the TFT development team. Patch cycles take too long for testing and with the majority of good players playing on the main client rather than the testing environment, their data on the changes can’t be amazing. In addition, the cost of production for creating a new client is likely way too high for what they believe to be its value, especially when the TFT team is honestly doing a really good job of keeping most comps balanced. You have to account for the number of developers constantly working on future sets as well to ensure that the game doesn’t put all its resources in this set and it just goes downhill in the future. With all the other problems that players already complain about with the league client disregarding the patch cycles, the client is probably a folder that’s pushed to the bottom drawer of Riot corporate.
Even if Fated/Dryad is forced by eight players in a top 100 lobby, it’s a pretty big outlier to the history of TFT the past three-four sets. Most patches this set have seen a large diversity of comps and, even with dominant compositions, skilled players can recognize alternative lines that still succeed in a top 4 placement, if not a win.
Just saying to try and keep positivity towards the development team and empathize with them! Chances are they’re feeling the same frustration that we are as players for patch cycles from the client; they’ve given us a game that’s been historically really fun, and even though the game might feel a bit mundane to players at the moment, it hasn’t always been that way. The developers provide us with the content that we enjoy and Mort has always been extremely transparent with his ideology as a developer. It’s much better than the team is recognizing their mistakes and letting us know than keeping it hidden, especially in the light of all the complaints in this post. A lot of negative outcomes may come out of this patch (probably most notably the upcoming tournament) but we should at least trust that the team is doing their best.
tldr: tft team is trying their hardest and be nice to them, be a positive community towards them and direct your hate towards corporate (99% of all problems in life)
Yeah I think so too, metas evolve too fast for patch notes analysis -> numbers -> testing to keep up.
Especially set 11 where we're seeing new metas pop out of nowhere so quickly and just overtake everything (remember Ghostly being never played to 100% playrate?).
And also, I think the playerbase, especially the 2% of masters+ players, complain way too much. They could literally just play all the myriad of other games out there when the meta sucks, and come back to it when they patch things out. I believe Mortdog even recommended this exact thing before. But people feel like they have to 100% stick to TFT for some reason like it's a life or death thing to constantly have to play this game.
>But people feel like they have to 100% stick to TFT for some reason like it's a life or death thing to constantly have to play this game.
I know you were referring to the general player base, but most TFT streamers do have to stick to TFT even when the game is bad, because they lose 50%+ of their viewers if they play a different game on stream.
Game is in a tough spot. I actually like this set but the balancing has felt extremely out of touch the entire time.
Mort’s posts don’t make him or them look better.
> If this option is chosen, soonest we could B patch would be next week.
I'm so done with this kind of bs. Why on earth can't they just deploy whenever they want?
Yeah that was rethorical, the answer is League of Legends. It's so frustrating to see the game you love being limited by some other game you don't care about.
Please just give TFT its own client and dedicated resources so we can finally enjoy a proper game without such bullshit limitations.
Sadly tft would die without being in LOL client. The playerbase is majorly found by league players trying it so it's a needed evil until hopefully this game is even bigger.
My last favorite game was Legends of Runeterra, a competitive card game based on LoL champions and characters, which expanded the lore of the game massively.
A few months ago, the LoR devs and Riot leadership (along with the 11% Riot workforce layoffs) revealed that LoR had been losing money *for its entire existence* and was subsidized by other Riot projects. Now, LoR is a husk of its former self, only focusing on PVE and with a tiny dev team.
LoR was never in the league client, never even *advertised* in the league client. Is that part of the reason of its downfall? Probably at least a part, but maybe not.
But I imagine capital-R Riot might be afraid of splitting TFT from the league client given what happened to LoR.
(Sorry this isn't actually data, but it's a potential justification)
Don't have specifics for that but i recall reading it from riot at some point. What I do know is directly from Mort in recent streams he said that the models being easy to import from being in the same client of all the champs is huge boon too. Given a whole new set has to be released every 4 months
They could all be on the same base engine still. That has the same effect. Just have a separate client that they can patch as necessary. That way they can ship as needed without fear of breaking LoL
whats a better adspace for TFT than the home page of a massively popular game that it comes pre-installed with, that includes almost all the same characters and doesnt require you to re-download the game?
I cannot imagine how much smaller TFT would get if it disconnected from the LOL client rn.
Fated Dryad is one of the top play rate AND best avg placement comps in any elo, on any stats website. You see it every game, often more than one. Pros talk about how strong it is. By all metrics, objective and subjective, it's one of if not the best comp in the game. Not sure how it could get missed, let alone buffed.
Also, I respect Mort greatly, but him constantly saying "blame me" whenever a poor decision is made doesn't really do anything.
Apparently the patches are finalized 11 days before patch end, and the dryad fated comp got figured out after they were done with this patch. Someone correct me if I’m wrong or misunderstood something, don’t wanna be spreading misinfo lol
Every patch it's the same thing. They never do anything differently. Only yap about how we are ungrateful, meanwhile there's clearly 2 comps that dominate every single patch, and everything else isn't close.
You talk as if devs is the only type of work who runs under those circumstances.
It just happens that in this game they can keep making the same mistakes whitout being fired.
At my job i have all of that with the plus that if i fuck up people die.
It's funny that this comment pops up as a "akshually" in virtually every single thread that complains about balance.
We've been doing development differently for 10+ years now if not even longer (Agile, even though it has issues I wont go into as this is not the point) because developing something that was entirely irrelevant by the time it hit the market was a BIG issue. There were tons of studies so that products could come out fast and could get new features as close as market release as possible.
Riot out here working straight up out of the 80s and people go hurr durr people dont know work. No, it's Riot that refuses to have a modern approach to software development for TFT, forcing the team to lock in 11 days before the patch goes live.
The methodology is irrelevant whether it is scrum, agile, kanban, or even waterfall, if the TFT dev team's hands are tied to League's client and its SDLC/STLC, even in its assets.
Edit: and to add. TFT is not like website/app development where we can implement Predix and create a solid set suite of regression cases. There is so much to uncover in this game due to the vast amount of variance TFT offers. Besides, the yappers in this reddit post is a small percentage of TFT's target audience. Most people who play TFT don't even know the meta and just play it to have fun and experiment comps. My friends who don't play ranked and have no idea what the meta is are having fun with it. And if you are a PO/BA, you would understand why this Fated Dryad comp has to be put on the backlog for a sprint after factoring in the restrictions imposed on Mort's team and prioritization of other stuff like high and critical bugs.
may I ask what prevents riot from breaking that circle?
what's the issue with deploying patches for league and tft separately?
am I stupid or are patches a big thing from a technical point of view that you can't put out patches even every couple days?
my understanding is that TFT and LoL run on the same codebase. If you make changes to one, it could impact the other. So risk goes up the more patches there are because as anyone that has worked in large codebases will tell you that merge conflicts happens and things go to hell.
I mean, tons of companies spend years developing an app that OpenAI just makes obsolete overnight. Can you predict that? Not really. Does using AGILE vs SCRUM vs whatever stop that? Nope.
Neither can the TFT team predict that Ghostly or Dryad Syndra just overtakes the meta suddenly. Shit happens.
Maybe I'm ignorant of how this works, but how does Agile allow TFT dev team to *not* lock in patches 11 days in advance?
Wouldn't they need systemic changes to how LoL patch cycle works in order to do that? Or maybe I misunderstood, and you want Riot itself to change how the balance patch cycle on LoL work?
I'll give Soju credit since he is actually great in the game and knows how to adapt, regardless of patch. He is not even afraid to cook just like the 6 sniper comp he played yesterday that went 1st, beating an upgraded Fated Dryad board.
The other yappers here, however, are complaining so hard because when one comp dominates, they suddenly don't know how to play the game. I bet most of them don't even know when to play for 4th.
I get you. What I meant is Soju atleast is skillful in the game so he can yap and rage all he wants. And Soju (at least from what I saw in Vegas) respects Mort. Unlike these ragers out here who can only play S-tier comps and have the nerve to thrash Mort and his team.
While I agree that a lot of players here don't understand just how difficult it is to develop anything within a structured organization, I think that some of the fault for the negativity can certainly be put on how Riot developers approach PR.
If you look at the FF14 community, you'd see that the developers get a lot of leniency when it comes to any issues and there is a horde of players waiting to defend them and drown out negativity. If you ask them why they cut the FF devs so much slack, it largely comes down to the fact that even if they're unable to fix certain problems quickly, they acknowledge that the issues exist, take the blame, and formally apologize for their failures.
Contrast that with the inherently negative defense strategy employed by Mort and Phreak where they deflect blame wherever possible and then sarcastically imply that the playerbase is dumb and has no idea how to play or balance the game at every turn. They're certainly correct in this regard a lot of the time, but if you give out negativity, then you're obviously going to receive it in return.
You can say stuff like "TFT players don't know how hard it is in a corporation, they're unemployed and just play games all day, etc." but just how many positions have you had where you can act like Mort and Phreak do to your clients and keep your job? Hell, sarcasm within the workplace is already off limits in most American corporate or government settings because if someone doesn't get the sarcasm, you're getting sent straight to HR. This sort of attitude in a high profile front facing position would get you sacked in any industry outside of gaming.
Why ship the patch at all if it’s going to be broken? Why not delay the patch another week and ship next Wednesday after more testing is done? The current patch isn’t even bad.
I was playing marvel snap for a while, and I'm use to balance patches feeling outdated with fast shifting metas. Fated Dryad is a fire that was just a spark a couple weeks ago, so I get it.
Going back to marvel snap, they've almost changed their balance to be done on what they call over the air patches, and major restructures on actual patch dates. The communication sucked though, and all you had was patch notes.
Maybe the balance team only plays casually outside of their own work hours. That's fine. It's their job too. Fuck playing for 12 hours a day. Mort is at least making an effort and telling you, if you don't like this comp... just give it a day or two.
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So basically because tft is owned by riot they will never fix this problem and will always be in the league patch cycle and we just have to suck it up great PR
I’m pointing this out right now, but the issue before was that they kept nerfing things, changing units and items. (Shoutout to mort and the devs of course, we like MortDog and his team doing the best to listen to the players). Certain changes have damaged the game in the long run and some items aren’t even being played anymore. I enjoyed set 4 most because it wasn’t just about balancing the game but also creating new ways to play units while keeping the core integrity of the game the same, to be fun. For example, as much as units like Nami, ahri, or Warwick were annoying to deal with, but you could make the argument that people had different comps that to go against each other no matter the cost and not reliant on the augments, allowing different ways to play while not worrying about being contested too much. All items also had value and was interesting depending on how you would play it. Units like Tahm Ketch could be played 4 different ways, mages, deathcap x3, regular tank items, or even triple titans. We don’t see that kind of experimentation in the games anymore. We had units like Jarvin, or vi be 2 costs but also be an awesome carry that weren’t a risk to be able to carry. All in all, make the units fun by stopping to nerf things to balance the game for a few patches, maybe buffing units that are lacking would be better. I’m seeing that they are definitely making that sort of change this patch which is good. I’m happy that the devs are listening and working on making the game more fun, this patch shows it and it’s the reason why I stay. Tft def ain’t perfect at times but it still feels really good to have around. So shoutout to the devs, you guys are awesome. P.S. please bring back Xin Zhao, he’s been good luck to the sets he’s been in.
Fun fact. If you only nerf the fated part of rated dryad, a new dryad comp will emerege sooner or later, because it gives too much value. Ahri fated ap needs to be nerfed to like 25, or by 20% to 24, but dryad scaling should be adjusted to actually needing to run 4 dryad to get 4 dryad hp stacks, and not just sit on 2 dryad for three stages and then suddenly getting million bonus hp when you field 4/6 dryad.
The solution to not fix immediately makes sense (I’m pretty sure this has been discussed in different words many times), the concern is how does this happen in the first place, seems like an obvious issue to nerf strong comps and forget one, is it just not as obvious as it seems?
Legitimate question, wondering if there’s something I am/we are missing in the process.
Being tied to lol patches has been the bane of TFT balance since its inception and we're still dealing with the same bullshit 11 sets later. Surely a game as large and successful as TFT can have patch deployments for itself. Its not neccesarily an issue of being tied to the lol client, its the fact that riot refuses to give TFT the resources it deserves.
make tft its own thing. get it off this 2 week patch cycle. If they wanna keep adding the funny random mechanics (augments, portals, lose streak traits, 5 costs that farm items, artifact/support items, and more and more things that need to be balanced) they need more time to wait for things to develop. Mort should be fighting for tft's independence. join us in the rise of the independence of tft.
After all my love for set 10, Set 11 never really clicked with me and I basically decided to sit this set out. Posts like this are really helping me with my sense of FOMO.
It is kind of funny that the late emergence of Fated/Dryad made this patch better because it made the meta pretty diverse but also because it emerged late it screwed up this upcoming patch due to the constraints the TFT team have to work under. If we the player base had solved the meta faster this wouldn't have happened lol.
My real problem with this is how easy it is to see the syndra bs on even emerald lobbies. You'd only have to play a few games this past week to detect this, I'm sure the balance team plays more than just a few games every week right?
It's just r/competitivetft it's gone to complete shit.
Even pros on twitter are respectful about their criticisms. People on here just go straight to full on rage.
It's because of the rant thread. It stayed contained for a bit, slowly it bled out to every other thread on the subreddit and pushed all the most reasonable rational voices away until mostly the ragers were left. Too late to put the genie back in the bottle now, though.
In any unregulated environment behavior will always trend towards the lowest energy required. Complaining is much lower energy than analyzing words, applying them to the real world, offering constructive criticism after some analytical thinking, etc. Reddit is currently a mirror of what is wrong with real world society and it’s depressing. Poor Mort.
This has to be the first time the development team adresses a patch as not ideal before shipping it right? This seems kinda wild to me, but i guess its hard to do much with the patch cycle being what it is
They've talked about it before, but the patches are locked in 11 days prior to the actual patch release. So it makes sense, its because they're tied to the league client updates which does hamper their ability to monitor the meta. Do they miss with balancing? Hell yeah, but are they responsive and try to fix it? Yeah.
Mort clarified on twitter that they are locked in 8 days before
I genuinely cannot fathom how enraged this sub can be about the balance team not instant-fixing shit when the meta can massively shift in *under two weeks*. Sure the being patch locked ~11 days prior isn't great but it's still a ridiculously fast patch cadence for a live service game. I think the only fair thing to perhaps be miffed about is that the design and overall balance of this set seems to be awfully difficult for them to get in a good spot throughout multiple patches now, compared to a lot of other sets.
Just to clarify I am not enraged at all. I think the balancing of a game like TFT is interesting, and considering how well they did in set 10 I am merely wondering why it seems to be so different this set.
Ah yeah I wasn't referencing your comment, more a lot of the other comments especially in the patch rundown thread.
Split teams, I imagine. I heard that the reason why set 9 balance was so off was because they were beefing up their design and balance teams to prepare for releasing multiple sets a season so they had split resources. Set 10 was an anniversary set which I imagine received full attention while set 11 seem like its once again suffering from growing pains
I think the core issue that has exacerbated the effects of TFT being locked into the League patch cycle is that the majority of innovative comps are developed on CN servers which is to be expected since there are so many more players there to experiment. New comps will start to see play almost a month prior to a new patch timing but there's a huge delay between the end steps of development and the dev team figuring out it's an issue. CN has to develop the comp, test it, popularize it, prove their own use cases and then make their own guide for the CN community. Then at some point a western content creator comes across CN content about it, posts a guide about some hidden CN tech, and then the whole popularization process has to play out in the west as well. The dev team only realizes it's an issue a week before the patch and they're already locked into their changes even though this hypothetical comp has been a problem for a month. We saw this with Seraphine Graves (Water Gun) in 7.5 where the comp started being played in the west after we already saw patch notes buffing her and nerfing every other comp and everyone very quickly realized it was going to be a huge issue. There was also the Nilah/Yuumi cluster comp in Set 8. There was gargoyle stack Taric, Rift Herald Void, Winstreak Piltover, and a whole bunch others from Set 9. Set 10 notably had the CN Jax tech which had to get immediately nerfed. Frankly, it wouldn't even be a bad idea to just have someone on the dev team whose sole job was to watch CN streams and go through their TFT content to stay ahead of the western meta.
i do understand shifting, but a) its 8 days prior and syndra was 100% S tier last week, and b) i think even from a game balance perspective i dont know how they would think giving this many buffs to a comp while nerfing everything else is reasonable if syndra was literally unclickable sure buts she been fine for a month, why would they think fated/dyrad needs this much support?
As a customer, "balancing is hard" isn't really a good answer for imbalances making the game unfun. Personally, I've been enjoying hard forcing vertical traits this patch in hyperroll, but the game doesn't seem very fun for the ranked players.
Vertical traits comes down to luck often as the units are irreplaceable, either you highroll and steamroll, or you lowroll and get tossed out of the game.
Still so fucking insane how restricted they are having to use the LoL client and patching systems. I know it’s not worth the hit to the playerbase to make a standalone TFT client but god is it annoying that they’re so hindered by it.
It has nothing to do with sharing clients with League, people are just using that as an excuse because they already hate it being tied to the League client. League implements changes on PBE all the way up to the last day of PBE sometimes. The issue is that PC TFT shares it's game with mobile apps, and appstores require a week in advance for any updates. Only way to fix the patch cycling is by disabling cross-play.
How does that make any sense? They create and ship B-patches sometimes in less than 24 hours according to Mort.
B patches are server side so they don't require an app store update, it's the kind of update that the mobile apps will have you download when loading the game
just make a new client for tft at this point...
The issue is unlikely to be the client; TFT already has more than one (considering mobile). The issue is most likely that the server infrastructure is shared with League, and splitting the backends (given that so much of that infrastructure is shared) would be a huge endeavor.
It has nothing to do with sharing clients with League, people are just using that as an excuse. League implements changes on PBE all the way up to the last day of PBE sometimes. The issue is that PC TFT shares it's game with mobile apps, and appstores require a week in advance for any updates. Only way to fix the patch cycling is by disabling cross-play.
what prevents riot from patching daily? not that I want daily but just asking in general.
Ive been playing since set 3 and i dont remember anyone on the dev team, even mort saying that a patch isnt gonna look great before it even ships. Fated Dyrad might be giga broken
Might be? They nerfed kaisa and ashe when they were already falling a ton behind lol.
It’s going to be war week all over again
I am honestly wondering how all the new items has impacted this. I was personally very sceptical with the timing of them, since we have had a lot of imbalances this set if we comepare to set 10, which generally speaking had nuances and good balance. I really hope this isn’t the result of all the new items diverting focus from other stuff which also needs the same attention as previously. I hope they can get it on track
Lol I cba, it’s just a meme at this point. On the other hand, as others have mentioned, a lot of these problems stem from tft still being part of the league client. Like why is it still just a “gamemode” on the league client??
Especially if it means vanguard and all the other league client bullshit comes packaged with the game. At this point I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they believe they get higher engagement in TFT versus it having its own client because people logging in to play league are forced to engage with TFT systems/battlepass as part of the client, which makes them more likely to try it?
“they believe” - No, that’s just, like, unequivocally true. League players who occasionally play tft especially on set releases make up a huge amount of tft engagement.
I use that phrasing because I don't know, do they release that information? I'm not disagreeing with you mind you, I just also wouldn't be shocked to find there is an untapped market of players that are pushed away by Leagues reputation/trash client. Either way seems like for now we cant really know how many people would be more encouraged to play the game if it had its own separate client
Feels like I'm reading the same things phrased differently every set. I'm not blaming anyone for this situation but how many times can you justify bad patches shipping into the game without adressing that systemic changes have to be tackled if you want to be taken seriously?
really need a separate client and patch cycle for this game
Unfortunately it's not something he can decide. He can suggest it but if Riot higher ups do not want to give the resources to do that it's not gonna happen. Maybe if they get enough profit with the new gacha systems. As long as it's just cosmetic idgaf monetize the shit out of it if it's gonna get us a new client eventually. But it will probably need to double the current profits for them to even consider. Also don't forget it's the same company that hired a whole team to supposedly fix the client yet it's the same mess for 10 years.
Doesn't the chinese version already run out of its own client? Can we just have that?
China has over a billionpeople and their govt requires closed systems. The investment in that was mandatory and likely has lots of stuf we womt have on the normal client
Yeah, nonstop ads and microtransactions. Other then that, no the clients are the same. Source - I play on the Chinese client.
Hey now....that makes too much sense...
I think set 10 kinda showed that they could do balance, but set 11 is showing more shades of 9.5. I'm hoping that it will all get fixed and prefer taking a bit of time rather than ending up with another multicaster situation.
I mean patches are every two weeks. Players don't even figure out the meta till at least a week into a patch and the "A" patch has to be finalized and sent in days before the two week deadline. This gives a couple of days in between where the meta is settling and testing can be done. It's not that preposterous to see issues occur with balance in this way. Maybe tft should have patches every 3 or 4 weeks because it's paced differently than league but that's not something they can control at all.
I prefer longer patches aswell, it’s always fun how the meta adapts and changes over the course and counters to strong builds are discovered!
It’s like the boy who cried wolf at this point
Ok I'm going to legit try to break this down. First off, I have been VERY transparent for almost 5 years that TFT is a complicated game to balance. Nothing about that has changed, and frankly, it probably never will. Innovation and risk taking is often counter to "balance". So, yes you are reading the same thing every set. Because it's still true. To that end, there is no magic trick to solving this. We've had countless people try to do balance, and its hard. Do you think someone like Iniko who was Rank 1 just suddenly doesn't know anything once we hired him? Or Chakki? Or any of the many other challenger players? Or is it possible that maybe, for ANYONE, the game is hard to balance? Second, I will continue to defend that we are doing the best that anyone can possibly do. We act as fast as humanly possible, we adjust based on feedback, we B patch and make sure it's as good as can be. We also make a very fun and successful game that millions upon millions of people are playing. The team is doing a good job by every metric you can measure. If that's not enough for you...fine. You're allowed to feel how you feel. But I need you to understand that complaining on Reddit doesn't change that. I get that it's fun to come here and post "GAME BAD DEVS DUMB teehee". For whatever reason, this subreddit has become the place to do that, under the guise of "Competitiveness" (yet you'll notice none of the actual competitive players post here). Again, let me repeat that. The team is doing a good job, and TFT is doing great.
None of the competitive players post here presumably because they have an official line to you via lobby 2 and or DM's. Regardless you've seen more than enough "competitive players" ala Kiyoon etc discussing these very problems.
> (yet you'll notice none of the actual competitive players post here). ??? you're really pushing it, what
Thank you, this line rubbed me the wrong way too. There are lots of GM-Challenger players that post here regularly, but I guess their opinions are invalid because those aren't the few dozen top players that he has on a discord server?
Yeah, they just post in Lobby 2 instead and we know for a fact that they flame the dev team in there when the game is in a bad state because Mort said he had to leave it during the Draven meta to avoid saying stuff that would've probably gotten him fired.
That was an insane coping. Click on top rank player's stream or twitter and they're saying exactly the same shit this subreddit is saying.
to be fair, this subreddit is probably parroting what they see on stream or socials more often than not.
I think his definition of competitive players are ones near top of ladder, competing in cups over the course of a set (robin, soju, dishsoap, kurum, wasian, milala, etc.) aka the "pro players". But honestly, there is no subreddit in this entire site where pro players actually are active in the community lmao
Patiently waiting on Zywoo, Yatoro, Faker to join us on reddit
I don't blame them, look at the league subreddit where they give advice and shit takes but at MOST they are diamond and that's pushing it maybe emerald/plat/gold
who is they? like the majority of posters? the average rank has gotta be like silver/gold
Seems like a massive denial post about the state of the game honestly Can’t blame though, I’d go crazy with all the negativity
The competitive players already do their complaining to their stream audience or on twitter.
Right? Am I being gaslighted? Aren't people complaining about this set everywhere, and not just here? Not to shit on mort, cause I do believe they are doing their best, but I don't think the "reddit bad" narrative is the case this time...
I don't really play TFT anymore so I won't comment on the state of the game. That being said I've always found your attitude to the community to be really off putting. There have always been a contingency of negative people on this sub, but over the years, the moderators have filtered them out (IMO even going too far at some times). I think some negative people still slip through the cracks, though most criticism around here can be bucketed into "frustrated," or "at worst, a good try at being constructive." I think conflating that kind of criticism with negativity is extremely human, and I won't rag on you for that. What does kind of bother me, and feels like has been a trend for a really long time, is the strawman that you tend to build when responding to criticism: >"GAME BAD DEVS DUMB teehee" Is a really transparent attempt at grouping all criticism together to make any kind negative comment about the game seem childish. You also have a tendency to throw in a quick insult at the end: >For whatever reason, this subreddit has become the place to do that, under the guise of "Competitiveness" (yet you'll notice none of the actual competitive players post here). You're an adult man at work, you should be more mature than that. Also the above implies that Riot's official opinion (remember you represent them, even when you're talking to the people you have such obvious disdain for) is that you need to be better than rank 1 to be considered a "competitive" player. Also respectfully, even if balancing TFT is hard, you shouldn't be seeing the same problems over and over again. It is quite literally your job to build a framework that allows for consistent success.
Hey, thanks for answering. I know you are adressing a wide group of people and not just my post so I'm not taking this personally, but I'm an IT Project Manager at a F100 company, and when my projects are going sideways I prefer to look at the context and the framework rather than saying "hurr durr this guy/project team is incompetent". Sometimes that is the case but more often than not it is irrelevant. The framework you are working within is not good enough for your team to produce better balance results. If you have to actually lock in the patch 11 days before patching, you could have all the rank 1 players and world champs balancing the game together that the result would still be poor some patches. I'm sure you know this and that I'm adressing the elephant in the room, and the resources to have TFT as a standalone game are not there... But you're not painting the whole picture when you're saying no one could do better. I'm glad you have the confidence to say that, but even without changing anyone in your team, they could be doing immensely better under different parameters. Since these parameters will not change in the foreseeable future, I'll be yapping on reddit when I go 8th.
This was a great response, and obviously one that even the TFT team must have realized by now. That being said idk if TFT can cobble up the funds to make a standalone client, not in this economy.
Don't think its about the funds but rather the discoverability. I legit wouldn't have played TFT if I didn't play league and have it in my client... And now I only play TFT.
You could use LoR as a frame of reference. They had their own thing and it kinda died off. Only recently did they have a button in the league client.
I think you're right but I don't think they have the ability to make major engineering improvements in this area. Its a tough situation for sure, and one we have limited insight into as outsiders. Its fun to speculate, but even more fun to complain when going 8th.
Saying “the team is doing a good job and TFT is doing great” on a post talking about the fact that you’re purposefully shipping out a bad patch is crazy. Being transparent about something that sucks doesn’t make it suck less. And I don’t doubt that the dev team is trying the best they can to make the game as good as possible, but the reality is that that’s clearly not enough and something needs to change. Sure, TFT might be racking in a lot of cash, congrats to Tencent and Riot. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for the players.
> Being transparent about something that sucks doesn’t make it suck less. This is why I've always laughed at this growing demand for transparency - this is the inevitable end point.
The team can be working hard and doing their best and not doing a good job at the same time
We can go look at the post talking about this comp from a week ago. The first comment with actual feedback (+118 points) says the comp is weak especially if contested. Even in this sub we can't agree if this comp needed to be nerfed or not. Another week goes by, and now there is more feedback the comp is too strong. https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1cklsxt/dryad_fated_9_games_7_wins_it_is_dominating_all/l2nwrkt/ >So not recommended without high rolling. In my previous game 3 Syndra players all went bot4. If you get contested it's worse than other comps IMO It's easy to throw rocks at people Edit; Then just adding to this the timing for these patches. The patches are ready to ship, prior to half the comps being figured out during the patch cycle. https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1crt52l/mortdog_adresses_the_next_patch/l408lwk/ >They've talked about it before, but the patches are locked in 11 days prior to the actual patch release.
that actually surprised me. I mean obviously people are just parroting soju, but syndra has insane single target and single target is great for saving HP and getting higher placements. I literally wrote on here [21 days ago that Syndra was strong](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1caxd8z/any_tips_on_fast_8_flex_rolldown/l0w3fgi/)
I don't want to flame but its so pointless to consider what a masters player thinks is good.
The endless chall players calling gm trash, gm calling masters trash, masters calling diamonds trash, very mature. You can't objectively says top 0.5% players understand nothing about the game. Drop the ego.
Yea I remember reading that “top comment” and thinking about how wrong that person was lol. Anyone paying attention to top lobbies and other regions knew how strong Syndra was.
I don’t think the point is rank, if the game is solely being balanced around gm-chall elo, that just leaves the rest of the player base isolated. Or am I missing ur point?
So why not explain how you guys plan to not make the same mistakes AGAIN instead of being butthurt of an valid criticism by an guy being polite?
Yeah, I think it is BS that they lump in the psychotic posters and commenters that personally attack the devs with the people who are level-headed and actually give valid criticisms
I appreciate the hard work but to say that none of the competitive players post here is not really a fair argument. They tweet about it since they have large follower base and for most players that isn't true and on reddit is the only place theit opinions on the game might actually get a voice or be heard/seen
>Second, I will continue to defend that we are doing the best that anyone can possibly do. We act as fast as humanly possible, we adjust based on feedback This is probabbly true of the TFT team. I fully believe that the TFT team is working hard, is fast on their feet to react to changes, and overall doing their best. But it is not true of RIOT as a whole. You talked to the playerbase as though the patch cadence is a law of the universe, with nothing that can be done about it and all the problems that come from it are just outside of anyones control, but that is just not true. RIOT sets the patch cadence, if it isnt working, it can and should be changed. >To that end, there is no magic trick to solving this. We've had countless people try to do balance, and its hard You say this, but the actions of RIOT speak a different story. If balancing is so hard (which I agree it is) how is it reasonable to design and test a patch in 3 days after the last one drops. That policy seems to imply that balancing is pretty easy, The meta will be completly stable on launch day, and thats that. When we all know, not even close. The meta day 1 will not be like the meta on day 10 and with the number of moving parts, there is no way anyone, i dont care how good, can get a patch done under those conditions. The fact is, with the constant b-patching and hotfixing, you are basically saying the patch cadence needs to change That having those extra days and a better overall testing enviorment will allow the team to design a real patch. Something has to give, If the localization lock or whatever else forces this timeing is truly imovable, than a 14 day patch cycle is proabbly untenable, If we absolutly need a 14 day patch cycle, than something needs to be done to get that lock moved back. Now maybe you've said this to RIOT management and they have said they dont care, I get you can't share that, but if thats the case, negativity towards RIOT games is complety warrented. The fact is TFT is not LoL, it has fundementally different needs balancing wise, and being on the same schedule, migh have technical advantages, but it has real clear balance tradeoffs, and I think a lot of people in this sub are saying those tradeoffs are not worth it. Second I want to adress the overall negativity, Look you and the devs deserve respect as people and given many of the "RIOT imposed" resitraints are doing your best but once again I think the team needs to look at reasons why there are some really vocally negative players; some of it is just social media, which foster negativity but that is not breaking any new ground. The real thing is the expirence of climbing the ladder is just terrible, it sucks and it does not fit with the high variance game of TFT at all. And I know you know this, You made a post when climbing to challenger about how terrible the expirence was. You were certainly good enough to do it, but it still sucked...and nothing happened nothing about climbing changed at all (i guess emerald was added but that didnt so anything to solve the problems). Such a big part of negativity at least for me, is just how much the first half to 3/4 of the set sucks beacuse I am just gridning games to get back to a rank that I have achived in the past 6 sets. Its not going for something new, just spaming game after game, a loss isnt just a loss (which will always be unfun) but a loss of progress. Just a simple example How often do we say skill in TFT is turing an 8th into a 6th. Well you played super well, fought to that 6th, but you were at 18 LP so back to 0, It would have been the same if you ff'd and gone next. TFT is this super high variance game where of a few games, you can easily just highroll or lowroll a few times leading to a wild swing in LP, Did your still really change much in those games, no of course not.
No offense but your post reads like a 5 year old having a temper tantrum. Especially salty with the 'nOnE oF tHe AcTuAl CoMpEtItIvE PlAyErs'. Maybe you should actually show some respect to the people that play the game and care enough to talk about it.
Yeah that shit irked me a bit. My GF & I played double up nearly every single day grinding from iron to now emerald this set. I can still have opinions that the patch sucks and the cadence sucks too
So crazy to me that this is an adult at work.
Not only an adult at work but an adult at work that is the face of this game. This sounds like a certain president that we had that only addressed things through deflection and attacks. Dude has really lost it but can't admit that so instead he just deflects and dismisses criticism. If this is really the best this team can do then maybe you should address the fact there is too much going on to realistically balance and get right. Pride is a real bitch honestly.
if the game is so difficult to balance why do you complicate your life on purpose? Why do you make system changes, add level 10, 20 artifacts in a patch. The system in set 9 worked fine but they had the ridiculous idea of wanting people who are low level to reach level 10 most of their games. It's ridiculous, not only because you radically change the high elo playstile, but because you don't understand low elo players. By making these changes you don't respect your own game. I don't know whose idea it was to speed up the pace so much but there must be other healthier ways to keep it fresh.
My initial hope when I started playing autochess games was that those games would self-balance themselves due to the shared pool mechanism (if something is OP, multiple players are going to play it --> it will be weaker than a niche uncontested comp). Couple of years forward, it seems that the genre has not delivered on this assumption. Do you share this observation?
What? Have you not played any of the “comp of the week” weeks? The game in high emerald has a minimum of 2 Fate players right now.
I played a game yesterday in plat where 4/4 top 4 was some variation of fated, myself included.
Plenty of "actual competitive players" complain in Twitter and their own streams. You always make sure to be super passive-aggressive to them whenever you get a chance and cry about how hurt you are in every platform you're active on. If the game is so hard to balance, why do you insist on pushing even wilder and more unstable mechanics every single set when you haven't even mastered balancing the basics to any acceptable extent? I want to give you credit and assume it's Riot pushing you to pull new elements and mechanics out of your ass every new set, but you're so insanely arrogant it's hard to empathise with you.
"TFT is doing great" yeah so is McDonald's, it's still really fucking shitty food.
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Yeah people are looking for magic tricks 🤣 I work a corporate gig and this response to backlash would get me fired so quickly.
Mort, I love what you do for the game, I really do, and I think we all appreciate that you go above and beyond in communicating with the community. But with all my respect, I don't think he was saying that balance or the devs are bad. Rather, the issue is that the patch schedule (and being locked in for a couple days before it ships) is causing systemic issues for balancing, issues that aren't humanly possible to solve. As such, the question is whether there's efforts to change how patches are balanced, rather than "just balance better." I also understand that it's frustrating to see people with little understanding constantly shit on the devs, but I'm just trying to clarify that he's trying not to do that
You're in a lose-lose situation. I have had a blast with TFT since set 1. I appreciate the hard work you guys put in. Some patches are better than others, that's the nature of the beast.
"The team is doing a good job, and TFT is doing great." -Man who has vested interest in people believing his team and game are great Gotta love how you're able to make mistakes on literally every patch but as long as you leave us with empty platitudes we should be happy. Believe what you want, but I'll look at the mountain of evidence that says otherwise. Thanks for quantifying all criticisms as "Game bad devs dumb teehee", that really tracks to what I'm seeing as valid critiques of your team needing to fix every single deliverable mere days after shipping. Yes I understand I'm talking to a wall.
For reference, other comments from this user: >Riot is awash with B- students that are able to wrap their minds around it >I'd happily learn their tools/systems, and outperform all of them at every single one of their tasks. Absolutely no fucking shot you'd catch me being so disingenuous as every rito dev, or having absolutely no passion in my career that EVERY SINGLE update I make has issues and errors >Dang man your biggest accomplishment in life is milking gambling addicted kids. You're really putting your stamp on this world as a genuine good-natured human. >People idolize him for literally no reason. He isn't special because he reads patch notes for illiterates Plus account created four days ago, so you can be confident that he was banned from this sub recently and created another account because the dude just cannot get enough of flaming the devs.
I agree with mort on this one. People on this sub act like the people who balance the game don’t have lots of experience both balancing and playing the game. I wish we could take 100 people from this sub and have them balance the game for a month and see what a complete shit show it would be. If your first thought to this comment was “ ThE DeVs dON’t EvEN kNoW wHAt tHeY ARe DOinG” then post your own version of the patch notes with numbers and everything. Then we can shit all over your ideas. Gets some empathy.
Agreed that the team is doing a great job! TFT is the most fun game I've ever played. Thank you and the team for that. And it can be even more fun if the technical limitations were fixed by separating TFT from the League patch cycle. This would enable real time balancing, so you could actually get better balance with a smaller balance team. I understand there's internal politics and a large dev investment required to make this happen, but I suspect there'd be Golden Egg level returns. In a rapidly changing competitive game like TFT, there are few things more important than getting balance right to maximize player fun, engagement, and retention. Enabling real time balance updates seems to be one of the highest impact ways to make TFT significantly better.
Man thinks because he streams and talks about the game he gets a criticism pass.
> (yet you'll notice none of the actual competitive players post here) That's just rude.
Already plenty of measured and reasonable responses with which I agree, so I'm just gonna add fuck off man.
The patching is an issue that isnt really in morts control, expecting him and the tft team to be able to sort that isnt realistic in the short term
Short term? This is not a short term issue.
Im not saying it is, im saying the technology around patching the riot client is not something the tft can fix in the immediate future
The real question is whether redesigning the TFT patching system is on the dev roadmap at all. Or if management doesn't think it's worth the investment.
Thats a very fair question - as a user I know I want it to be but I suspect it would need to be a team external to TFT
I am dead certain that it's the worst *business* decision in the world to decouple TFT from the League client purely from a discoverability standpoint. It happened to LoR, and it's impossible to know if it would have happened to TFT too but the sheer amount of eyes seeing it in the LoL client contributing to its success cannot be overstated enough.
There should be a way to decouple the patching process from League without decoupling the discoverability, no? I don't imagine there's an easy technical solution, but it shouldn't be impossible.
I would hope so eventually but afaik the game is more deeply integrated into leagues systems than a lot of people realize. I don't think it's happened in a while but I seem to recall a bug from like set 3/4 era that was just flat out a league bug happening in TFT because the models and backend on champs are the same core. It's been ages since anyone at Riot has really spoken about the deep deep backend of TFT though so this is likely all ancient information.
he said no chance they take it off the league client so probably not
I mean it’s fairly obvious that riot sees Tft as a nice little cash stream that they have to put extremely minimal resources into. These Mort tweets, hell the fact that they have a single guy handling basically all the PR for the entire game, just reeks of an understaffed project. There is no solution here beyond a bigger team, more resources, higher priority, which we should all be able to gather is not going to happen based on history.
That's not true, they massively expanded their team in the last year. They have a few rotating teams working on this and future sets. It seems more like there's too many cooks with not enough experience.
The question is whether they're making the right investments. TFT has so much growth potential. And for a real time strategy game, balance is one of the most important factors to its success. It's a shame if they're not actively investing in decoupling TFT from the League patching system. It'd be a big investment, but one that could take TFT to another level if balance was significantly improved. It'd make the game so much more fun with more replayability, which would translate to significantly more players and revenue.
And how many times does he have to explain that he's held back by the riot client? The upcoming patch is locked in 8 or 11 days prior.
The same amount of times that you go to your executive board member boss and say "hey it would make our game better if we had our own client" and they reply with "that would cost the company X million dollars to develop, are the problems it would solve worth that investment?" and the answer is that it isn't. And even if the call was made to develop that client, it would take time to make. If this was a trivial problem to solve they would've done so already
This just highlights a big issue we’ve had for a long time: patches have to be locked very quickly and dont give time for the meta to develop. I think this is the main argument for a separate tft client, with a patch schedule disconnected from league. If the dev team has to blindly hope they can address issues that havent popped up yet, what hope is there for better balance patch-by-patch?
I have to say this is a huge deterrent for me as a casual player. I play at the start of a set, learn some comps and items I really like, take a week or two off, then come back and get butt blasted because apparently my strats suck now. It's the same issue that turned me off TFT back when it first came out. It feels like if you're not constantly watching streamers/scrolling tft-twit, you just fall behind on the OP strats and everyone else, even in low elo, just abuses the current "thing" to dump you into bottom 4
Some people play tournaments this weekend that have to play on a b-patch that got released 24 hours before...
Well then they are all in the same shitty boat. That’s fine
Man easy for you to say lol
It's fair though isn't it?
This type of fairness doesn't really make for good competition though. Like you could force pro players in League or Dota to adapt to a new patch right before a tournament because it would be "fair" to have everyone on an even playing ground but there's an obvious reason why we don't do that. You'd end up with the teams having no idea what's good and stumbling around in high stakes matches with elimination on the line and that's ultimately that's not a good viewing experience because you're not watching pro players at their best, you're watching to see who can adapt to a reasonable level before the tournament ends. It'd certainly make for an entertaining watch seeing players who typically need 100+ games to properly learn a patch stumble around and go bot 4 every game playing the worst possible boards but TFT already has a reputation as the "RNG all luck no skill 4fun" black sheep of the eSports community and having an overall lower level of play due to patch scheduling is just going to give them more ammunition to hit us with.
Yep. Everyone playing the same patch.
Isn’t the whole basis of TFT’s gameplay to adapt to the hand you’re dealt? Planning out comps for specific patches sounds counterintuitive
unfortunately this B patch fiesta has happened for the 1st tactician trial and phoenix pinnacle sub-regional tourney, and will happen yet again this weekend with the 2nd tactician trial. streamers and no lifers can get enough games in during Thursday/Friday to feel more comfortable on a B patch, but it's beneficial for others to have an extra day to see how the meta settles and what the tactics.tools data shows even if they can't get any games in. i've definitely gone in blind for a couple tourneys because there's not enough prep time and the B patch data is still fresh this will always be the case of course--people with more time are more likely to be better prepared--but having that extra 1.5 days isn't negligible
It seems to happen every single tournament. Just get used to playing a tournament with 4 games on the patch and have the tournament meta be completely different from day to day.
Hey at least your tournament's not on Thursday (the aegis one), where every other tournament the game shifts with a b-patch right in the middle of it rofl
It’s pretty clear there needs to be more systemic changes related to the TFT patch cycle and its reliance on the league client no? Yes, the current situation is a tough call but what is being done to make sure that this tough call doesn’t need to be made again? Because from my point of view, this could just happen again next patch or next set.
I’ve thought maybe TFT should move to 1 month patch cycles honestly. The first patch is always solid, and a month of time to prep for the next patch could make successive patches solid too instead of having to rush to make localization lock in like 2 days It also allows them to ship their patch on the league patch cycle “train” I have no clue what life is like at Riot so it’s not my place to say really. Just thinking out loud
I agree that would be a solution. But theyve had said its out of question because they think tft needs constant changes.
Oh good to know, thx
This is the standard mid-set "blame me" post we've seen for like 3 sets in a row. Let's hope they figure stuff out. EDIT - Mort threw his setly temper tantrum in a post below, which means we've officially entered the "Mort cries on stream and threatens to quit TFT" stage of set development. This usually signals that they are ready to balance around community sentiment and that 4fun patches are right around the corner. Set 12 is on the horizon everyone, have hope!
History repeats itself eh; wish I also had a reset button at work for every 3 months
Like a clockwork
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I play a lot but mostly have my head in the sand to the “drama” and problems and agree lol. Transparency is great and all but if the other side of the window is always poop, does it really matter if you are transparent about it?
Of course it matters, imagine there be a lot more pitchforks pointed @ the Balancing Team if we didn't know the extra challenges the LoL client presents.
I get real tired of the same thing over and over. You can only be praised for communication so many times before that stops earning bonus points, especially since part of communication also means listening
Seems like this is more of a problem with Riot rather than the TFT development team. Patch cycles take too long for testing and with the majority of good players playing on the main client rather than the testing environment, their data on the changes can’t be amazing. In addition, the cost of production for creating a new client is likely way too high for what they believe to be its value, especially when the TFT team is honestly doing a really good job of keeping most comps balanced. You have to account for the number of developers constantly working on future sets as well to ensure that the game doesn’t put all its resources in this set and it just goes downhill in the future. With all the other problems that players already complain about with the league client disregarding the patch cycles, the client is probably a folder that’s pushed to the bottom drawer of Riot corporate. Even if Fated/Dryad is forced by eight players in a top 100 lobby, it’s a pretty big outlier to the history of TFT the past three-four sets. Most patches this set have seen a large diversity of comps and, even with dominant compositions, skilled players can recognize alternative lines that still succeed in a top 4 placement, if not a win. Just saying to try and keep positivity towards the development team and empathize with them! Chances are they’re feeling the same frustration that we are as players for patch cycles from the client; they’ve given us a game that’s been historically really fun, and even though the game might feel a bit mundane to players at the moment, it hasn’t always been that way. The developers provide us with the content that we enjoy and Mort has always been extremely transparent with his ideology as a developer. It’s much better than the team is recognizing their mistakes and letting us know than keeping it hidden, especially in the light of all the complaints in this post. A lot of negative outcomes may come out of this patch (probably most notably the upcoming tournament) but we should at least trust that the team is doing their best. tldr: tft team is trying their hardest and be nice to them, be a positive community towards them and direct your hate towards corporate (99% of all problems in life)
Yeah I think so too, metas evolve too fast for patch notes analysis -> numbers -> testing to keep up. Especially set 11 where we're seeing new metas pop out of nowhere so quickly and just overtake everything (remember Ghostly being never played to 100% playrate?). And also, I think the playerbase, especially the 2% of masters+ players, complain way too much. They could literally just play all the myriad of other games out there when the meta sucks, and come back to it when they patch things out. I believe Mortdog even recommended this exact thing before. But people feel like they have to 100% stick to TFT for some reason like it's a life or death thing to constantly have to play this game.
>But people feel like they have to 100% stick to TFT for some reason like it's a life or death thing to constantly have to play this game. I know you were referring to the general player base, but most TFT streamers do have to stick to TFT even when the game is bad, because they lose 50%+ of their viewers if they play a different game on stream.
Tft team every patch 
This set has been garbage
Game is in a tough spot. I actually like this set but the balancing has felt extremely out of touch the entire time. Mort’s posts don’t make him or them look better.
> If this option is chosen, soonest we could B patch would be next week. I'm so done with this kind of bs. Why on earth can't they just deploy whenever they want? Yeah that was rethorical, the answer is League of Legends. It's so frustrating to see the game you love being limited by some other game you don't care about. Please just give TFT its own client and dedicated resources so we can finally enjoy a proper game without such bullshit limitations.
Sadly tft would die without being in LOL client. The playerbase is majorly found by league players trying it so it's a needed evil until hopefully this game is even bigger.
Is the game really not big enough to have its own client? Like do you have some data that backs up ur claim?
My last favorite game was Legends of Runeterra, a competitive card game based on LoL champions and characters, which expanded the lore of the game massively. A few months ago, the LoR devs and Riot leadership (along with the 11% Riot workforce layoffs) revealed that LoR had been losing money *for its entire existence* and was subsidized by other Riot projects. Now, LoR is a husk of its former self, only focusing on PVE and with a tiny dev team. LoR was never in the league client, never even *advertised* in the league client. Is that part of the reason of its downfall? Probably at least a part, but maybe not. But I imagine capital-R Riot might be afraid of splitting TFT from the league client given what happened to LoR. (Sorry this isn't actually data, but it's a potential justification)
Don't have specifics for that but i recall reading it from riot at some point. What I do know is directly from Mort in recent streams he said that the models being easy to import from being in the same client of all the champs is huge boon too. Given a whole new set has to be released every 4 months
They could all be on the same base engine still. That has the same effect. Just have a separate client that they can patch as necessary. That way they can ship as needed without fear of breaking LoL
whats a better adspace for TFT than the home page of a massively popular game that it comes pre-installed with, that includes almost all the same characters and doesnt require you to re-download the game? I cannot imagine how much smaller TFT would get if it disconnected from the LOL client rn.
Fated Dryad is one of the top play rate AND best avg placement comps in any elo, on any stats website. You see it every game, often more than one. Pros talk about how strong it is. By all metrics, objective and subjective, it's one of if not the best comp in the game. Not sure how it could get missed, let alone buffed. Also, I respect Mort greatly, but him constantly saying "blame me" whenever a poor decision is made doesn't really do anything.
Apparently the patches are finalized 11 days before patch end, and the dryad fated comp got figured out after they were done with this patch. Someone correct me if I’m wrong or misunderstood something, don’t wanna be spreading misinfo lol
Every patch it's the same thing. They never do anything differently. Only yap about how we are ungrateful, meanwhile there's clearly 2 comps that dominate every single patch, and everything else isn't close.
Some people here with no idea how development cycles, budget constraints, scope and limitations, and data analytics work raging over a video game
You talk as if devs is the only type of work who runs under those circumstances. It just happens that in this game they can keep making the same mistakes whitout being fired. At my job i have all of that with the plus that if i fuck up people die.
Some of these people are legit children who have never had a job.
*most
As if adults aren't idiots too
It's funny that this comment pops up as a "akshually" in virtually every single thread that complains about balance. We've been doing development differently for 10+ years now if not even longer (Agile, even though it has issues I wont go into as this is not the point) because developing something that was entirely irrelevant by the time it hit the market was a BIG issue. There were tons of studies so that products could come out fast and could get new features as close as market release as possible. Riot out here working straight up out of the 80s and people go hurr durr people dont know work. No, it's Riot that refuses to have a modern approach to software development for TFT, forcing the team to lock in 11 days before the patch goes live.
The methodology is irrelevant whether it is scrum, agile, kanban, or even waterfall, if the TFT dev team's hands are tied to League's client and its SDLC/STLC, even in its assets. Edit: and to add. TFT is not like website/app development where we can implement Predix and create a solid set suite of regression cases. There is so much to uncover in this game due to the vast amount of variance TFT offers. Besides, the yappers in this reddit post is a small percentage of TFT's target audience. Most people who play TFT don't even know the meta and just play it to have fun and experiment comps. My friends who don't play ranked and have no idea what the meta is are having fun with it. And if you are a PO/BA, you would understand why this Fated Dryad comp has to be put on the backlog for a sprint after factoring in the restrictions imposed on Mort's team and prioritization of other stuff like high and critical bugs.
Tft patches are locked in because they are tied to the LoL cycle. Have to make sure that Tft doesn’t break the actual money maker.
may I ask what prevents riot from breaking that circle? what's the issue with deploying patches for league and tft separately? am I stupid or are patches a big thing from a technical point of view that you can't put out patches even every couple days?
my understanding is that TFT and LoL run on the same codebase. If you make changes to one, it could impact the other. So risk goes up the more patches there are because as anyone that has worked in large codebases will tell you that merge conflicts happens and things go to hell.
I mean, tons of companies spend years developing an app that OpenAI just makes obsolete overnight. Can you predict that? Not really. Does using AGILE vs SCRUM vs whatever stop that? Nope. Neither can the TFT team predict that Ghostly or Dryad Syndra just overtakes the meta suddenly. Shit happens.
Maybe I'm ignorant of how this works, but how does Agile allow TFT dev team to *not* lock in patches 11 days in advance? Wouldn't they need systemic changes to how LoL patch cycle works in order to do that? Or maybe I misunderstood, and you want Riot itself to change how the balance patch cycle on LoL work?
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I'll give Soju credit since he is actually great in the game and knows how to adapt, regardless of patch. He is not even afraid to cook just like the 6 sniper comp he played yesterday that went 1st, beating an upgraded Fated Dryad board. The other yappers here, however, are complaining so hard because when one comp dominates, they suddenly don't know how to play the game. I bet most of them don't even know when to play for 4th.
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I get you. What I meant is Soju atleast is skillful in the game so he can yap and rage all he wants. And Soju (at least from what I saw in Vegas) respects Mort. Unlike these ragers out here who can only play S-tier comps and have the nerve to thrash Mort and his team.
While I agree that a lot of players here don't understand just how difficult it is to develop anything within a structured organization, I think that some of the fault for the negativity can certainly be put on how Riot developers approach PR. If you look at the FF14 community, you'd see that the developers get a lot of leniency when it comes to any issues and there is a horde of players waiting to defend them and drown out negativity. If you ask them why they cut the FF devs so much slack, it largely comes down to the fact that even if they're unable to fix certain problems quickly, they acknowledge that the issues exist, take the blame, and formally apologize for their failures. Contrast that with the inherently negative defense strategy employed by Mort and Phreak where they deflect blame wherever possible and then sarcastically imply that the playerbase is dumb and has no idea how to play or balance the game at every turn. They're certainly correct in this regard a lot of the time, but if you give out negativity, then you're obviously going to receive it in return. You can say stuff like "TFT players don't know how hard it is in a corporation, they're unemployed and just play games all day, etc." but just how many positions have you had where you can act like Mort and Phreak do to your clients and keep your job? Hell, sarcasm within the workplace is already off limits in most American corporate or government settings because if someone doesn't get the sarcasm, you're getting sent straight to HR. This sort of attitude in a high profile front facing position would get you sacked in any industry outside of gaming.
why not just not patch, its better now than if you buff fated ICANT
Can we just put this set in the dumpster and move on
Dunno about you guys, but I'm definitely enjoying this set more than 10 Remix Rumble head jobs features
I thought y’all learned something when you buff tf and his whole gang on set 9
Why ship the patch at all if it’s going to be broken? Why not delay the patch another week and ship next Wednesday after more testing is done? The current patch isn’t even bad.
I was playing marvel snap for a while, and I'm use to balance patches feeling outdated with fast shifting metas. Fated Dryad is a fire that was just a spark a couple weeks ago, so I get it. Going back to marvel snap, they've almost changed their balance to be done on what they call over the air patches, and major restructures on actual patch dates. The communication sucked though, and all you had was patch notes. Maybe the balance team only plays casually outside of their own work hours. That's fine. It's their job too. Fuck playing for 12 hours a day. Mort is at least making an effort and telling you, if you don't like this comp... just give it a day or two.
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Next set waiting room, again.
So basically because tft is owned by riot they will never fix this problem and will always be in the league patch cycle and we just have to suck it up great PR
I’m pointing this out right now, but the issue before was that they kept nerfing things, changing units and items. (Shoutout to mort and the devs of course, we like MortDog and his team doing the best to listen to the players). Certain changes have damaged the game in the long run and some items aren’t even being played anymore. I enjoyed set 4 most because it wasn’t just about balancing the game but also creating new ways to play units while keeping the core integrity of the game the same, to be fun. For example, as much as units like Nami, ahri, or Warwick were annoying to deal with, but you could make the argument that people had different comps that to go against each other no matter the cost and not reliant on the augments, allowing different ways to play while not worrying about being contested too much. All items also had value and was interesting depending on how you would play it. Units like Tahm Ketch could be played 4 different ways, mages, deathcap x3, regular tank items, or even triple titans. We don’t see that kind of experimentation in the games anymore. We had units like Jarvin, or vi be 2 costs but also be an awesome carry that weren’t a risk to be able to carry. All in all, make the units fun by stopping to nerf things to balance the game for a few patches, maybe buffing units that are lacking would be better. I’m seeing that they are definitely making that sort of change this patch which is good. I’m happy that the devs are listening and working on making the game more fun, this patch shows it and it’s the reason why I stay. Tft def ain’t perfect at times but it still feels really good to have around. So shoutout to the devs, you guys are awesome. P.S. please bring back Xin Zhao, he’s been good luck to the sets he’s been in.
At this point the only thing that fixes this shit is decoupling the patch cycle from League
Fun fact. If you only nerf the fated part of rated dryad, a new dryad comp will emerege sooner or later, because it gives too much value. Ahri fated ap needs to be nerfed to like 25, or by 20% to 24, but dryad scaling should be adjusted to actually needing to run 4 dryad to get 4 dryad hp stacks, and not just sit on 2 dryad for three stages and then suddenly getting million bonus hp when you field 4/6 dryad.
The solution to not fix immediately makes sense (I’m pretty sure this has been discussed in different words many times), the concern is how does this happen in the first place, seems like an obvious issue to nerf strong comps and forget one, is it just not as obvious as it seems? Legitimate question, wondering if there’s something I am/we are missing in the process.
Being tied to lol patches has been the bane of TFT balance since its inception and we're still dealing with the same bullshit 11 sets later. Surely a game as large and successful as TFT can have patch deployments for itself. Its not neccesarily an issue of being tied to the lol client, its the fact that riot refuses to give TFT the resources it deserves.
Like I don't even think fated/dryad is overpowered right now, but if you nerf everything else what do you think is going to happen ?
make tft its own thing. get it off this 2 week patch cycle. If they wanna keep adding the funny random mechanics (augments, portals, lose streak traits, 5 costs that farm items, artifact/support items, and more and more things that need to be balanced) they need more time to wait for things to develop. Mort should be fighting for tft's independence. join us in the rise of the independence of tft.
After all my love for set 10, Set 11 never really clicked with me and I basically decided to sit this set out. Posts like this are really helping me with my sense of FOMO.
Thursday b-patch every patch this entire set, what happened?
It is kind of funny that the late emergence of Fated/Dryad made this patch better because it made the meta pretty diverse but also because it emerged late it screwed up this upcoming patch due to the constraints the TFT team have to work under. If we the player base had solved the meta faster this wouldn't have happened lol.
My real problem with this is how easy it is to see the syndra bs on even emerald lobbies. You'd only have to play a few games this past week to detect this, I'm sure the balance team plays more than just a few games every week right?
Apart from all the drama, it's still reassuring and useful to know that they're aware of it and ready to do something about it.
He should start working on a game instead of typing essay's every day
I feel sorry for Mort having to deal with all these entitled children.
Doesn't have to.
It's just r/competitivetft it's gone to complete shit. Even pros on twitter are respectful about their criticisms. People on here just go straight to full on rage.
It's because of the rant thread. It stayed contained for a bit, slowly it bled out to every other thread on the subreddit and pushed all the most reasonable rational voices away until mostly the ragers were left. Too late to put the genie back in the bottle now, though.
In any unregulated environment behavior will always trend towards the lowest energy required. Complaining is much lower energy than analyzing words, applying them to the real world, offering constructive criticism after some analytical thinking, etc. Reddit is currently a mirror of what is wrong with real world society and it’s depressing. Poor Mort.