- Red Post Collection: The Story of TFT Dev Blog, April Fools Merch Collection, 10.8 PBE TFT Changes & More
- 4/2 PBE Update: Skin Tweaks, TFT Player Damage & Streak Adjustments & More
Table of Contents
- Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 3
- (TF)T-Minus Ten Weeks: The Story of TFT (Part 2)
- Miscellaneous
- Reminders
Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 3
"Disclaimer
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.
Increasing Dodge Penalties
Champ select dodges are something that hurts the overall player experience by putting 9 players back into a longer queue after they’ve already spent a lot of time and effort getting their last game started.
There are many underlying reasons why a player may want to dodge a lobby, and we think dodging is ok as a very rare outlet for players. Today, we think players are dodging too frequently, and without significant enough penalties when they do.
Over the next few months, we’re going to slowly tune up the penalties for repeated champ select dodges:
- Increasing the “repeated dodge timeout” so that we catch more egregious cases where players are dodging constantly
- Amping up LP penalties for dodges (current is -3 for first dodge -10 if repeated)
Fiddlesticks Learning Curve and Follow Up
With Fiddle VGU just launching, there’s been a lot of spooky gameplay going around. Like normal we will be monitoring his power and do multiple phases of follow up if it needs. Our typical follow up for a big launch is:
- A few days after the patch, if things are way off look to hotfix a buff or nerf
- Reevaluate after the first week to see if they should be in the following patch
Fiddle might be a rare case where the playing-against learning curve might match or eclipse the playing-as curve. For most normal champs or VGUs, we see their win rate climb over the first few weeks as players learn to correctly play them. But a certain type of champion design that is very trickery focused can have a similarly steep learning curve for opponents, as they get familiar with the types of tricks that they should be looking out for when playing against them. For example Neeko had this type of reverse curve, where her win rate actually decreased slightly over the first few weeks of her release. Our current expectation is that Fiddle should still have a normal curve where its win rate will climb over the first week because it has a very unique jungle playstyle that will take some time to master.
Duo Parity Results Update
With the full rollout of Duo Parity in 10.7, we’re getting some results on how things have improved. The good news is that it's even better than we first predicted!
- Before - 54% of games have uneven duos
- After - only 8% of games have uneven duos
It's worth noting that this is also achieved without significant change to queue times or widening the MMR spread in games. This combined with the Autofill Parity feature have amounted to a significant matchmaking upgrade so far this year. We’re hoping to continue delivering improvements to matchmaking, ranked, and player behavior systems like these throughout the year.
Jungle Work Finishing Up
In 10.8 we will be shipping the last piece of our planned work for improving jungle satisfaction. Just to refresh, the two key components of the design are:
- Lower Gank Power Early
- Small homeguards effect for champs that are killed in the early game
- Slight decrease in champ kill XP for non-solo kills in the early game
- Higher Jungler Personal Power
- Further increases XP from farming (targeted at mid and late game where junglers fall behind)
- Improved sustain when at very low health on the jungle starter items (to help less experienced jungle players in the early game)
Meddler mentioned in his last post that we’re seeing good results from the top lane changes so far this season, and we hope that after this last piece, we can wrap up our Jungle work for the short term and let things settle a bit.
Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there."
(TF)T-Minus Ten Weeks: The Story of TFT (Part 2)
Check out Part 2 of the story of TFT - "Throwing away the prototype and starting fresh with 10 weeks to go.":
"Editorial note: This is the second of a two-part look back on TFT’s creation. To learn more about the first eight weeks, check out part one.
After eight weeks of testing, optimizing, and lagging, the team had a TFT prototype. And although it wasn’t exactly pretty, it was fun as f*&#$. Which meant phase one—make a fun thing—was complete. Up next? Throw out the entire prototype and actually build the game in 10 weeks.
“When we got the greenlight to move forward with production, we knew we needed a lot more people,” says Riot Wittrock. “Luckily, Meddler was able to get some other teams from League to move over and join us. And an R&D project had recently been canceled, so quite a few of them jumped on as well.”
Here are the devs you’ll be hearing from, who are just a small part of that early TFT team:
10 Weeks Until Launch: Leaping Off a Sinking Ship
“We always knew the prototype was throw-away. It was really just a picture of what we could build, but not what we would actually build,” explains Riot Nullarbor. “So we reset and started to build again. Only we did it properly this time.”
“Properly” meant the team was no longer cobbling something together on Summoner’s Rift. It was time to bring in the engineers to develop scalable code. With the fundamental game design choices in place—like having a controllable avatar and purchasing units through the UI rather than physical models—the team was able to get started quickly.
But that doesn’t mean they stopped using the prototype build completely, as it was a great way to test ideas before the final build was ready.
“While the engineers were working, we needed to continue playtesting to adjust the roster, tweak the UI, test items and the shop, and all of that,” Riot Wittrock says. “So we continued to use the prototype while the shippable game was being built separately.”
Eventually the team needed to face cold, hard reality and send their darling prototype to pasture.
“The prototype was really held together with duct tape and popsicle sticks,” jokes Riot Wrekz. “As we were progressing with the final build, we went from having one version of the game that worked (the prototype), to two versions of the game that didn’t work (the prototype and the final build), and then, ultimately, one version of the game that worked (the final build… hopefully).”
“I just remember hearing one day that there were all these bugs in the prototype we weren’t going to fix,” says Riot Stimhack. “There was a long list of bugs, but it wasn’t worth having someone go in to fix them anymore.”
“It was like leaping off a sinking ship,” laughs Riot Nullarbor.
7 Weeks Until Launch: Refining The Roster
With seven weeks to PBE, it was time to lock down the initial roster of champions.
“League has a really wide universe,” shares Riot Wittrock. “We wanted to have a good breadth of what the League roster has to offer while still hitting on traditional fantasies. I wanted my ninjas, my dragons. That kind of stuff.”
As the team worked to narrow the roster down they realized that something was off.
“There were a lot of humans,” laughs Riot Stimhack. “It felt a little shallow. But it was also hard to tell the difference between all of the humans standing in a row.”
Luckily League has demons, Void creatures, vastaya, and... yordles.
“We cut things based on feedback from the whole team. So it didn’t really feel bad cutting some things we liked,” Riot Wittrock adds. “We knew we were going to make future sets, so we could add those champions later.”
The roster adjustments sometimes consisted of shuffling champions around, and other times cutting them completely.
So who almost made the first cut?
“Lux was a champion in Set 1 for a while,” Kilmourz offers.
“Oh yeah! The roster was completely different,” Riot Wittrock recalls. “We were playing with Lux, Lee Sin, and Bard for a really long time.”
“Ugh... Bard was the trolliest unit,” Riot Nullarbor interjects. “That ult. Half your team would just suddenly stop fighting.”
“It honestly doesn’t feel like it was that long ago that we had Bard in the game,” adds Meddler.
“Don’t worry,” Riot Wittrock smiles. “Bard will come back some day.”
With champions all but locked, the team focused on a different roster.
“Scuttle was really popular when we were testing it in the prototype, and we knew we wanted to make Little Legends,” Riot Wrekz says. “So we decided to run some ‘personalization’ tests when building the final version.”
“Yeah, people willingly gave their money to Riot Wrekz,” laughs Riot Wittrock.
“No! Well, not really. The entire system was run on sticky notes,” Riot Wrekz admits. “It was an honor system. If you won a playtest you could ‘purchase’ a sticky note with the skin you wanted. And then you were allowed to use that skin.”
“I remember that! It was so fun and motivational,” Riot Stimhack adds. “Everyone wanted those sticky notes.”
5 Weeks Until Launch: Sickness in the Convergence
“We knew we wanted a PvP game where players would fight each other, but we had no idea how to actually get people to each others’ boards,” Riot Wrekz says.
Warning: May cause motion sickness.
“At first we had this boat that you’d ride to travel between boards,” remembers Kilmourz. “You’d get on and sail from one board to the next. But it didn’t fade to black, and the camera would have to swing around to fix the board orientation.”
“Yeah, we had to rotate the camera 180 degrees, so the air ships would launch across the map and the camera would spin while you were traveling,” adds Riot Wrekz.
Pirate ships are all fun and games until someone gets seasick.
“Some of the most magical moments were flying through the mystical void on my ship and passing other people along the way. But then I’d hear people retching behind me because of the motion sickness. That broke the magic really quickly,” says Riot MapleNectar. “I still miss it though.”
To solve the motion sickness issue, the team sacrificed their seaworthy ships and used a vortex portal to travel between boards instead.
4 Weeks Until Launch: The Board
“For the majority of TFT’s development the board was played left-to-right, rather than top-to-bottom,” explains Riot Nullarbor. “We changed a lot with the board quite late in t
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