Boards›Teamfight Tactics

A few simple solutions to some frustrations for players

Serafox·7/30/2019, 11:58:53 AM·0 votes·583 views

So just going to throw down some of thoughts here about things that frustrate players and what I think might solve or at least alleviate some of the problems.

Items:

  • What is the issue:

The initial RNG in the first 3 creep waves and in general on subsequent creep waves can allow players to completely steam role others through luck which removes a certain element of strategy from the game. In the worst scenarios you could have built a fantastic team comp, played your health economy correctly to be first at the carousels and still get stomped by the item heavy lucky player.

  • Potential solution:

Allow players to roll for a random item at the cost of gold (10-15, but finding the sweet spot will take some iteration).

  • The benefits:
  1. More strategy is required to manage your economy from the start to finish
  2. It delays steam rolling for certain players purely by RNG because they happened to get 4-6 great items from 3 creep mobs by chance at the start.
  3. You can use the first 3 creep mobs to more accurately specify a total RNG gold amount obtainable (eg. 5-10) which should leave players with a choice of either taking losses to boost economy, rolling down into more characters or going into an early item or two before 2nd carousel.
  4. Players who focus on an early heavy item strategy will more than likely be forced to have almost no refreshes and stand to lose out on upgrading their characters to 2* or 3* depending on availability and what other players have chosen to play
  5. This is turn also puts a demand on a player to be observant of what other people are trying to build
  • Potential problems:
  1. There may be too much gold available in the early game, so tweaking the total gold output from the first 3 mobs will be essential to ensure the game is slowed down enough but reduces some of the RNG components to manage from a developer point of view and create a new strategy avenue for players.
  2. The addition of costing items into your economy may have a negative impact on the choice to level up your board to allow for extra characters, but personally I think this will just add more depth to the strategy of the game, but there would need to be benefit balancing for choosing a specific route.
  3. Pirates may need to be reworked because it might get skewed that every persons would attempt to build into pirate early game to try get an item advantage, and as such they could be re-costed towards a mid-game choice which could have payoffs if you commit to it but would make it hard to pivot back out of the strat.

Auto Combining Heroes:

At the moment heroes auto combine when 3 of the same are obtained, while this is useful in terms of time management and not having to spend too much time thinking about it the downside is that items are permanently combined and stored on a character of which you cannot necessarily afford to trade in to get the item or you ruined 2 separate items by accident through a carousel pickup.

  • The solutions:
  1. Provide an on-off button to press to force combining of all heroes or leave it off on the left side of the screen, which allows players to decide if they want to sell off a unit to remove the item before it is accidentally combined.
  2. Allow auto combining of individual units by double clicking them.
  3. Allow removal of items from units
  • The benefits:
  1. Solution 1 returns a manner of control to the player and removes an unnecessary game mechanic while maintaining the time saving component should you chose to do it.
  2. Solution 2 gives the most control to the way the player wishes to play at any given time, while maintaining the strategic component of the game of having to make trade ins between a needed character and an item they wish to extract
  3. Solution 3 is obviously the most simple to manage and implement, and has the added benefit of being able to swap your items around characters based on situations in the late game.
  • The problems:
  1. The biggest obvious problem with Solution 1 and Solution 2 is that a full board would stop you from fast purchases if you aren't auto combining units from the deck into your board, and as such could cause confusion and frustration for newer players. (That being said it opens up interesting strategic decisions of other characters on your board you would need to dump if you don't want to combine them before purchasing).
  2. Solution 3 might be a bit too forgiving for mistakes which could have a big impact on the later game when trying to roll for 3 star heroes where you otherwise might not have had the cash to do so.

I had other stuff but I figured I would start with this and hopefully open a constructive discussion about potential solutions to some of the problems that are unique to TFT. I think the biggest thing is to move away from comparing this to auto chess and let TFT evolve into its own game. Please feel free to correct me on any of my thinking flaws on the above suggestions.

5 Comments

Bregan7/30/2019, 12:12:49 PM3 votes

the better solution in regards to items is to normalize the item count within a match. all players get the same amount of items. you can keep the rng between different matches though. for example, maybe one match gives everyone 2 items form minions, 1 from krugs, 3 from wolves, and 2 from birds. that match would provide 8 items to all players. but maybe another match players would get 4 items from minions, 2 from krugs, 2 from wolves, and 3 from birds. thats 11 items to all players. this prevents predictability and stagnation and keeps the excitement of "ooooo how many items will i get this time?". obviously, WHICH item you get will still be random, so luck and adaptability will still come into play. this also completely eliminates the awful experience of "this guy has 2 full completed items more than me, and theres nothing i can possibly do to bridge this power gap." it puts more emphasis on econ and card draws, which players have much more control over.

this is the simplest, most efficient, and most elegant solution.

Scramrails7/30/2019, 1:05:42 PM1 votes

Hard disagree on a random item purchase for such a steep sum of gold. This wont help anything at all. How is this going to help a player who got no items from creeps vs a player that got half a dozen? That player now has to invest a not insignificant amount of precious gold on a random item that very likely wont even be all that helpful, certainly not at time of purchase anyway.

They need to either normalize item drop rates from creep rounds (1 item per player per round) or just scrap the entire existing item system and just add a shop with a secondary currency acquired from defeating the creep rounds. If items are going to be as incredibly powerful as they are, the entire item system needs to be balanced around giving every player the same amount of items at the very least. Obviously there will still be instances where you dont get the items you want, but at the very least this will make sure everyone has access to the same number.