@Riot: In-Depth Feedback on Teamfight Tactics
First, I will say I'm enjoying the game for the most part. This critique is not a tear-down, but rather the places where I think the design struggles.
USER INTERFACE The UI looks solid across the board and works in most cases (items stacking up can be a bit weird sometimes), but there is some major room for improvement.
- During the Carousal you cannot see your team or your items, making this a needless memory test.
- During the Carousal you cannot left-click on units to see their stats, making this a needless memory test.
- During the Carousal you do not see a countdown to your own movement, making this frustrating. Additionally, your unit repeatedly moving upon wall collision and lacking a very clear highlight indicator makes this (and navigation) worse.
- You cannot bring up a list of items, making this a needless memory test.
- You cannot see an item's build paths anywhere, meaning that you often have to equip an item you don't actually want to equip just to see how you can combine it with other items -- or have another needless memory test.
- You cannot see enemy synergies, making this a memory test. If my opponent has the Assassin and Ninja bonuses active I should be able to see that, especially as some larger units and health bars can obscure the back lines of units.
GAMEPLAY I'm going to avoid discussing specific unit balance here, because that's highly subject to change.
- Champions come from a shared pool (or so I've been told), but this mechanic is not clearly conveyed ANYWHERE in-game. This is hugely problematic, as this is a mechanic that cannot be easily understood from playing the game, and leads to frustration with rerolls.
- It's a bit unfortunate that every Role/Origin has breakpoints rather than growth. I think the mandatory breakpoints serve to make RNG more punishing and builds more locked in, while opening up a few of those might increase flexibility. For example: if Rangers or Assassins or anything with a +3/+6 bonus gave you scaling between those breakpoints, it wouldn't end up as punishing to not manage to roll that Legendary Kayle. Example: If we picked Yordles as an example, it might start at 20% at 3 (again, some brekapoints are good, and having minimum buy-in feels appropriate), and then go 20/25/30/50. What that does is still STRONGLY encourage that breakpoint, but give you some mitigating tools if you're going for it and can't quite hit the breakpoint due to RNG.
- It's extremely frustrating the extent to which units are RNG. Given that items already are and that gold is used to increase your team size as well, the fact that luck is the difference between a Level 3 champion at by the second Player vs. Player fight or rerolling 30 times and still not getting that Darius you need is extremely unforgiving.
- The inability to see who your opponent will be means that a level of reactionary strategy is effectively removed from the game, which puts the game further into RNG territory.
- The RNG of items is severely problematic given their impact, especially early on. I've seen games where by the first Player vs. Player fight someone had 3 completed items and a level 2 Vayne (with Vayne-appropriate items) up against someone who -- through no fault of their own -- has just their starting item and mediocre champions.
- It's frustrating that the exact same match (with the same units in the same position and with the same items) can turn out differently due to RNG mechanics. This makes it hard to tell how (or even if) you should re-position your team after any given fight, and that means that the perceivable impact of good build placement is significantly lessened. In fact, the inability to really predict how your units will move raises an even bigger problem: It is almost impossible to accurately strategize for your team's movement once the fight begins, which hurts the core concept of the game as one of strategic team construction. Of course, I understand that this is kind of a common element in the genre, but I'd like to see in-fight RNG lessened a bit so that I more often feel like my own choices had a greater impact on my victory.
Otherwise, combat is generally decent. It's fun to watch and gets very tense at times, and comebacks can be thrilling. While it's very frustrating to not really be able to pinpoint how you could have adjusted your team to win a fight that you lost (or sometimes to not know why you lost a fight as badly as you did), it still gets points for being visually appealing.
Really, though, there's something of a dealbreaker here: It is often impossible to look at a fight and know what you could have / should have done, and often a fight is just lost no matter what you do. Neither of those is great in a game intending to have ranked.
I think if Teamfight Tactics is going to find its legs as a competitive game, it needs to tone down the RNG slightly so that strategies can be more proactive. Having RNG in champions, carousal availability, items received, frequency of items received, opponents (at least unpredictable although not entirely random), and fight mechanics means that of the six main mechanics all six have moderate to severe RNG elements. It would be potentially valuable to see some of these mitigated (just a few -- RNG is definitely a part of this style of game, and shouldn't be removed or overly mitigated in too many of those mechanics), such as being able to see carousal availability in advance, getting to see the next Champion offering you'll get, being able to pick one of three of four items at breakpoints in the game (with reduced random items), the ability to over-pay to acquire a SPECIFIC champion, or similar. I think exploring mechanics like these could help bring the RNG elements of TFT in line to make it a bit more of a game of strategy and unit placement and a bit less like a game that feels like it's sometimes playing you.
