TFT is fundamentally broken - Here's why
So, Teamfight Tactics. The name not only implies, but explicitly advertises one specific thing. Strategic teamfighting. This tells you that you can build varying team compositions, they'll buff and affect themselves and each other in certain ways as you build your team, and that there are several layers of strategy to playing it. It tells you that the game is in-depth and thoughtful on a level similar but different to regular League, an AI-controlled game of chess where you set them up and they knock it down. It tells you there are indeed tactics involved, which heavily implies that you are almost entirely in control of your board, aside from micro-managing what each unit does. Cool! Awesome concept. Here's why it's fundamentally broken.
The game is so heavily focused on RNG that you cannot strategize anything. It affects literally every single aspect of the game, except for Assassin jump and Blitz pull. Those are the two things you can count on, and that's it.
CHAMPIONS
- You can't effectively strategize what your team comp will be because the units you're offered every round are entirely random.
- Everybody pulls from the same champion pool, meaning that if someone else is building what you're building, you have less of a chance/zero chance of seeing more of those units for yourself (depending on how high a tier they are).
- When you sell a unit, it gets re-added to the champion pool and can be offered to you the very next reroll. Were you building Nobles, and it stopped offering you Nobles? Well, if you try to transition, get ready to see the familiar faces of your long-lost Noble units looking you sadly in the eyes for the next 5 rolls.
Solutions:
- When you have an overwhelming majority of one type of unit (ex; Nobles), the game should be more likely to offer you more of that class of unit.
- The number of each unit should be doubled. (ex; 30 tier 1 units -> 60 tier 1 units), or everybody has a different champion pool with select options. (ex; You load in, and you have guardians, elementalists, imperials and sorcerors as your champion pool. Next game you have nobles, wild, guardians and knights.)
- When you sell 2-3 copies of a unit, you should have a 2-3 reroll safety from seeing that unit again. (ex; I just sold 2 tier-2 garens trying to transition to gunslingers. My next shop reroll should not have 4 garens in it.)
ITEMS
Honestly, I can't even bulletpoint these. Items are a complete and utter mess. PVE rounds can offer you XP(? it was in PBE but may have gotten removed, haven't seen it in a while), gold, or items - sometimes a fully completed item. You will never get a substantial amount of money from a money drop unless you've not gotten an item drop yet. Money is the least useful drop from PVE rounds because it's the one resource you cannot immediately put to use without wasting it. You can't commit to building items early, because you may never be able to build a comp that can take advantage of that item. You just built Morellonomicon? Man, that's going to go GREAT on your Vayne! Rapidfire cannon? Hey, that's a +1 range on Braum, you're killing it dude! It's so obnoxious. Did you actually get items that synergize with your team comp and enable you to be stronger than you otherwise would be? HEXTECHED LOL!
PLAYERS
Yeah, this gets its own section. Sure, it's strategic to use the limited champion and item pool to block your competition from completing their build. It feels absolutely awful to have that happen to you, though, and while that's no reason to work on fixing that mechanic, what about the people who'll join TFT games in queues of 2-4 people and have one person dictated as the "carry", and everybody else just focuses on denying the other randoms in the game? I gotta tell you, it's so cool and amazing to have the 10hp players who pick first just sit threateningly around the carousel, daring the higher-ups to go for a unit/item and then they snag it. What do they do with it? They sit on it. They buy your units in the shop. They just watch for what you want and they deny you it, especially items, because items aren't redistributed when you knock those players out of the game. But of course then you have to contend with the big carry boy who was allowed all his units and items. That's fun and able to be played around.
TFT is fundamentally broken and will continue to be until Riot takes some kind of action on any of these things.
