TFT has had it’s share of rough patches. When a rough patch occurs, there are usually two immediate questions from players and devs. “How did this happen?” and “What are we doing about it?”

How did this happen is honestly a tough one to be transparent about externally. In the modern area, many are often not kind when it does and that pressure can make things worse. So today, assume it’s Mort’s fault and keep venting your frustrations my way. I don’t mind, and I get it!

Instead, let’s use today’s post to run down what the first 24 hours look like when it happens, to help inform what we are doing about it.

3am-10am: This is when we, like many of you, are looking at various discords and streams, and checking initial stats to see how the patch landed, and start to get a sign of the quality of the patch. It can range from good, to just ok, to bad, to ITS ON FIRE. This time is meant to get a grasp on the severity of the situation if there is on. If it’s real bad, we could know as soon as 3am (don’t ask about sleeping habits) if it’s off.

10am-12pm: After getting ahold of the situation, product and design discuss what action should be taken if any. The severity, weighed against possible solutions on how to fix, and taken into account to form a plan. Can it wait a week for a proper B patch? Is the issue so deep rooted it has to wait for a full patch? Or is the fire so bad we need to drop everything and fix the next day? This is usually around where this decision is already made, which is wild since it’s less than 24 hours since the patch has been live. We also have to take into account other factors such as timing around competitive events across the many regions of the world.

From here, obviously based on what choice we make, paths diverge…but in any case, if we decide to take action before the next patch, we have to immediately start doing the following:

Come up with a finalized plan for the patch and it’s size, taking into account the already planned changes of the next patch. Goal is usually as small as possible to address the issues.

Run sims with those changes to ensure they are doing the job they need to. Nothing worse than shipping an urgent fix and have it not address the issue (which has happened).

Prepare the patch package into the branch cut and have QA check it to ensure it didn’t break anything and the changes were implemented correctly. People make mistakes in high stress situations.

Finally engineers take the changes and deploy them to players across the globe, ensuring that the changes is a smooth process that doesn’t disrupt players.

Then once all that is done, the team often goes back and looks at that original question of how did this happen, and retro what can be done or needs to change to ensure it is less likely to happen again.

Hopefully this provides some visibility into the process of what goes on behind the scenes. If you’ve made it this far, and are an active TFT player, the current patch is in this category and we are actively going through this process right now to get things in a better state. Likely an update later today on when you can expect changes.

That’s it for today. Thanks for your passion around TFT, and all the various opinions I get, as they do help inform the situation. Until later, take it easy 🙂

Link to Mortdog’s original post