Q&A Stream Friday, so again today I’m going to knock out some of the easy ones. Leaving the spicy ones for Friday.

“Why no Exalted Emblem this set?” – We had one initially in testing and we were finding it to be TOO general and almost always good, especially late game. The ability to get it and two other exalted made late game comps too easy to boost up. When something is more accessible we have to nerf it, which led to base exalted feeling weak. Also seeing the emblem on Stage 5+ carousels was almost always instant take, which wasn’t great either.

“If you could go back in time to the beginning of set 1, what would you do differently in TFT?” – A couple things probably. Change the AD system so the AD & AP systems aren’t so different like they are now. Probably more experiments with the item system, things like only 2 items but sharper items and how you get them being different. And then from the tech side, probably find a way to increase our memory budgets so we can include more champs or features in a given set. Also leave a note saying “Don’t make kiss curse stuff IDIOT” to myself.

“What’s stopping TFT from patching more frequently?” – A bunch of things. First, for the player experience, we are probably close to patching too much as is. A lot of potential players that might enjoy TFT often churn because of how much the game changes. They learn how to play a line well, only for it to be changed 2 weeks later, makes it hard to value those learnings. Ideally we launch in a good spot and don’t NEED to patch so often. On the Dev side, getting patches properly tested and deployed all over the world, as well as localized for each region, takes time. Trying to do that every week or more, means an almost impossible amount of work to keep up for something that, again, shouldn’t be necessary. It’s not the best sign if we have to patch more often for everyone.

“What’s your favorite gift your kids have given you?” – My wife and daughter took my shoes, took a picture of her wearing those shoes (this is when she was like 6, so the shoes were comically large) and then made a cute picture frame of it with a cute little caption. I always remember it because of how funny the shoes look and her big smile.

“Are item anvils completely random? And if so, why not change it to have some tailoring?” – Currently anvils are pure random. You get 4 out of 8 of the component possibilities, that’s it. Typically when something like that gets made, often people go for the most straight forward solution. However, I actually agree here and this is one of the things on our backlog. Anvils, and augments that grant items, currently have situations that fall under my “Bad experiences for the player you should never allow to happen” that we need to resolve. We fixed a couple of them, but for example, opening 5 anvils and seeing 0 tears…isn’t the kind of experience a player should be having. I’m hoping we can fix that one sooner rather than later.

There ya go. Have a great Tuesday, and take it easy 🙂