6/20 PBE Update: Continued TFT Testing & More Tentative Balance Changes

Table of Contents

• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Miscellaneous 

• Teamfight Tactics continues testing on the PBE! Sign up for a PBE Account here, and keep an eye out on the PBE status page for announcements for when the PBE is going down for maintenance, etc! You can also report bugs on the PBE boards, or in the specific TFT thread!

Here's Riot skiteacher2 with an update on PBE capacity while TFT tests - "PBE overwhelmed by excitement for Teamfight Tactics" :

"From the team building Teamfight Tactics, thank you PBE community for the excitement and enthusiasm shown for TFT. We are so happy about the level of community engagement... though this excitement has also surfaced a couple of problems that you deserve some answers for. 

PBE capacity 

The PBE has always been designed to allow a small number of players to test new systems and content before it goes live. The community excitement for TFT has overwhelmed the capacity PBE is designed to support, so many players are being queued waiting for their turn to connect. If this massive influx of testers represented a permanent increase in the regular PBE population, we'd increase PBE capacity. We think TFT's launch is an exceptional case, though, and once it goes live we expect the PBE population to return to levels our current capacity can handle. We therefore are not going to increase the capacity of PBE at this time. 

Getting kicked out of queue 

Players being queued in login has also surfaced a problem in the queuing system for login: if you wait in queue for an extremely long time, sometimes you get kicked out altogether. We have heard you loud and clear that the experience is painful and feels super bad, especially when compounded with the capacity situation. We are working on fixing the issue before TFT goes live, meaning you'll at least be able to _reliably _wait in line once the fix ships. Thanks to this catch, Live will not experience the bug when TFT launches—PBE doing its job! 

We hope that explaining the current situation provides confidence that your testing efforts—even waiting in queue—are meaningfully making TFT's full release as stable as it can possibly be. To all PBE testers, thank you!"

Riot August provided a list of TFT balance and bugfixes:

"These are the champion changes coming in for today's PBE deploy (6/20) Also some bugfixes to player damage."

• Base HP reverted from 580 to 576.16
• Mana reverted from 320 to 302.2
• Base AD reverted from 60 to 60.04 
• Base movespeed reverted from 340 to 335

• [All changes reverted, look for more testing in a later cycle!]

Context & Notes

"The syndra changes for 9.13 are
Mana per lvl 30 -> 40
Hp per lvl 90 -> 95"

"Hi folks, 

Usual Disclaimers 

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 

TFT 

At time of writing TFT's been out on the PBE for nearly 24 hours. It's been exciting and a little tense watching to see what you folks will think and how the PBE server will cope with so much more demand to play than it normally gets. Very grateful for all your feedback so far, whether you've had a chance to play yourself or have checked it out on a stream. Wanted to run through a bunch of things we're planning and things we're considering doing so notes on those below. We'll also have a dev blog going out tomorrow that covers some of our thinking around design principles for TFT and some longer term plans.  

Things that will be in upcoming patches (some first patch post launch, some a bit later): 

• DPS meters.
• More detailed unit stats when you Right Click a unit to inspect them.
• More bug fixing, though we're hoping to hit all the big stuff at least before it leaves PBE.
• A ranked queue.
• Improved clarity around unit positioning on the board. Likely involves further work on the ground textures to make movement easier to track, could well include an toggle option to show a subtle hexgrid overlay all the time.
• Refinements to PVE rounds including difficulty tuning.
• Ways to get more information about what items will build into without having to commit them to units first.
• Additional balance and bug fixing (these should be in every patch for a while). 

Some things we're discussing based off feedback so far: 

• It's a common point of feedback that players feel like the board is too small. We're happy with it as it is currently and want to give it a bit more time to see how positional play does or does not develop with the currently available space. We're open to revisiting though if the feeling persists with players, especially if it reduces depth in the game.
• Similarly we think a maximum unit cap of 9 is the right place to be, especially given things like Force of Nature that let you exceed that cap and other items that let you add additional synergies. Again, open to revisiting though once things have had a bit of time to play out.
• What our options are to make two and three star units more distinct and more satisfying. We'll likely refine the existing silver and gold visual effects further regardless, especially given we think they're looking really good on some champs and not others at present. Discussing other angles as well.
• What additional information to next work on conveying through the scoreboard on the right hand side of the screen. It currently just shows player name/health, should we make adding things like loss/win streaks to it for example a priority ahead of other TFT work?
• Whether we’ve got the tuning right on how much damage a player who loses a round takes. For the first day of PBE that calculation was bugged and often higher than intended. Watching to see whether the intended values are appropriate or whether we should also make some adjustments so that games don’t resolve too suddenly or drag on forever.
• Whether item drop rates are too high or too low and how much we should or shouldn’t be controlling variation in items earned from PVE rounds for different players.

Little Legends 

In addition to their role in TFT we're also looking to bring Little Legends to other game modes. We want to make sure we're not damaging combat clarity by doing so though and a lot of extra units running around in the middle of a fight can make things quite a bit harder to follow. We've got some behavior in place for them as a result where they'll show up in ARAM games but hang back from the action. They'll be visible, but not in prime combat areas and will run towards the Nexus when an enemy champion gets too close. Play-testing so far's suggested that's a promising approach for making them still appreciable but avoiding them feeling underfoot and in the way. Plan is to see how that goes in regular games, refine the approach further, then see whether there are appropriate ways to get them into SR games as well, using both lessons from ARAM and potentially other techniques again. 

Sona 

Sona’s been a really interesting champ to track the playrate and performance of recently, with the emergence of Sona plus a tanky support (usually Taric) bot lanes showing a lot of strength. Some thoughts on her as a result:

• Our starting point is that it’s good to see new picks getting used in different positions provided they’re not crowding other options out.
• From a power perspective Sona’s stats in various skill ranges are on the border of what we’d generally consider overpowered. Digging into the numbers more however it looks like Sona + support is stronger than those averages suggest. There’s still a lot of support Sona data mixed in in solo queue, with Sona + Taric for example being dramatically stronger than Sona as a support statistically. In pro some teams have a very high pick or ban rate with Sona + X and we believe that that would be the case for most other teams as well if she remains in her current state for an extended period.
• We’re confident Sona’s too strong as a result and will be taking some power out of her. We’re targeting her AP scaling on Q and E, rather than her bases, looking to bring down Sona’s power with higher income/more aggressive (AP) builds than with more utility item and/or lower income builds.
• Goal here isn’t to push Sona out of the ADC position necessarily, but to address overall power. It’s possible that does end up with her no longer seeing ‘ADC’ play if that’s something that only happens when her numbers are out of line."

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