Hey Big A, I'm a challenger TFT player and I can basically corroborate everything that you said. It's lowkey disheartening to find the general player base disliking the set for being too hard when all the competitive players I speak to on a regular basis are in love with Set 10. I personally haven't had this much fun in TFT since like set 6. I REALLY hope Riot and Mr. Mortimer Dog doesn't pull back from this direction.
7:50 this is exactly why I play games. I play games to relax, have fun, and win pretty easily. This is why I play single player or coop games, so that way the game doesn't have to be balanced.
A lot of my casual friends only play reroll comps which is basically like playing slots. You press the button over and over and see if you hit the correct units or not.
Unironically its crazy that by getting a game like csgo, with crazy skill expression that is deeply intricate mechanically, and adding a literal slot machine with skins, you can make a super long lasting game satisfying both audiences in certain ways, sometimes with the same person fulfilling both audiences.
CS:GO / CS2 does not have much of a casual audience. The bell curve of players was weird where most of the playerbase was around the MG2/DMG rating. The casual players in silver is a small population of players that usually quit the game shortly after starting it. The odd player here or there that sticks around to get better is small enough in number that the gold nova ranks have less players than MG2/DMG.
11 years ago I played a little game on release called Outwitters that was tipped to be top-selling mobile game and was my life for years, but it was dead on release. Pure skill with very little luck. No gacha, and max $10 could be spent on the game. I learnt so much about competative play, but also what makes a bad game (financially). This was before gacha too, when in app purchases were considered a problem, let alone gambling..
I had to look that game up but the second I saw a screenshot it INSTANTLY brought me back I loved that game so much when it came out! I would've been a senior in high school, I guess the only reason I stopped playing it was because I went out into the real world and got a job, and when I wasn't working I'd play League because I was addicted lol
@Simple_City yeah I tried to pick it back up and you can take 4 days to take a turn - I could do it then but my attention span now wouldn't let me, other games are easier to focus on
i mean, it depends on the market really. there've been some very successful rhythm games on mobile that don't have any gacha elements and that genre is skill-based as well. Some games just fail to find their audience. Granted, I've never heard of this game so maybe it was just a bit trash.
@Lee-fw5bd it had the same issues TFT currently has as discusses in the video, and a bad monetisation model (the free content was better than the paid content competatively)
I've seen a similar trend go through a lot of FPS games over time as well. Developers have been trying to make "winning" less important over time. Originally you had things like Quake which were 1v1 and essentially pure skill. Then games like early COD are still mostly skill, but there's some a little bit of team and killstreak elements which leave more room for ambiguity where if you die, it wasn't "necessarily" you're own fault. Then games like Overwatch got big, where it's purely team based and players can always blame losses on their healer/tank/dps, not themselves. There's always someone else to fault. Then battle royals got big and now there's not even an expectation of winning. If there are 150 people in Warzone, you don't even care anymore if you die. The progression of minimizing the consequences for losing has been going on for quite some time.
I used to play a Battle Royale called Rumbleverse that was melee- and wrestling-focused and it was so incredibly skill based that there were absolute monsters around who would have 50+% winrates in a 40-player lobby game. Game shut down after 6 months because no casual wants to play a game where you can't even get a hit in on someone better than you.
@@DschonathanRIP Rumbleverse man, it was so good. I was pretty bad at the game honestly but when I pulled a sick or funny move off I felt like a god, it was such a rewarding gane to play.
There is definitely skill to any pvp fps though... With battle royales you aren't gonna win by luck, you need to win with skill, yeah there have been some games and some times that there was insanely stupid 0 skill ways of winning but that isn't very common.
@@thefoxsaysno9951 No, I think you are misunderstanding. I'm saying that because FPSs take skill, and players don't want to be reminded of their lack of skill through losses, developers have been shifting games towards modes where the onus of losing is shifted away from the player. It takes skill to win a game of fortnight, but if you lose, you can also just blame it on the fact that there are dozens of other people so you're not expected to win.
For the record, at my university (amongst cs kids), it feels like everyone and their dog started playing tft after this set dropped. So, at least in my circles, this new set is a pretty big hit
This is something that I see with fighting games. Most people who buy a fighting game don't actually try and put the time in to actually learn the game and actually get enjoyment from it in how they want you to eventually play, when most people just think of fighters as "If I mash the button really hard and really fast, I'm going to win and I'm not going to bother learning anything else" and they just simply don't do anything past a few random sessions with maybe friends and whatever because it is so very much designed to be skill based, that people would rather play the simpler, much more shallow games because they don't need to think about what's going on
Honestly, the learning experience for fighting games is not very fun or intuitive for most people. And 1v1 competitive formats can be too high stakes and stressful for a lot of people. Its not about needing to think, its about having a fun experience for new players to want to keep playing the game more and eventually get better naturally.
It's not specifically about casual vs tryhard but instead about intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to play. You can suck at a game but still enjoy it as long as you're getting better or others might be very good at a game but still get frustrated by not being rewarded for it
Not really. Fast 9 or playing jazz is just so consistent right now. But yeah casuals going for vertical comps just dont get to win anymore. No more yordles, astrals etc...
This makes me realize how weird I am. I only like games that are insanely skill based because losing due to RNG and not skill ruins it for me. I want to know there was something I could have done differently so in the future I will improve and get better.
Funny thing is I feel like this set is far more rng than the previous one actually. You can no longer pick a legend to get the augments you want so that became more rng. Some comps are just stupidly op and it feels like people that get the correct headliner and champs overall insta win. Yeah sure, you pivot more, cause if you get headliner samira you instantly switch to playing country executioners and insta win the match.
StarCraft is the ultimate “‘no rng” game, not because it doesn’t have it (ask artosis about attacking up high ground lol) but because of the sheer quantity and novelty of situations in any given game. Collectively, any “bad coin flips” are drowned out by the innumerable, intentional mechanical and strategic elements. The other important part is that it is 1v1 so no other people to add their own uncontrollable variables into the mix.
The interesting thing about this is that Magic the Gathering has pretty much solved this problem a while ago. You can solve this by incentivizing people to play regardless of complexity, like putting rare items that are only possible by playing, or have a release cycle of sets in which some sets appeal to the casual audience and others appeal to the hardcore players. It is possible to have a set has both high complexity and casual appeal, but it seems like they haven't quite found the formula for it.
I think that is a bit of a stretch personally. I think what has magic is that first it has different game modes ie Commander is very casual but Modern or Legacy isn't and its why the former has a larger player base, tft doesn't have different formats really other than like hyper roll. Second Magic and all card games really, have a session 0. It's easy to find a friend group to talk to and discuss what powerless you want to play with in 1v1 or even 4 player commander but tft won't have that due to being an online only game unless you have 7 friends who want to play. Even still Magic Arena had the issue as well of people quitting because people just slam META all day.
I heard that part of TFT's big pull in China is that the game resembles mahjong in a way, so the dudes that'd normally be in smokey basements betting mahjong are instead in smokey internet cafes rerolling like maniacs lol
I don’t know how TFT works, but looks like it might be a good idea to make it more like a slot machine for low elo players, and make it more skill-based the better you are. Maybe it is a win-win doing like this, with casual players and skilled players enjoying the game more
I feel like another good game to look at would be drafts in magic the gathering. I know you play but I'm not sure how much draft. It is of course heavily luck based, but the difference between a good drafter and a bad one is immense. unlike TFT however the high skill high intensity formats are generally loved by the community, and simpler more rng heavy formats are generally hated.
I think there's also a difference in longevity for skill and luck based games. I played nearly every set in tft, sometimes nearly the whole set, some sets just for a short while, but I always stopped at some point. And on the other side there's rocket league, a game that I started playing one week after it released in 2015 and since then never stopped playing, with my biggest hiatus being like 2-3 weeks max.
I've played TFT since Set 1 but only got into it in Set 2, peaking at Plat in Set 3. After that though, I couldn't play much because I got busy IRL. I've mainly played on and off the past couple of sets but noticed that with the new set mechanics it got increasingly harder to get into the game without spending a lot of time in it, which I didn't have. I wasn't planning on playing TFT again anytime soon but I do love the musical theme of the new set and I'm curious how harder it got so I might try to play again soon.
I just want to add. Even though the new sets is probably more skill-based, there's still a lot of RNG in the game. The skill seems to come more from managing the RNG and ironically set 9 helped lower that RNG. So, I feel like it's a case where reducing RNG helped make the game easier but lowered skill expression, so now they removed that, making the game harder for casuals but leaves the competitive players unaffected.
I don't really think it makes any sense to bring up Genshin and other Gacha games because that gambling doesn't have to do much with the actual gameplay loop which is just doing quests, exploring and killing enemies/bosses. The gambling there can get you a really good character but at the end of the day to do well in those types of games it's not just about having a good character but being able to survive and kill enemies. While the Gacha is entirely random it doesn;'t really have much to do with rng in the gameplay loop.
Fighting games may be niche but they live in that right half, and honestly most competitive games do (or high-end raiding in mmos) once you're at high enough rank
I only bought StarCraft 2 because I wanted to play Squad TD with my friends. I havent played it in years but I liked that a lot more than any of the newer iterations like auto chess or tft
This set is actually fantastic. I've avoided TFT for a while (and switched to Legends of Runeterra) because I wanted a game with some more skill expression that felt like it had better design. LoR is brilliantly designed and super accessible, but it also infamously doesn't make enough money for Riot to invest in it like with TFT or League. I came back to TFT specifically for this set, but I can totally see why players would leave. I can't even have a second video playing while I play TFT because this set requires real focus if you want to win. Disappointing but understandable that this is making the game less popular. I think Atrioc's analysis on this trend is pretty insightful; shows that he has a lot of meta-knowledge about how these markets operate. Great video!
Been playing ranked TFT since set 1, masters the last 3 sets, I would say I'm relatively casual as I'm currently a full time college student with a full time job. 100% agree with Big A's take
I don't really think that more skill expression necessarily automatically makes a game "better", I think how good a game is should be based on how FUN it is to play, and honestly, TFT clearly found a really solid niche that sat at a good balance between luck and skill for a specific audience of people, and now they've turned that audience against them by pivoting.
This reminds me a lot of how in siege the meta got degraded from being highly utility based and plan based to more run and gun. It killed a lot of competitive depth to the game but bc it was more aim bro and there was a significantly lower bar of entry siege is doing pretty well for itself now (at least as well as a game owned by ubi can do.) People were happier with being able to blame bad luck for missing an aim duel compared to blaming themselves for improperly droning, clearing site, etc. People also hate learning new maps in that game for that reason, if they get out-knowledged on a map they get mad and immediately call it bad bc they cant blame luck.
I'm a dogshit TFT player, and so I've gotten the opposite end of the spectrum. Since everyone I'm playing with is dogshit, we can all still effectively play the old way where you just see what you have at like the end of first 3 minions and just force it down mid, and you usually either get lucky and get some funny 3* 1 and 3-4 cost or you get out early and it at least the game was short. Even though there is a lot more skill expression, because I don't really put in the effort to have skill I can stay in the gamba side
Gambling in video games is very scary. When I walk into a casino I am aware that it is designed from the ground up to steal as much money as possible. When I play a video game, im not prepared for random gambling. I think it makes it a lot easier to justify throwing away a tremendous amount of money on video game gambling.
Some games can pull off the purely skill based thing, but sometimes a game is just slop. I havent played tft, but it sounds like slop, so while it might be good for dedicated players to make the game more skill based, the pure audience just wants their rng slop so the purpose of tft is to be slop Smash is a decent (not good) example of how to handle it, which is to just split the playerbase. I say smash isnt a good example because the character balancing is terrible, but how the player base is split up works
Genshin actually also has had a rift between casual and hardcore players though. Although relatively small, there is some skill expression in the combat and there's a noticeable difference in damage output if you know what you're doing, but the devs rarely cater to that side of the playerbase lol. There was even a huge fuss about it a couple of months ago where a dev in an interview said the one more skill based part of the game was already "too stressful" so they didn't want to add more.
I think the big thing this set that is missing for the casuals is an economy trait with ridiculous cashouts. Hitting prismatic heartsteel is basically 1/1000 and at 7 heartsteel you're not gonna have massive clickbait cashouts. Compare that to set 9 piltover literally handing you a 3 star 5 cost or turning all of your items radiant... yea. They want the gamba back.
I get this take, but it really only applies to PvP/Competitive games, right? Singleplayer games have so many other things that contribute to their popularity such as narrative, exploration, etc. Those don't really fit on the sliding scale suggested here. Feel like the conversation is a lot more nuanced. After all, if this is the case why wpuld Baldurs Gate 3 have outsold Diablo IV? Not saying that there's no such thing as the Skill-RNG scale and how it affects audience numbers. I just don't think it's as prominent a consideration for ALL games as it is for PvP games.
I think if you zoom out the scale is about internal satisfaction from achievement and expression and external satisfaction from blinking lights and spectacle. Surely some nerd with a fresh game design degree can elaborate on this more precisely. And clearly games don't just fall onto a gradient between A and B, there is a million other factors why some games succeed and get popular while others don't. Baldur's Gate 3 specifically is the most Lightning in a Bottle game for a long time, nobody ever would have expected it to go off as hard as it did.
@@Dschonathan Yeah, you're right. It's more a discussion of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation to play and keep coming back to a game. Guess I just got lost in the details a bit. I'm personally not the best at games, but I do enjoy them. A good narrative and an interesting world to explore is often what gets me to stick with a game. One of the reasons I'm a huge fan of CRPG's in general like Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder, Tyranny, etc. Great narratives and interesting worlds set in games that have a lot of skill expression and replayability, which is what left me a bit conflicted when I wrote my original comment. It's interesting to think about though, I do wonder if there's a GMTK video on this kind of thing.
Rainbow six siege is a great example of this The game at it's core remained the same for about 7 years Then they slowly started implementing new monetization mechanics to the game But those never messed with the core gameplay. The gameplay and monetization were completely separate from each other. So none of us cared. We understood that the company behind the game was trying to find more ways to make money because, it's a company at the end of the day. And that was fine. But now that all the slot machines they always wanted to implement are in the game, they are trying to find ways to make the game as casual as possible to attract more...well...casual players to increase the amount of people playing the 'slot machines' and try and make more money And because of that, players like me who've played the game for over 6 years and also every OG content creator have started quitting the game. They're losing their original fanbase which is being replaced by new casual players coming in. Which only increases the frustration for the old players that want to play the game in a tactical way because now we have to play with people that don't give a shit about tactics Not trying to plug someone here but one of the OG r6 content creators called 'bikinibodhi' just made a video about this a couple of days ago explaining why he is going to quit making r6 content even though it means the death of his youtube channel saying that 'he promised himself from the beginning he will never make content that he doesn't enjoy making just for monetary gains'. He's been making siege content for 8 years and now he decided to keep the promise he made to himself all those years ago Maybe it could be an interesting watch for anyone interested in this subject
thats weird ive played 20 games now this tft set followed a guide and all the same comp 19 times top 4 one time 5th feels like every set before to me :D
For years and years casino's have triumphed and grown, but thats because everyone else was not as good as you and kept losing money. But you are better, you will change it! Let's gamble 😎
They should just make casual the version before and competitive the current version. Sure it divides the player base but it’s the only way to make both players happy.
Set is fun but I understand that the most important customer is the general audience. If they make the least amount of money and have the least amount of active players then it shows who won. Money always talk and Big A is right about that fact. At the end of the day, what matters is if it makes profit otherwise you might as well just go back to being an indie company.
I actually think games like TFT or way more addictive than gambling due to barrier for entry and accessibility. You don't need money to play TFT, you can literally lay on a couch and just play every single day.
No idea why Atroic spoke about TFT when litteraly every loot based game is a gambling machine which turns time into dopamine rush when a chase item drops.
I agree, but, the way it forces you to make new decisions is by making the early stuff you drafted worse. Like imagine if in magic the gathering. Your pack 3 in a draft was always all rares. It would be more challenging to navigate color commitments early if you knew that. Headliners make it so that you have this singular decision point that is heavily weighted higher as the game goes on. I would argue that even if you are way better and it is more competitively interesting. The game is still less fun and deserves the downvotes.
You can make easy games that are still purely skillful but easier Example is most fighting games have characters that are USUALLY worse but much easier to play and win with at lower levels Good game design would be making those easy characters just something fun for low level players to have fun with to get them into the game, while technical and difficult characters are the most rewarding, but sometimes games just say fuck it and dont do that
I have no clue what I'm doing in TFT, only playing this set becaue KDA is in it. I've dabbled in past sets and grinded set 7, i think. It's disappointing for me because IDK how to make KDA work and just get rolled whenever I play them.
There are huge exceptions to that “slot machine make money” mentality in gaming tho. Take Elden Ring as a recent example. High learning curve, no luck, and no way to spend more than the base game costs (like loot boxes or whatever). In all respects you’d think that is a recipe for a failure, but it popped off because the game is a masterpiece. I still believe that if you make a good game you’ll find an audience.
I've made it to diamond a few sets in tft. But now that I have to turn on my brain I'm like ew yuck 😂. It's still incredibly fun and I'll see how far I get
And now the devs are pushing slots into every. single. game. I just wanna kill zombies, not play slots for a chance to win a piece of gear I need to no insta-die.
I disagree with the genshin walking on the edge of slot machine. Genshin is set up perfectly between gatcha and skill. Its a gatcha game which you do not need to do the gatcha part at all. As you can beat the whole story and do everything in the game by only skill, because you level your characters outside of the gatcha part. But if you want to go max world level and do the late late game, you will need to make good comps. Thats why you see streamers spending tens of thousands+ and casual players spending 0. Because casual players just want to beat the story. I dont really play it anymore but im world level 5 or 6 with around 250 hours. And I have spent 0. I only have 3 five stars but 2 of them I have never used. So the gatcha part is not forced at all.
I want to clarify that I'm not sure it can be said set 10 is an objectively better game. It may be more complex or demanding, but to a casual player base that wants something fun, that does not mean better. If you put dark souls bosses into Animal Crossing, that would ruin the game. I guess TFT needs to decide what kind of game it wants to be and be the best at that.
As someone who got plat last season by literally just hard slamming any comp that I looked that was good only. I am getting smashed this season for the most part haha
It was a great design choice. Reduced pool sizes means there's a lot less 4/5 cost 3 stars and the set is balanced around 1/2 cost 3* carries not being viable for endgame comps (except for outliers like Annie). It's actually a massive improvement over set 4 chosen, because at high level play you basically have to swap headliners as you level, so it somehow moves the needle towards both skill expression and slots at the same time.
Crazy the the Free Market (aka execs at game firms) is going to decide whether to take unfair advantage of human psychology and make games worse qua games. Capitalism truly takes everything we value in non-commodity ways and makes people value them as commodities before as the things they are -- art, video games, technology, everything.
I've never played this game once in my entire life but, it's only the best set ever to good players right? The reason it's performing worse is becasue the majority of players aren't that good. So it's not "good" for most players, I personally hate when games cater to the more elite mfers. One game I play has a pro who helps with balancing and he made some of the worst balancing changes that literally nobody liked, but since he's so good he was basically unaffected, it made the game more of a challenge for himself while straightup ruining some shit for other players. I'm not sure you can consider something "good" if most of the playerbase doesn't like it.
What they need to do is start marketing this game towards the kind of people who like souls-likes by *using* *these* *exact* *facts* to display the actual necessary skill. Because, those kinds of players weren't really playing TFT before, because it was too far on the slot machine side. I'm not gonna pretend that there is as large a market of those kinds of players as the casual players, but they do exist, and if this level of balance is the perfect mixture for your core playerbase, you should atleast try marketing to a different audience, rather than backing off what your core players consider the peak experience.
