Big changes are coming to Teamfight Tactics.
Riot Games’ design director Andrei “Meddler” van Roon was fully transparent with fans in today’s Dev Corner post, sharing TFT’s preseason timeline and explaining the next steps for the revamped player-versus-environment (PvE) drop system.
Preseason timeline
Meddler outlined the different stages of the TFT preseason roll out, citing all of the communication steps Riot will follow until it goes live on Nov. 19.
- Around Oct. 10, Riot will start talking through its goals for the preseason.
- Riot will then show some of the key things changing in the preseason during the 10th Anniversary Edition of Riot Pls livestream (Oct. 15 at 8pm CT).
- After that, Riot will post a written rundown of all the big preseason changes on the Nexus.
- Preseason changes will start turning up on the PBE around Oct. 22. The changes will be on the PBE for a couple of patch cycles (roughly four weeks) to give more time than usual to gather feedback, tune numbers, and fix bugs.
- The preseason goes live on Nov. 19 in Patch 9.23.
Riot aims to keep this timeline solid barring any unexpected issues.
PvE drop system
As a whole, Riot is happy with the big changes to TFT’s PvE drop system that came with Patch 9.18. The update made it so drops could now offer extra gold, units, and Neeko’s Help, a new item that allows you to make a one-star copy of one of your champions.
While the system had some immediate success, there are still some changes that Meddler said will be addressed in Patch 9.19.
Four-cost units will no longer come from PvE drops before Krugs, fixing the possibility of getting a Draven before any player-versus-player (PvP) rounds even happened.
The amount of gold players can get from drops will also be tuned down a bit since Riot believes it “overswung a little.” That’s a bit of an understatement because players were able to earn over 10 gold from drops in one PvE round.
Neeko’s Help will become a bit more common since it was rarer than intended. Spatulas, on the other hand, will drop less because “Spatula based plays” were becoming too common of a strategy in the meta.
Along with Patch 9.19, Riot will release information and stats about TFT’s play rate.
