Mortdog admits TFT’s ban on Augment stats sites was ‘naive’ as Riot changes course

A ban on sites collecting Teamfight Tactics Augment data is set to get reverted, according to game designer Stephen “Mortdog” Mortimer on Aug. 9, as the experiment comes to an end. 

Riot Games introduced a new API policy through Patch 13.12, limiting data that third-party sites could collect—specifically win rates on Augments at each Stage. Since the ban went into effect on June 14, the TFT team was “happy with the results,” according to Mortdog, but not at the expense of how the changes might impact the autobattler over time. 

“We were naive to think that everyone would happily go along with this and just adopt this way of approaching the game,” Mortdog said.

Data scraping of match histories, which includes Augments chosen for that game, became a problem that was conveyed to the TFT team. And the only solution to prevent this type of data scraping was to remove Augments from a player’s match history. To the TFT team, removing Augments from a player’s history was “an extremely harsh trade-off.”

“But we also aren’t willing to remove the ability to share match history and with it, the social moments that we love sharing, just to reap the wider benefits of removing stats,” Mortdog said.

Starting with the TFT Set 9.5 Mid-Set update, all changes made to the API through Patch 13.12 will get reverted. 

“As I’ve often said, design isn’t always about finding the perfect solution, but making tradeoffs to best solve the problem at hand,” Mortdog said. “So here, we think the best state is to revert the augment stats removal starting with the Runeterra Reforged Mid-Set.”

The initial ban was never a permanent change, but rather one that Riot and the TFT team wanted to evaluate over a “period of time,” according to Mortdog. And not making any changes going forward wasn’t an option due to the data-mining of Augments through a player’s history. 

Related: Riot surprisingly changes TFT Worlds seeds for Runeterra Reforged World Championship

No date for the Mid-Set update has been announced at time of writing. The NA Mid-Set tournament takes place from Aug. 25 to 27, making the update likely to occur either on Aug. 30 or Sept. 18 through Patch 13.18.