Leon Gallagher

NEW PATCH LANE SWAP DETECTED

Hey folks. I’d like to talk to you today about removing Augments from the end of game and match history, and, therefore, from stats sites. The last time we tried to remove the Augment stats in Runeterra Reforged, we saw some immediate positives toward TFT game health—lobbies had a wider range of Augments taken, unique compositions crafted, and innovative strategies appeared more frequently. However, due to the way we implemented the change, people could scrape match history, creating an unfair advantage. You can read about the last time we talked about it on Reddit. Since then, we’ve been monitoring the impact and are still unhappy with what stats sites do to how players interact with TFT. Rather than experiment and explore the large amount of content, players rush to conclusions based on that data. In addition, we’ve seen on the competitive side that not every region has equal access to stats, which creates another competitive integrity issue. We saw at the Vegas Open that having everyone play without access to those led to a fantastic event with unique plays—anyone remember Milala’s Learning to Spell victory (back when that Augment was not high-priority)? Since then, we’ve kept all other mechanics mostly out of our match history and APIs. We kept portals off of there explicitly to ensure we didn’t end up with a world where sites were saying exactly what the best champs and Augments were on each portal, each encounter, etc. Anomaly buffs in Into the Arcane are similarly not on match history for this very reason. So, in the spirit of game health and competitive fairness, we will take another stab at this and remove Augments from match history, starting with the launch of Into the Arcane. Removing them from match history ensures there is no way to scrape everything to create stats and should lead to a more dynamic discussion around the content of the set. We know some players won’t be happy with this change, and we get that. But that does not change that this is the fairest thing to do for future competitions. Past that, this change will also lead to better game health and enjoyment. Having tried this once before, we’re pretty confident in our updated approach to this decision. All that said, we will monitor and change if it turns out we were wrong. Have fun, enjoy the launch of Into the Arcane, and take it easy :)