Holy cow great video, genuinely the quotes and the way you actually formulated/articulated some very core principles of truly improving and understanding the game or spot versus memorizing or finding formulaic solutions is something that I not only have a hard time articulating but also is something that I actually find myself needing to work on in my own play. Super enjoyable watch, felt like poetry for real
Just throwing my random thoughts out, not really a coherent argument: While I like the change, I don't like the fact that top players who have access to study groups will have significantly better information than the rest of us. Especially us plebs down in diamond, floundering around in the dark. I agree with mort that removing this data is a net positive, but I personally don't play enough games each set to even come close to learning what the augment's power levels are. I am pretty sure that I will be even more conservative with my augment choices now, since I will have limited experience and no data. Before I knew stats were a thing, I would take the same few augments every game because I knew they were decent. In set 10 I basically took harmacist, cybernetic bulk, or binary airdrop every game. That was partially because bulk and airdrop were broken, but mainly because I didn't want to bot 4 games off of picking potentially crappy augments when i knew something like bulk was always a solid choice. On the flip side, someone like me doesn't play enough games to ever be in challenger or in elite competition, so it probably doesn't matter. I will get similar information from tftacademy and other tier lists. I guess in set 12 I enjoyed looking up stats on my phone as a way to kill time, so I'm sad that will be going away.
Good points. I remember when I played more casually and fewer games being risk averse to new augments since I wanted to have a higher floor on the few games I did play. This change harms players who fall in this category, though as you said, there will likely be substitute solutions like tier lists. It may encourage players in this group to experiment a bit more though, especially if tier lists appear unreliable or inconsistent. This may be a net plus as it forces creativity and experimentation.
I think this is an amazing update. When I started playing this game, I was looking for an edge that would help me climb a bit higher against players on computers or laptops. When I saw streamers using a stats tracker to choose their augments, I realized that this was their slight edge, and I was at a disadvantage because I play on iOS, which also limits my ability to do fast roll downs. Overall, an amazing update! Current Rank #689 🤦🏻♂
I don't like this change solely because augments are so imbalanced. The past day or 2 of PBE for example, there have been augments with 3.0 AVP and some augments with 6.0 AVP. So if we didn't have stats how would we know this, that some augments are just autolose and some are free top 4s? Do they expect the millions of silver/gold/plat casuals to play 1000 games and study every patch note to learn general augment strength?
I like this change overall as I'm honestly not a fan of just having stats open in the middle of a game and dictating your every decision based on them. However the one problem I have with the change is pro/high elo players that already have the infrastructure to share information will have a very big advantage over those that just don't have access to information beyond their own experience and what is publicly available.
I think that a lot of people forgot that data might be a double edge sword. Of course it is handy to know WR of your augment however, people tend to forget that one needs to create conditions to make an augment work and this condition is their board. I will low key miss those headless chickens aka gold players clicking blindlessy any augment with a highest win rate not taking into consideration neither their synergies nor current state of the game etc
@@alejandrobeltran4884 Thanks! I wouldn't say I was always good. I was hardstuck Masters for a while. But I've learned to enjoy the learning process and that's helped me climb a lot. Plus, coaching from top players and engaging with the community has helped a ton.
7:53 This has always been one of my biggest issues with Aug Stats. Stats cant ever contextualize your current board state. Snap picking the best stat augment isnt always going to be best and I definitely felt myself defaulting too much to the number over my own game sense especially at the end of this past set
100%. When I experimented with turning off stats, I found myself picking augments I normally wouldn't and finding unique situations to take advantage of them. When I had stats on, I'd often be too anchored to the lower avp augment over what may have been situationally better.
One thing that bothers me the most is bugged auguments, items etc. Like without stats how were you supposed to know find your center is broken? Or that ie on rapidfire caitlyn doesnt work, if they are gonna remove stats which are a clear indicator of broken things, they should put more efforit into less bugs making it through to live
100%. Mortdog said that they'll at the least try to communicate more proactively about buggy augments: www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1gqln4u/comment/lwyyxmw/
Interesting point. The downside of polling is that unless the vast majority of players have a significant pain with the status quo, change aversion will almost always lean toward keeping the status quo. So that approach would lead to minimal changes over the long term. I'm not familiar with how successful Runescape has been with growing their player base with that model?
The notion that people are lazy or don't want to think critically is disingenuous, especially when this is just presumed to be an internalized quality or attributed to stats existing. Instead, we should look at the conditions that produce the behavior we are associating with laziness or a lack of critical thinking. People turn to stats because they generally feel that TFT is a game about making optimal decisions-“play what you hit” in that you are given a set of conditions and are supposed to make the best choices around them (note that the game isn’t about, and actively punishes players for, playing what they find fun or developing a personal playstyle). However, players don't think that they have enough tools to find these optimal decisions. Without a practice tool, there are too many situations and variables to gain a depth of experience playing any given combination of augments, comps, and items. Without a relatively balanced and bug-free environment, decisions arrived at through logically analyzing one's own situation can routinely fail due to something just not working as described or being undertuned. Stats are one tool that players add to “experience” and “critical thinking” because neither of those tools are reliable in the state of the game as it exists. The notion that the player base is playing the game incorrectly by using stats, somehow ruining the gameplay experience, can’t be addressed until the dev team actually reckons with the fact that the conditions of the game encourages those behaviors.
There is no "competitive" scene of TFT. TFT is development it is as a casual game with a fair balance in mind. I really doubt that any decision is made with the competitive scene in mind. Mort dog was bringing the difference in competitive data from difente regions because different rigions in the past tend to develop different metas, but today we just copy from everyone what is the best comps
To the argument that "some region has more stats to look at, they have an advantage". I disagree with this. 1."Law of Large Numbers" This large amount of data would not always be helpful, it can also magnify some of the false positive trends, and ultimately result in false conclusions. 2. Each region has different player bases, and hence different orientations in playstyle, with large sample numbers, these biases can also be exaggerated. 3. By result, CN didn't perform well in this sets worlds, despite having the largest database. Overall, I like the idea of removing/nerfing the contribution of stats to general players augment choices, as it encourages players to learn the game from a bottom-up fashion, and rewards players' creativity and critical thinking. But the point of blaming some regions for having unfair advantages because they have a "larger sample pool" does not make sense, not to mention that most of the sites have data from all around the world (except CN), so technically we share the same sample pool (if you choose to look at data across all regions).
Thanks for your input, Saika! 1. I don't disagree, but would lean toward more data on average helping more than hurting since it'd give edge case scenarios a larger sample size. 2. True. 3. Do we know if CN has a larger data set than the rest of the world combined? You make a great point that most of the sites have data from all around the world except for CN. I didn't think about that. That alone eliminates the supposed advantage that I thought VN might have. In Diamond+ on tactics.tools advanced explorer, VN has an insane 1.4M vs NA 200k data set. This reinforces point 2 you made. If you look at aggregate stats, it might not capture the nuances of your specific region's meta & playstyle. Given that VN didn't have a data advantage, this may reinforce the idea that more games (experience) & larger population leads to more optimal play, which could mean that removing augment stats leads to a bigger advantage to regions that have larger populations & play more. So perhaps VN/CN will dominate even more in set 13? We'll see...
@@LearningTFT 1. It really depends on how deep you are looking into the stats. If you dive deep and look at stats with enough constraints, it might eliminate many of the "false positives" caused purely by large numbers (however, when you put more constraints it also reduces the sample size...), but a lot of the players only look at the numbers the overlay (metaTFT etc.) gives them in-game, a larger-than-needed statistical power would cause more harms in these situations. For example, at live patch, knowing that one's going for shape dragons, at 2-1 choose between Big Gains and Eternal Growth, do you think one is significantly better than the other or situational? what role does the law of large numbers play here? Also, this will combine with the self-reinforcement problem you talked about in this video and become a bigger issue. 3. Actually I don't know which side has a larger data, from my knowledge, CN has more players than the rest of the world combined, but a large amount of them play on the mobile version, and I heard that the mobile version has different numbers as TFT, so I'm quite confused about this...
I think that blackmarket stats will be a very real issue for tournaments and impossible to enforce in an online environment. If TFT tourneys were all LAN and in person, then it would be easy to enforce and say no stats or all stats, but in an online environment I worry. The set 13 champion might cheat their way to the top and we would have no way of knowing.
Blackmarket stats were simpler the last time stats were banned since people could still scrape the data off lolchess. That can't be done anymore since Riot is removing augments from end game data in their API. So the only way for players to do it now is manually. You'd need to get a large enough group of players together to manually track. This seems unreasonable to do at large enough scale for the sample sizes to be viable. And probably still not useful at Challenger level, which already had sample size issues prior to the stats removal.
Holy cow great video, genuinely the quotes and the way you actually formulated/articulated some very core principles of truly improving and understanding the game or spot versus memorizing or finding formulaic solutions is something that I not only have a hard time articulating but also is something that I actually find myself needing to work on in my own play. Super enjoyable watch, felt like poetry for real
Hey, Comedy. I appreciate your positive feedback. I'm glad you found the video enjoyable!
That's what I love about TFT. There's always more to learn.
Banger vid, probs gonna check out some the books from the qoutes u mentioned
🙏🏼👊🏼
Just throwing my random thoughts out, not really a coherent argument:
While I like the change, I don't like the fact that top players who have access to study groups will have significantly better information than the rest of us.
Especially us plebs down in diamond, floundering around in the dark.
I agree with mort that removing this data is a net positive, but I personally don't play enough games each set to even come close to learning what the augment's power levels are.
I am pretty sure that I will be even more conservative with my augment choices now, since I will have limited experience and no data.
Before I knew stats were a thing, I would take the same few augments every game because I knew they were decent. In set 10 I basically took harmacist, cybernetic bulk, or binary airdrop every game. That was partially because bulk and airdrop were broken, but mainly because I didn't want to bot 4 games off of picking potentially crappy augments when i knew something like bulk was always a solid choice.
On the flip side, someone like me doesn't play enough games to ever be in challenger or in elite competition, so it probably doesn't matter. I will get similar information from tftacademy and other tier lists.
I guess in set 12 I enjoyed looking up stats on my phone as a way to kill time, so I'm sad that will be going away.
Good points. I remember when I played more casually and fewer games being risk averse to new augments since I wanted to have a higher floor on the few games I did play. This change harms players who fall in this category, though as you said, there will likely be substitute solutions like tier lists. It may encourage players in this group to experiment a bit more though, especially if tier lists appear unreliable or inconsistent. This may be a net plus as it forces creativity and experimentation.
You won't be experiencing what you have experienced in set 10 this time because the other 7 players in your lobby also won't have access to stats
I think this is an amazing update. When I started playing this game, I was looking for an edge that would help me climb a bit higher against players on computers or laptops. When I saw streamers using a stats tracker to choose their augments, I realized that this was their slight edge, and I was at a disadvantage because I play on iOS, which also limits my ability to do fast roll downs. Overall, an amazing update!
Current Rank #689 🤦🏻♂
It's amazing that you got to rank 689 on iOS! This removal for sure helps players who never relied heavily on stats in the first place.
I don't like this change solely because augments are so imbalanced. The past day or 2 of PBE for example, there have been augments with 3.0 AVP and some augments with 6.0 AVP. So if we didn't have stats how would we know this, that some augments are just autolose and some are free top 4s? Do they expect the millions of silver/gold/plat casuals to play 1000 games and study every patch note to learn general augment strength?
@@ik9363 yeah, great point. This change really requires Riot to balance the game better and inform players of bugged augments.
Anything to stop me from having to bleach my eyes every time I see BT Steraks Wukong without the hero augment in a master lobby
Hah! That is a perfect example of memorization applied without understanding.
I like this change overall as I'm honestly not a fan of just having stats open in the middle of a game and dictating your every decision based on them. However the one problem I have with the change is pro/high elo players that already have the infrastructure to share information will have a very big advantage over those that just don't have access to information beyond their own experience and what is publicly available.
Agreed. Hopefully, it'll incentivize more players to socialize and share information with one another.
I think that a lot of people forgot that data might be a double edge sword. Of course it is handy to know WR of your augment however, people tend to forget that one needs to create conditions to make an augment work and this condition is their board. I will low key miss those headless chickens aka gold players clicking blindlessy any augment with a highest win rate not taking into consideration neither their synergies nor current state of the game etc
100%. People will actually need to learn to think for themselves. Imagine that. (Or not. They'll find another way to defer thinking with tier lists.)
I didnt know you got this cracked at the game holy top 0.01% of players! Well done!
Upon further investigation you were ALWAYS this good at the game my goodness!
@@alejandrobeltran4884 Thanks! I wouldn't say I was always good. I was hardstuck Masters for a while. But I've learned to enjoy the learning process and that's helped me climb a lot. Plus, coaching from top players and engaging with the community has helped a ton.
7:53 This has always been one of my biggest issues with Aug Stats. Stats cant ever contextualize your current board state. Snap picking the best stat augment isnt always going to be best and I definitely felt myself defaulting too much to the number over my own game sense especially at the end of this past set
100%. When I experimented with turning off stats, I found myself picking augments I normally wouldn't and finding unique situations to take advantage of them. When I had stats on, I'd often be too anchored to the lower avp augment over what may have been situationally better.
7:47 i never expect someone to say "ill pick the augment based on my position" unironically xd
@@berni5641 😂
One thing that bothers me the most is bugged auguments, items etc. Like without stats how were you supposed to know find your center is broken? Or that ie on rapidfire caitlyn doesnt work, if they are gonna remove stats which are a clear indicator of broken things, they should put more efforit into less bugs making it through to live
100%. Mortdog said that they'll at the least try to communicate more proactively about buggy augments: www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/1gqln4u/comment/lwyyxmw/
I just wish riot would poll their community on big changes like this. Runescape does it and it works incredibly.
Interesting point. The downside of polling is that unless the vast majority of players have a significant pain with the status quo, change aversion will almost always lean toward keeping the status quo. So that approach would lead to minimal changes over the long term. I'm not familiar with how successful Runescape has been with growing their player base with that model?
The notion that people are lazy or don't want to think critically is disingenuous, especially when this is just presumed to be an internalized quality or attributed to stats existing. Instead, we should look at the conditions that produce the behavior we are associating with laziness or a lack of critical thinking. People turn to stats because they generally feel that TFT is a game about making optimal decisions-“play what you hit” in that you are given a set of conditions and are supposed to make the best choices around them (note that the game isn’t about, and actively punishes players for, playing what they find fun or developing a personal playstyle). However, players don't think that they have enough tools to find these optimal decisions. Without a practice tool, there are too many situations and variables to gain a depth of experience playing any given combination of augments, comps, and items. Without a relatively balanced and bug-free environment, decisions arrived at through logically analyzing one's own situation can routinely fail due to something just not working as described or being undertuned. Stats are one tool that players add to “experience” and “critical thinking” because neither of those tools are reliable in the state of the game as it exists. The notion that the player base is playing the game incorrectly by using stats, somehow ruining the gameplay experience, can’t be addressed until the dev team actually reckons with the fact that the conditions of the game encourages those behaviors.
Great points, Kenny! Hopefully, Riot is more proactive about fixing bugs and/or communicating buggy augments. Fingers crossed.
There is no "competitive" scene of TFT. TFT is development it is as a casual game with a fair balance in mind. I really doubt that any decision is made with the competitive scene in mind.
Mort dog was bringing the difference in competitive data from difente regions because different rigions in the past tend to develop different metas, but today we just copy from everyone what is the best comps
To the argument that "some region has more stats to look at, they have an advantage".
I disagree with this.
1."Law of Large Numbers" This large amount of data would not always be helpful, it can also magnify some of the false positive trends, and ultimately result in false conclusions.
2. Each region has different player bases, and hence different orientations in playstyle, with large sample numbers, these biases can also be exaggerated.
3. By result, CN didn't perform well in this sets worlds, despite having the largest database.
Overall, I like the idea of removing/nerfing the contribution of stats to general players augment choices, as it encourages players to learn the game from a bottom-up fashion, and rewards players' creativity and critical thinking. But the point of blaming some regions for having unfair advantages because they have a "larger sample pool" does not make sense, not to mention that most of the sites have data from all around the world (except CN), so technically we share the same sample pool (if you choose to look at data across all regions).
Thanks for your input, Saika!
1. I don't disagree, but would lean toward more data on average helping more than hurting since it'd give edge case scenarios a larger sample size.
2. True.
3. Do we know if CN has a larger data set than the rest of the world combined?
You make a great point that most of the sites have data from all around the world except for CN. I didn't think about that. That alone eliminates the supposed advantage that I thought VN might have. In Diamond+ on tactics.tools advanced explorer, VN has an insane 1.4M vs NA 200k data set. This reinforces point 2 you made. If you look at aggregate stats, it might not capture the nuances of your specific region's meta & playstyle. Given that VN didn't have a data advantage, this may reinforce the idea that more games (experience) & larger population leads to more optimal play, which could mean that removing augment stats leads to a bigger advantage to regions that have larger populations & play more. So perhaps VN/CN will dominate even more in set 13? We'll see...
@@LearningTFT 1. It really depends on how deep you are looking into the stats. If you dive deep and look at stats with enough constraints, it might eliminate many of the "false positives" caused purely by large numbers (however, when you put more constraints it also reduces the sample size...), but a lot of the players only look at the numbers the overlay (metaTFT etc.) gives them in-game, a larger-than-needed statistical power would cause more harms in these situations. For example, at live patch, knowing that one's going for shape dragons, at 2-1 choose between Big Gains and Eternal Growth, do you think one is significantly better than the other or situational? what role does the law of large numbers play here? Also, this will combine with the self-reinforcement problem you talked about in this video and become a bigger issue.
3. Actually I don't know which side has a larger data, from my knowledge, CN has more players than the rest of the world combined, but a large amount of them play on the mobile version, and I heard that the mobile version has different numbers as TFT, so I'm quite confused about this...
I think that blackmarket stats will be a very real issue for tournaments and impossible to enforce in an online environment. If TFT tourneys were all LAN and in person, then it would be easy to enforce and say no stats or all stats, but in an online environment I worry. The set 13 champion might cheat their way to the top and we would have no way of knowing.
Blackmarket stats were simpler the last time stats were banned since people could still scrape the data off lolchess. That can't be done anymore since Riot is removing augments from end game data in their API. So the only way for players to do it now is manually. You'd need to get a large enough group of players together to manually track. This seems unreasonable to do at large enough scale for the sample sizes to be viable. And probably still not useful at Challenger level, which already had sample size issues prior to the stats removal.