Unfinished: Teamfight Tactics (06/26/2019)

Great open

Guess I'll finally download league...

23 minute queue is pretty absurd.

I have a slightly passing interest in Auto Chess and I really like the characters of LoL even if I have no interest in the MOBA. I keep leaning closer and closer to trying it out but I really don't wanna learn the meta... I just wanna play with my favorites.

Best auto chess game

More Auto Chess clones?!?!

I'm having fun with Underlords, but I'm not sure that I like how intentionally going on a lose streak seems to be a thing in this genre... It just seems kind of strange to do that for multiple rounds in what is already a relatively passive game.

Other than the roulette pick a guy stage, I don't really see what it brings to the genre in a meaningful way.

@impatientandy: its up to 90 mins at 10 to 3 am as i type this

Very excited to see this, it seems to have the bigger base atm but I haven't had a chance to check it out. I think Underlords will probably be my leaning but I'm certainly interested to try TFT.

EDIT: Having watched some now I'm actually surprised at how lacking the UI is compared to Underlords. I still think of League as the more colourful, approachable game but I'm struggling to read the character portraits (and I know a lot of these characters) and the alliances are so small and plain that they're difficult to parse at a glance.

I presume that's all stuff they'll work on as they continue to progress the development, but for as much as Underlords has been criticised for looking too much like a mobile game or feels so much cleaner and easier to read at a glance.

wait a minute is Chess Club new Flight Club???

Once the servers all open up by Friday the insane que times will go away.

As someone who plays league this is the auto chess for me and I hope that they implement the data features that the other ones have.

@impatientandy: The wait last night was up to an hour and half per game unless you were a whitelisted streamer. Absolute insanity for a major company.

As someone who's thrown ~150 hours into Autochess and about 25 into Underlords already I really want to dig TFT because it offers a chance for new strats/metagame exploitation, but they really failed a lot of fundamental things from the perspective as someone wholly unfamiliar with League and its characters (and I'm one of the strategy/Magic Arena/Hearthstone players who only knew some of the DOTA characters from the og mod and the 2 week failure that was Artifact). I'm sure the vast League audience will be fine, but unless wide ranging UI changes are made quickly to really differentiate characters/items I see the rest of us bouncing off (the carousel is a cool comeback mechanic but even after spending a ton of time watching Scarra, Toast, and Dog play on another monitor since closed beta I still can't tell who's who or what they do).

Not even a big Nintendo fan, but at this point I want someone to shake someone over there to convince them to make their own Pokemon spin on the genre to mix things up because unfortunately neither offshoot is living up to the update schedule, ingenuity, and foresight the OG mod team's shown (though Valve's rapid patch releases are kind of mindboggling).

@benpack I hope this helps: I think you can estimate opponents gold by looking at gold icons on the opposite side of the battle area to yours

I don't know why NA servers are struggling with queue times, on EUW I have yet to wait longer than 10 seconds for a game to start.

Edit: Of course now that I wrote that, EUW is busted and they had to take TFT down.

Man the turn around on all of these autochess likes is insane.

I like the implementation of interest and showing it physically instead of in a tooltip. Aside from that, I don't think I like anything about TFT... all the League characters look too similar (and having to choose them in a carousel seems nuts given that, which they encounter in the Quicklook), and the item RNG is still here from the DAC mod and is the most unbalanced, bullshit thing about the genre... going to stick to Underlords. Because it's League, it will probably get more people, which is unfortunate, but I do like the competitive explosion around the genre.

@eggheaded: Dude a Pokemon one could be awesome. Insanely complicated maybe or severely lacking in the pokemon department but potentially awesome. You'd have to figure out how the types interact with the board and how to limit the number of pokemon in a match but it could work. Maybe have the game choose a handful of evolutionary lines for each match. That'd make it a little chaotic not knowing what's available until you're in the match but maybe that'd be a fun shake up. Also I suppose chaos makes up the difference for those less skilled sometimes.

@impatientandy: IIRC the Dota Autochess mod came out of a WC3 mod pokemon autobattler. People keep saying "it should go pokemon" and it cracks me up XD

wow Ben doing his best Goro from shenmue impression at the beginning there

I remember when video games were good.

Kudos to Ben for actually taking the time to explain how these auto chess/battlers work.

That being said, they are so not for me. I can't for the life of my figure out why they're so popular all of a sudden. I get it though. There are several times when something is popular and I'm not a fan and the it probably works the same for others.

I highly prefer the pacing of this game, but Underlords is better in basically every other aspect. The lack of information in TFT not only makes everything a lot less clear but also less deep. For some reason, I'm winning a lot more in this one though, so that's nice.

Underlords QL is one entire match.

First match of this is just 20 mins

"You can see how big my little man is" - Ben