Milo

Opinions are mine alone not Riot's. Just a nature lover :D

Technical Game Designer on @TFT | Sets 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, Unreleased 19

[Valentine @itsvalentinet]

Look I did another one

[kristen 🌻 @kwizten]

so excited to open this up!! apply starting Oct 1 to join our TFT partner program YAY!!!

[Teamfight Tactics @TFT]

🚨 General Sale Update: Thanks for your patience while waiting for your Convergence Fest passes.

We experienced platform issues that prevented players from completing their purchases for both Competitor and Attendee passes. To give everyone a fair opportunity, the sale will reopen at 7 AM PT.

Thanks again for your understanding, and we’ll see you at Convergence Fest!

[Elisabeth 🎮🎀 @710wonderdev]

I want to be clear that every set has its share of issues, that’s just part of live service. But Set 15 is where players really felt it, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It lines up almost exactly with when more and more of our team shifted onto the Unreal build.

Which brings me to today with Set 18 and our first real steps on Unreal Engine. This is the first engine migration we’ve ever done on TFT and engine migrations are notoriously difficult. For many of us it’s been one of the hardest projects of our careers.

I want to pull back the curtain a little on what a migration like this actually means, because it’s the part I wish more people got to see. When we built a new set previously, we were testing fresh content on a foundation we already trusted. A migration flips that completely. Everything you already know still has to look, feel, and behave exactly the way it always has, except now every champion, trait, item, animation, and interaction is running on a brand new engine underneath.

So much of QA is thinking in systems, tracing how one change ripples outward, predicting where things will break before they actually do, and building the tooling and checks that let us test at scale. It’s less about whether we found a single bug and more about where risk is hiding in this huge web of interactions, and how we get ahead of it. On a project like this, that mindset is everything.

So I want to be honest about what you’re already seeing. If you’ve spent any time in Set 18, you’ve probably felt it firsthand. A migration of this scale is frankly a lot messier than a normal set, and buggier than normal…and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What I can promise is that it will get better each and every day, it has. We’ll continue to watch, test, and fix things constantly, and the team has worked incredibly hard to deliver the best experience we can under real time and resource constraints.

And as hard as it’s been, this is a huge opportunity space for TFT. The work we’re doing now is an investment in everything we get to build for you going forward (and honestly, that’s the part we’re most excited about).

___

We’re always learning and trying to do better, and tech changes really fast. I truly appreciate when players reach out about bugs and share their frustrations. It shows you’re passionate about this game and care a whole lot.

This post isn’t meant to push aside pain points or be defensive. It’s to share the very real (and very difficult) reality of operating on a complex, constantly changing live-service game. Thank you, always, for holding us accountable to a high standard of quality. Appreciate you all.

2/2

[Elisabeth 🎮🎀 @710wonderdev]

Hello, I wanted to take a moment to share a bit of my craft in QA on TFT (and hopefully educate a little along the way).

This is genuinely one of the tougher parts of game dev, and it’s something I’ve wanted to talk about for a really long time. It just never felt like the right moment. But now that our move to Unreal Engine is finally public, with Set 18 live, I think it’s about time the community got a little insight from me as a QA Lead on TFT. I’m going to start with an example from TFT K.O. Coliseum (Set 15).

I actually wrote a version of this a long time ago and felt it was best to wait. I was worried people might not understand, or not care, or that it’d be met with cruelty. The timing never felt right and a big reason was that our Unreal work simply wasn’t public yet, so much of the story I wanted to tell was tied to it. But I feel really passionate about TFT and I’ve wanted to share a side of this work that doesn’t get talked about often.

Why start with Set 15? Because that’s when we saw a noticeable shift in player perception of quality.

___

Every TFT set brings its own challenges depending on its scope, mechanic complexity, and where we are in development across multiple future sets at once. From a player perspective Set 15 felt buggier than past sets, but the data tells a more nuanced story.

Internally, Set 15 launched with a larger than usual backlog of non-critical issues (roughly double what we’d consider a healthy starting point). These weren’t game-breaking or exploit-level bugs. They were a high number of smaller, low to medium priority issues that compounded over time and contributed to a “buggier feel” overall. Think of it as death by a thousand papercuts. Each small issue adds friction, and collectively it shapes perception.

At the same time, our critical and exploitable bug rates were actually among the lowest we’ve had in years. The majority of major issues were caught pre-launch, and our escape rate (the bugs players find that we didn’t catch before release) was significantly lower than previous sets. So from a raw quality standpoint the game was safer and more stable than it might have felt.

Where we fell short was live support capacity. Our live team was much smaller than normal while we spun up other high priority work across the team (the TFT Unreal Engine migration). Fewer engineers, designers, and QA dedicated to live meant we couldn’t burn down the backlog as quickly after launch, and the fix window stretched much longer than any of us wanted.

Another factor was the complexity of Set 15’s mechanic, Power Ups. That feature alone accounted for over a third of our total bugs. Not because it was poorly made, but because its scripting touched nearly every system in the game (even minor adjustments could have ripple effects). And since Power Ups were the mechanic, players naturally noticed any oddities with them more than they might with smaller content pieces.

To put it simply, we had more total bugs at launch, fewer resources for live fixes, and a highly complex mechanic amplifying the visibility of issues. Player perception dipped even though the underlying severity and escape data actually improved. So while the set’s public perception reflected real player pain, it wasn’t a sign of declining quality. It was a reminder that quality is as much about how quickly we can respond and recover as it is about how clean the build is on day one.

___

1/2 🧵

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@demacianraptor Me too, everyone has worked really hard and I’m looking forward to show off some set 19 stuff when the time comes.

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@demacianraptor Doesn’t excuse us missing things like this but a lot of this is growing pains from learning new release processes and a whole new way of building, deploying, and maintaining the game.

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@demacianraptor I won’t speak for the whole team and I like yall know that we are NOT at the quality bar we want to be at. But making set content (champs, augments, items, etc.) has become much faster and is makes much more sense for TFTs tech needs. Still work to do tho to earn y’all’s trust.

[Truexy @TheTruexy]

Update on a couple 18.3 things.

As per the official channels, we’re completing a B-patch that includes re-adding the 18.B changes that got excluded, disabling some bugged augments, and catching the meta shifts that are still apparent from late 18.2B. A rough ETA is tomorrow (Thursday) by EOD, and hopefully earlier in the day than later.

There are reasons why this patch was a bit different than the normal cycle, but it’s definitely not up to the quality bar we want for TFT. We’re working to quickly get the balance changes back to where want.

Additionally, there was an intentional revert of Champion Targeting from 18.2. Our goal is complete parity in champion targeting between Set 17/18 and there have been bugs that have altered how melee targets are acquired at the start of combat. An attempted fix to other movement bugs caused unintended effects in 18.2. We’ve reverted that change and are investigating a better way to return parity to targeting.

I appreciate everyone’s patience and feedback.

[Orbitals @OrbitalsGame]

🚀💖

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

I have ~27 hours in this game. Such an amazing concept for a game and incredibly well executed. https://t.co/ROtMmFMqZu For anyone that likes city builders def worth checking out.

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@riyitaa Idk why this bot replied but as a real person I would say just list what your career experience is and anything you may think is applicable or interesting. You never know what weird effort makes you stand out or taught you something unique.

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

If you want to help make TFT better please apply. Every single person that got hired last time has been incredible. Lots of hard work to make TFT Unreal better for this and future sets.

[Ananda Gupta @agauntpanda]

The TFT design team is looking for game and UX designers who are new to the industry! We hired amazing designers last year from tech and academia, who brought their love of TFT to our team. Check out the listings!

https://t.co/iXMVepohvS

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@CaptainMemeMan Best of luck to you in applying

[Missyeru @Missyeru]

Hi! I don’t tweet often, but I lead global Influencer for TFT and work closely with our creator community, including on Convergence Fest.
Since notices just went out, I wanted to share some transparency into how we evaluate creator applications & opportunities 🧵

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@KarstenBeoulve No Human effort is wasted. The act of learning, failing, and improving is something intrinsically human, never lose that.

[Novi @novic_0]

One of the very first projects I worked on during my TFT internship, Alune’s moon! I helped create the concept and vfx callout 🌕

[Anthony Ma @anthonyma64]

Set 18 Enchanted Wilds is live today! Here's my small contribution to this amazing set, super proud of everything the gameplay team has been able to accomplish this time around!
#animation #gamedev #TFT

[Milo @Riot_Milo]

@BepoCarrot We are now the same age. Happy birthday!

[Teamfight Tactics @TFT]

A quick check-in from Geoff & Peter just before Enchanted Wilds goes live covering:
- Squashed bugs 🪲
- Visual/VFX upgrades 👁️
- Cosmetics gradual rollout 👕
- Download Details 💾
- MacOS progress 🍎
- Community Events 📦📦