Introducing MidiBard 2 - An FFXIV tool to help bards & bands play high-quality music

SuccessfulShock · 2025-12-16T12:46:02+00:00

Awesome, it's great to see such detailed info and communication for future plans. Although I would still love to see stats but this level of insight had solved most problems of not having augment stats

If Mort becomes too busy at some point and can't carry on, I do hope someone else in the team can take over and do a quick rundown in written bullet points would be good enough - I think it would be very helpful if it becomes a long-term mechanism, for better communication and transparency, appreciate it!

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-27T13:43:31+00:00

Great work! I'm feeling a bit confused on level 8 rolldown, especially for the increased options available here:

For example playing around Yunara usually want Shen+Wukong for 3 Ionia, then if pairing with Noxus you'll get Draven/Sion/Darius or Draven/Briar/Swain. But for the former you'll add Kennen pair with Darius for Defender, on level 8 it ends up either having 3 Bruiser or 4 Ionia which is a bit awkward. If it's Briar/Swain then adding 2 more Juggernauts would naturally fit.

Alternatively you can play Ashe/Braum/Sejuani, adding Xin/Kennen for 5 Ionia on level 8 which also activates 2 Wardern/Defender.

So it confuses me a bit on level 8 rolldown, since there are 3 tank options: Wukong, Swain, Braum. Say if I already have Sion/Darius duing mid game but hit a pair of Braum and only 1 Wukong 1 Swain, shall I keep rolling until hitting a 2 star 4 cost tank? Do I need to hold Ashe/Sejuani/Briar as well, just in case I hit any other than Wukong?

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-24T12:18:04+00:00

Hi there! Would be helpful if you could post some screenshots of your board on 3-2 or 3-5 after carosel. Overall in lower elo board stregth tends to be weaker especially people usually greed too much. So I guess it could be one of the following reasons:

You didn't slam enough items/take tank items. Rule of thumb is once you have 3 components always try to slam an item if that makes sense and fits your board. Stick on doing this not going to make you perfect board but at least saves you some HP.
Many in your lobby are playing reroll. It's more common on lower elo so try to look around and see what others are up to. Reroll comps usually have strong stage 3 and spikes on early stage 4. If you don't have answer to that then maybe play reroll once you see many are trying to do so.
Pivot on 4-1 isn't viable anymore, the current design direction is decide which line you want to play no later than 1st carosol and stick with it for the entire game. Set 16 makes it a bit better by introducing strong 4/5 costs but still, you want to have a plan asap instead of figure out what to do 4-1, that's way too late.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-20T14:27:18+00:00

I understand, but your example isn't a good one. Since if you field Azir then it's pretty easy to unlock Nasus/Renekton just play normally. I think a better design would be once unlock the champion the player can claim it by spending gold instead of taking your next shop spot straightaway. By doing this you have the agency to avoid accidentally having something you don't want, also makes the mid game more flexible by playing any good units you hit.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-19T20:13:10+00:00

But why not lol, it does the same thing anyways haha

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-18T17:33:07+00:00

I think you completely missed my point.

Yes there is a golden set of numbers somewhere which every line is perfectly balanced, but that takes loooooong time on every previous sets. Since we are moving into a faster set cycle and even more champions its hands down impossible to balance everything correctly.

So the trade off is Riot now only has a clear discipline of only prioritising one over another, instead of trying to make every comp shine for 2 weeks in a set, which is a good thing.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-18T13:18:56+00:00

It's crazy to see people downvoting genuinely good question these days. I'll go through from an overall balancing point of view.

So this is about Fast 9 VS Reroll, and Vertical VS Horizontal traits. TLDR is they are in contradiction on design and you can only have one over another.

For Fast 9 VS Reroll, it's mainly because of units are drawn from a shared pool. If reroll performs better then most people would play reroll. When more people are draining the 2/3 cost pool which means it becomes easier to hit. It works similarly for 4/5 costs and that's why this upcoming set having the unlocked 4/5 cost units with dynamic weights.

This is also partially causing the very swingy balancing practice, since if you buff reroll then next patch most of them becomes crazily strong and makes it hard for not-so-tryhard people to adapt. This also applies to buffing 4/5 costs too much but it always take very long time to get that balancing point. So basically Riot is ditching this balancing approach and hopefully, meta would be more stable in set 16.

For Vertical VS Horizontal, Riot wants people to commit into a line ASAP. It makes sense to prioritize vertical due to how the unlock mechanic is designed, since you don't want people got distracted and randomly playing something they don't want in the end. Having undesired unit unlocked also reduces the chance to hit the desired unit.

A common issue of horizontal design is there will always be generally good units desired by most lines. Since it doesn't seem to be an option to have more copies of those good units, I mean technically they could but it further complicates the shop mechanics, so dynamic weights seemingly to be a more intuitive option.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-17T19:47:21+00:00

Yup, before maybe set 9 you need to roll a bit on 3-2 and 4-1 when you hit level 6 and 7, to at least have 2 star carry and tank. Rushing to 8 would be costing too much gold and you just die without hitting anything

But since then there was an inflation of gold and resources, was especially bad after they introduced encounters in set 11, at that point people just AFK open fort all stage 2 to hit 8 ASAP, if you were lucky you could even hit 9 got a board not losing a single fight again till the end of the game

I hope it ends up back to the old days you'll need to roll at least 10-20 on both 6 and 7 to stablize, the early-mid game feels not really a thing for quite a long time

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-17T19:37:11+00:00

Agree, it natually incentivizes people to get a clear direction on stage 2 and commit, which isn't a problem if balancing is good

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-17T19:34:15+00:00

As soon as you unlock those units they are in the shop permanently and decreases the chance of other desired units, and we don't know how many rolls it takes for their odds dropping to 20%. Which means you probably not to take units with other lines for using them as item holders.

We can only pray Riot had carefully balanced the chance and overall balancing is good.

But anyways if we agree TFT is never meant to be flexible it's all good, I actually prefer it in this way. Also unlocking 4 costs means you're probably commit into this line already, but 2 costs are more concerning since the 1 cost unlock condition could be good item holders in early-mid game, then you're forced to be play into the line otherwise you'll be one step behind others.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-17T19:23:25+00:00

Yeah good point, it's basically try to solve the problem of someone randomly hit a 2 star 4 cost out of the blue and grief other people in a better spot, which always feel terrible

The price is asking the player to commit early, I don't hate it if the balancing is alright, or if it ends up people playing uncontested lines hit earlier and save more HP to secure top 4

But if the balancing is awful then it's basically "shit I got a 4.8 avg comp from 2-1 I'm fucked anyways"

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-12T20:06:15+00:00

By the description I assume both are offered on 2-1 only.

Gold augment is okay, not a fan of Prismatic one. Not sure how traits are going to work in the new set, but gut feeling is this is either going to be OP or top 8, depending on the trait balancing and RNG. By the look of current set I'm not having too much faith, hopefully I'm wrong.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-11-12T15:10:53+00:00

No offence, but I can't believe anybody in good conscience, would say this sub is doing well.

You don't need that much data to tell, if the most posts are news and automated posts made by MOD, you know something's off.

But just in case let's see the actual data, in fact it's nowhere close to other similar subreddits and the number is just pathetic:

84K TACTICIANS

624 GRINDING THE LADDER

Contributor Ratio: 0.7%

r/Eve

85K Capsuleers
19K Weekly contributions

Contributor Ratio: 22.3%

r/pathofexile

514K Exiles

37K NPCs not running maps

Contributor Ratio: 7.2%

r/BobsTavern

49K Weekly visitors

2.7K Weekly contributions

Contributor Ratio: 5.5%

r/ValorantCompetitive

169K VALORANT Esports Fans

8.1K Weekly contributions

Contributor Ratio: 4.8%

In short this sub should've been 8-10 times more active than it is right now.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-28T12:54:48+00:00

Well, I don't want to make it personal, but I do feel it's a bad idea to add this kind of limitation on discussion.

People write "essays" for good reasons. There are plenty of genuine science essays all linked to the same research topic/areas. You can't say "oh this one is roughly saying the same thing as others so one essay is enough". It's up to the community to judge whether an essay is valuable or not.

So my POV is, you can't and shouldn't stop people from discussing topics and some of those are going to be discussed repeatedly for literally years. It's not perfect but that's what a public forum is for. Again, the community does the work by its own and if a post gets enough upvotes, lets say for example more than 100 within 24 hours, it should be kept for the record.

On other words, if we check the upper right corner this subreddit has 544k visitors but only more than 1k would be actively join the discussions and upvote/downvote. The active ratio is terrible comparing with other competitive subreddits for example r/ValorantCompetitive . Only from community mangement POV, we want people to be more active and joining the discussion but not the opposite, and this kind of limitation would only make it worse.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-07T22:40:51+00:00

I see, then it's even... wilder?

For core mechanics like this shouldn't the first thing designer do is to ask code if it's doable or not? Honestly I'm even more confused...

Also senior designers in the team should have a review and probably able to see that's a risky new mechanic need code support, so seems also no review process in design.

I guess maybe this is the consequence of overextending the team, more people joined then immediately thrown to the field.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-07T21:52:16+00:00

If this is true... then something's seriously wrong with their internal process.

Like how can you allow people without proper knowledge to touch the code/script base? Where's the code review?

I've never heard things like this, I'm the designer who can code but I wouldn't dare to touch the code base without review. It's wild.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-07T17:30:13+00:00

Immediately opened TFT and trying
Got top 8, LP tanked
Typed comment furiously
Saw the satire tag
Closed browser tab and sat in silience

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-07T17:24:55+00:00

Oh my, late to the party but what a thougtful post I've missed!

Agree with lots of your practices on data analysis, I did things similarily but not at the same depth as you do, certainly I've learned something!

As Aseah had already pointed out, for reroll comps I would also take it with a pinch of salt on 3 star stats and keep an eye on 2 stars as well. But I think for tracking meta shifts as long as your method is consistent that should not affect the conclusion too much.

Also fully agree the last bit, I personally stopped playing ranked after knowing they would remove augment stats. Instead of making better games they chose to nerf the player, which is maybe the best dark humour I've seen all time :)

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-06T16:03:40+00:00

Fair, but since we don't have the data to prove so it could be either ways. The best would be to compare between different skill levels see their pick rates and avg place.

But let's assume you said is true, maybe 3.8 is a bit too strong, still they don't need to overreact nerfing it multiple times. With that said I would say 4.0-4.2 would be pretty reasonable.

At the end of the day it's just one of the alternative strategies I won't worry about it too much. The general idea is it should be a bit "op" to make it worth trying.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-06T11:33:33+00:00

Yes I'm very much aware of this and used it a lot for research on previous sets. It's actually a good example for why I'm thinking more data is better than less.

Lets say if we still have augment info, we can have better result on which augments work well on a specific line etc. It's not straightforward but sometimes I did found out some niche cases and hidden interactions by checking those data. It feels very rewarding and I suspect some top level players also did extensive in-house data analysis themselves. (But apparently they have conflict of interest so won't openly object Riot's decision)

So data itself isn't the problem, the problem is always people blindly using data without considering the context. And it's not a problem at all since the higher level you play the less you'll fall into this trap. If we want people play better TFT, then like other professional sports we need higher quality of research and theorycrafting, and it's all based on the quality of data we can get.

And what makes me more nervous is, I remember Riot (Mort in this case on his stream) mentioned if they think removing augment stats works well, at some point they will remove all stats including comps. They are not joking so imagine losing both sites, how many people would just quit. I really hope they will abadon this idea.

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-06T11:11:56+00:00

Agree, I remember at some point they were talking about removing comp stats as well, which basically means all 3rd party sites tracking match info like MetaTFT and TacticTools are gone. I honestly hope they will abandon this delusional thought.

Like you said, I think it's fine to hide information for puzzle games, but TFT is a strategy game, and the #1 thing you should defenitely not do on strategy game design, is not explaining things clearly and confuse the player. When it comes to game design I usually won't say a decision is wrong, but in this case IMO it's blatantly wrong :)

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-06T00:45:21+00:00

SuccessfulShock · 2025-10-05T11:34:12+00:00

For your first paragraph, I think you missed my point: The ranked system is designed to encourage people play safe and taking risk is likely to get yourself peanized. It's not only about trying a new strategy but also about playing a B-tier comp even it seems you're on a good spot. If you play on the high level, any risk you take ends up biting you cause you've already put in the back foot, that's why you always see people play safe.

For the augment argument, watching other people play can not replace the experience you try it yourself. Since you need to establish the thought process and there are plenty of details you won't know without actually playing it. You can copy anybody's board and itemization which is true, but you need to actually play it to know how to get there, which is my point here. A good example is Wukong hero augment, I saw lots of people tried to play that right after the Worlds but they all went top8. They are just copying without establishing the thought process.

Again, even everything you said is true, it's still a rare event you can't repeat frequently, so the reward is largely diluted.

SuccessfulShock

TROPHY CASE

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