If you’re a little new to Teamfight Tactics, TFT for short, then you may be a little confused as to how players are accumulating gold, and what all the different pieces of the user interface actually mean. It’s gone through a few changes in a recent patch and there are some very useful tools that you’d probably not be aware of.
What is it with Teamfight Tactics and big updates? The 9.22 patch overhauled the game in such a way that it’s now a completely different game. New champions, item recipes, and even adding a fourth row. If you’ve been playing the game for months, this is likely to be a massive headache, starting again from scratch, with new faces to have to remember. With the aim to soften the blow, we’ve updated our guides to explain everything about TFT Set 2.
A new season in Teamfight Tactics means that we’ve somehow got a whole bunch of brand new champions and items. Putting them all together in one coherent TFT comp might be a little trickier as you’ve now got to contend with elements, as well as the fact that everything is new again. So with the new beginning, we thought we’d once again bring you the TFT best comps list for the current patch – 9.22.
Teamfight Tactics had an overhaul with the introduction of set 2. One of the bigger changes is that Riot have now wiped every single champion origin and trait and replaced them with a brand new set. It’s time to relearn everything you know about how traits work in TFT.
Well, it turns out that Teamfight Tactics set 2 brought on so many changes that it’s the equivalent of a new game. Every champion has been altered or replaced in some fashion, meaning that the meta has been forever changed overnight. So it’s time to learn everything about TFT’s champions all over again.
It began with the Sword of the Divine, but now many more items have been changed since the introduction of TFT set 2. A whole host of new items and altered recipes mean that every, single TFT cheat sheet needs an update, in particular, the alterations to many of the Spatula based item combinations.
Last year's League of Legends World Championship featured the debut of the song Pop/Stars by virtual K-pop act K/DA, and this year it's time for imaginary videogame hip-hop crew True Damage to have their turn, with a song and accompanying video/advertisement for new in-game skins called Giants.
According to Riot, "Formed by K/DA’s rapper Akali (Soyeon of (G)I-dle), True Damage is a virtual hip-hop group that fuses the raw vocal talents of Ekko (Thutmose, Duckwrth), Senna (Keke Palmer), and Qiyana (Becky G) with Yasuo’s cutting-edge production." The musicians and their digital apparitions performed together in augmented reality at the opening of the 2019 World Championships, at the same time as the animated video debuted on YouTube.
It already has well over three million views, and our Gorillaz/Hatsune Miku/NG Resonance future is one step closer to being realized.
Riot has unveiled its follow-up to K/DA, the K-pop act starring League of Legends characters and K-pop artists. The new group is a "hip hop inspired collective" containing Qiyana, Senna, Akali, Ekko and Yasuo. They're called True Damage and they've been dressed by Louis Vuitton.
The fashion brand and Riot announced their collaboration last month, which includes a travel case for the World Championship Summoner's Cup and unique skins. So you'll be able to drape True Damage's outfits on their in-game counterparts, starting on November 10.
A pair of prestige skins have also been designed for Qiyana and Senna. You'll only be able to unlock Qiyana's by playing games during the Worlds 2019 event from November 10 - 25. Senna's skin will be available next year. Check out all the skins in the trailer below.
The real musicians behind True Damage are Becky G, Keke Palmer, Soyeon, Duckwrth and Thutmose, and they'll be giving a live performance of their single, Giants, at the Word Championship finals on November 10.
True Damage's in-fiction background is that K/DA star Akali, who is now in both groups, wanted to combine the killer musical skills of Ekko, Senna, Qiyana and Yasuo to create a "gene-defying" colab. But what does the rest of K/DA think about all of this? Are they rivals now? Music is all well and good, but I want some drama.
Chance the Rapper hosted Saturday Night Live over the weekend, which provided him with the opportunity to bring back Lazlo Holmes, the Knicks correspondent who had to cover a hockey game without knowing anything about hockey. "As they say in hockey... let's do that hockey."
This time around he's handling the League of Legends World Championships, and he appears to know even less about what's going on. For starters, he repeatedly calls it "League of Legos."
It's low-hanging fruit for the most part, aimed squarely at people who still watch SNL, but I did get a chuckle out of a few cracks, like saying LoL "looks like how a seizure feels," or getting the audience pumped up with, "You know how they do in esports: Ready, set, sit down." The interview segment is more cringe-inducing, and not in a good way—the skit could have easily had fun with some of the inherent alienness of esports without going so all-in on the "look at these weirdos" approach.
Some of my appreciation for the bit may arise from the fact that I can relate to poor Lazlo's predicament. Pro-level esports can be incredibly complex and covering it in any depth requires specialized knowledge and experience. Honestly, given the choice of having to do emergency color fill-in for the NHL or LCS, I'd take the NHL every time.
Video games are a small window into Chinese life, but they're a window nonetheless, and video games themselves, in China, are huge. China accounts for more than half of the entire planet's PC gaming revenue. In fact, despite it being smaller than mobile gaming there, China's PC gaming market alone made over $15bn in 2018; more than half the entire amount of revenue made in the US gaming industry overall, including consoles, mobile, the lot. Going by the numbers of analyst firm Niko Partners, as of 2018 there were a total of about 630 million gamers in China - a little over 8 percent of humans on the planet.
Huge. But we know there are lots of people in China, and we know lots of them play games. What's really interesting is that these people are playing games in what is, on paper, the most aggressively censored system around. I suspect this sort of thing is why economists love visiting China, even if doing so is a risk: everything is a case study.
Games are no different. Under Chinese law, video games can't contain anything that "threatens China's national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity". They can't harm "the nation's reputation, security or interests". They can't promote cults, or "superstitions". They can't "incite obscenity, drug use, violence or gambling" - although loot boxes are, of course, fine (in fact Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad reckons a Chinese game may have invented them as far back as 2003) - and they can't include anything that "harms public ethics" or China's "culture and traditions". They also can't include any "other content" that might violate China's constitution or law, whatever that may be, and they have to be published in China by a Chinese company.