Stephen “Mortdog” Mortimer is the Game Director of Teamfight Tactics. We at MeinMMO conducted an interview with him and the Global Head of E-Sports – Michael Sherman – focusing on the Auto Battler. It faced many problems at launch but is now performing better than ever. Next, the E-sports division is also set to expand.
What is this interview about? I had the opportunity to talk for almost an hour with Mortdog (title photo) and Sherman about the development of TFT. We focused on hurdles faced during its development, the major successes, and the upcoming plans for the game.
Recently, on November 21, the new set Remix Rumble launched, introducing an additional element of music into the gameplay. All champions, attributes, and some items have been adjusted accordingly.
Apart from TFT, he also engages with LoL and MMORPGs, including Guild Wars 2, ESO, and New World.
At the start, there were very few developers, but it became a huge success
MeinMMO: I would like to start with the launch of Teamfight Tactics and would like to know from you – Mort – how everything began for you. And how exactly did you become the Design Director of the game?
Mortdog: When the original TFT team was assembled, it was a very small team. I believe there were about seven designers, a few artists, engineers, and so on. And they were working on developing the game.
In the first five and a half months, there was a lead designer named David Abecassis who oversaw everything. But he had to switch projects for various reasons. About a month before the release, they lost the chief designer. And Andrei, the head of all LoL studios, said: “I need someone to replace him.” He asked me: Hey, you’ve been looking at this genre. Would you like this position? And I said: “Sure.”
So I joined the team about a month before the release, took on the leadership role, and I’m still doing it today.
MeinMMO: And TFT had a really great launch in June 2019. It temporarily reached number 1 on Twitch and people everywhere were talking about the game. Do you have a rough estimate of how many players tried it out?
Mortdog: I can’t give exact numbers, but the answer is: A huge amount. It was a very large number. And for a while, after we couldn’t really maintain those numbers, there was concern that it might be a fad. Initially, everything was exciting, and then it just started to decline.
MeinMMO: Were you surprised by the great success at launch, or did you expect it?
Mortdog: I wouldn’t say I was surprised. We did have a bit of help behind the scenes. Just the fact that we were the second game from Riot Games created hype. So that initial success didn’t really surprise me. However, how quickly the hype faded was certainly a big challenge for us.
“If set 3 doesn’t work, we can just shut down TFT”
MeinMMO: With set 2, you launched a big experiment in October 2019. A completely new experience, new champions, new comps. How did you come up with this idea?
Mortdog: I spoke with Andrei ‘Meddler’ van Roon about it. It was originally his idea. We looked at the LoL champions and the many available choices there. At that time, LoL had about 130 or 140 champions. And it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t be able to feature every champion when we made a set. But to ensure every champion gets a turn, we wanted to introduce a rotation. That led to the idea: Oh, but what if we also wanted to include the Star Guardians? Let’s bring in the Star Guardians. And then naturally it was like, okay, if we do this, we now have 200, 300, 400 champions. And that led to a cool idea. What if we made this thematic group of sets?
And the other thing is that we felt auto-chess would get solved and boring very quickly. My personal experience was that I played it for about a month and thought: “Yeah, I’ve seen everything I need to see. I’ll log off.”
And we wanted to make sure it’s not a game that just dies out after two years.
Here you can watch the teaser for the new set 10:
MeinMMO: But such a change is confusing. Do you remember what the initial feedback was like?
Mortdog: Set two had a few major mistakes. The first was that we delivered it too early. There were a lot of people still enjoying that set and not ready for the change.
Mistake number two was that we had a pretty large audience. And we hadn’t yet taught the players what makes TFT so special. With our new set, we essentially booted out everyone who didn’t want to change. Because not everyone wants a bunch of changes every few months. And some of them didn’t come back because TFT changed too much.
And the third major problem was that we made some pretty questionable design decisions because we didn’t exactly know what we were doing. I always joke that we had an elemental-based set. And then we turned Zyra, instead of plants, into a fire-type character. We had a moon trait and turned Dianna into fire. There were just so many things that even LoL players thought: Excuse me, what?
But that’s the beauty of TFT: Every time we develop a new set, we learn from it.
MeinMMO: But set 2 did not go well with the fans, if I remember correctly. Then set 3 came, which I personally did not like at all. How was the transition?
Mortdog: With set 2, we reached the point where we thought: “Wow, if set 3 doesn’t work, we can just shut down TFT. Then we’ll go back to set 1, leave it alone, and focus on other things.” That was definitely our low point. Fortunately, we turned it around.
MeinMMO: Was there another point in development where you were at a real low point?
Mortdog: With set 5, we had a second low point. It wasn’t about player numbers, but rather satisfaction. In particular, the shadow items upset many of our veteran players and showed us that not everyone wants those deep design elements. Some people just want to have fun.
“We have more than doubled the size of the team in the last year alone”
MeinMMO: And when did you reach your peak? Or are you still in a rising high?
Mortdog: Our game is currently running great. As I mentioned, we keep reaching new “huge numbers”. I can’t speak about details, but what I can say is that things like Gizmos & Gadgets, released alongside Arcane and the Augments, were a really big success. Fates and Chosen, along with the release in the eastern regions, were also a really big success.
So we continue to have a lot of these great successes. And every time we have a little slump and wonder, are we still good? Bang, another new success. We’re still going and hope that Remix Rumble will be another big success.
MeinMMO: How important was the release on mobile devices for you? I myself play TFT very actively there.
Mortdog: It was really important to make the game accessible to more people and more gaming opportunities. Additionally, each region is a bit different. In the USA or Europe, PCs dominate. But in countries like Brazil or Latin America in general, mobile is much more dominant. And so we are expanding into new target groups. Korea is another big country, where there are just a lot of mobile players. So mobile was definitely very important for our expansion and will continue to be.
MeinMMO: In an interview in late 2021, you said that the number of developers was still steadily increasing. Is that still the case in 2023 or have you reached an end?
Mortdog: So the size of the team has more than doubled in the last year alone. We have grown significantly. One aspect of this is also the area of e-sports.
TFT wants to create large LAN tournaments with hundreds of participants
MeinMMO: Since you’ve already mentioned e-sports, I will now turn to Sherman. I am a huge fan of League of Legends and am currently watching Worlds, like most people I know. But with TFT it’s different. I can rarely motivate myself to watch the events. How do you see the eSports scene? And how satisfied are you with it at the moment?
Sherman: TFT is struggling like many new games to find its e-sports identity. At the beginning, it focused a lot on adopting what was successful in LoL. In a way, that worked. But I don’t think watching is really the best form of e-sports for TFT.
What we’ve seen is that players are most satisfied and excited when they participate in competitions themselves. In the first few weeks, we didn’t activate ranked matches, and the community was really eager to play ranked. That doesn’t necessarily mean they want to be the best player in the world. I think we are trying to create an ecosystem for TFT where it’s not immediately about that.
So how satisfied am I with the state of TFT e-sports? We are in an exciting transitional phase because when I joined, it was about how to enhance the competitive scene. And that’s really exciting. We’ve made some big upgrades to make prize pools more valuable for top players and made some format changes that have helped top players enjoy themselves more.
The Vegas Open is a step in a new direction for us, where we are really focusing on how to create a more engaging and exciting e-sport that features large numbers of players competing against each other. Here, 512 players can compete against each other at once.
I’ve seen a lot of fighting game events and I’m intrigued by them. I love that the competitions in fighting games are more at the forefront. I want to go and see my friends, compete with them, and experience a cool moment. And I believe that this type of competition will encourage the TFT community even more than it already has.
Here you can find the summary of the last championship:
MeinMMO: That’s an interesting picture you’re painting. Because I always felt the urge to participate in tournaments, but I found the websites and information about them somewhat confusing. If there are now regularly large live events, that would be great.
Sherman: There is definitely still a lot to be done to realize this vision. But our hope is that we can work towards a system where every player can participate in tournaments and e-sports if they want to try.
MeinMMO: And what is your stance on community-run tournaments? Would you actively support such events?
Sherman: Yes, we are always looking for ways to better support community-organized tournaments. We are already doing this in some areas, e.g., our regional offices support local tournaments happening in their region or country.
We have also realized that it is quite challenging to host a TFT tournament without tools like custom games or the spectator mode. We are still working on implementing such content.
MeinMMO: Yes, the question of a spectator mode was also on my list. What I sometimes miss in TFT are prominent figures like Caps or Faker in LoL. Do you see yourselves as being responsible for promoting and strengthening such individuals?
Sherman: I think comparisons with League will always be very difficult since it’s the biggest e-sport in the world. If you look at Faker, then we’ve built a wall between Faker, who is much better than everyone else, and you and me. I can’t drop my hand low enough to illustrate that.
I believe that if we focus too much on making individual players legends of the game in TFT, it will deter people from stepping up themselves. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to help create stars and people who can make a living from TFT.
3 sets per year, new fun modes, and the strategy for success
MeinMMO: How do you generally see the future of TFT? Do you want to experiment with more fun modes like the Lunar event, or are you more focused on major revisions like the ones with the Augments?
Mortdog: As I mentioned, the team has grown much larger. Some of the fruits you’ve already seen, some you haven’t. That aside, we are also at three new sets per year, which we want to maintain without intermediate sets. For the smaller droughts in between, we are always looking for variety. Fun modes could definitely make sense there.
I think there are just a lot of cool things you can do with TFT and experiment with.
All important information about the latest patch has been summarized for you by Mortdog here:
MeinMMO: Do you still follow other games in the genre, like Dota Underlords or the standalone Auto Chess of the mod developers? If you look at the numbers there, you are clearly more successful. Why is that?
Mortdog: I occasionally check them out and play them. I think one of the main reasons for TFT’s success is that we focus heavily on the gameplay experience. Many of the battles are very exciting, and the players and champions do really cool things.
If you compare that to some other games, they feel a bit flat. They just don’t have those highs and lows, the pacing, and such things that we place a lot of emphasis on.
The second important part is our sets. I think that the autobattler genre typically provides fun for two to four months before people get bored. The fact that we patch so frequently, much more than anyone else, is beneficial for us. When you start to get bored, it’s like: “Oh, what’s coming next?”
If you want to take a break and do something else and then come back. That’s great. My favorite is Wolfie, the famous Pokémon player. He played quite actively during set five and six, even did some casting, then he left and played a lot of Pokémon. Now he’s back for set nine and ten. And he says, “I’m having fun again.” And that’s exactly our goal.
MeinMMO: Thank you, Mort and Sherman, for participating in this interview.
What do you think about the development of TFT? Which set did you enjoy the most? And would you attend a live e-sport event?
