Teamfight Tactics players are furious about gacha-style battle pass
Riot seems to have poached our eggs, and added gacha. Both of which appears free-to-play unfriendly.
Set 9 of Teamfight Tactics - titled Runeterra Reforged - has gone live. While players are having a great time with the drastically new collection of units, combos, and in-game mechanics, many are frustrated with changes that have been made to the battle pass.
The main source of ire stems from the removal of Little Legend eggs. Before, players who invested enough time into the set could expect some eggs as a reward, regardless of whether they were paying for the premium pass or not. These would grant a random Little Legend - an upgradable player avatar - from across the game's life. For those who paid for the pass, new Little Legends from the current set were easily attainable.
However, these eggs have been poached from the battle pass by Riot Games, replaced with a new kind of currency called Treasure Tokens. Rather than collect the eggs directly, players can now spend these Treasure tokens in the Treasure Realms. It's a gacha system, a style of reward system which has players spend currency for randomised rewards. If you've not experienced one before, the term has its roots in gachapon Japanese toy machines, but you can think of it like a sort of video game slot machine that pays out cosmetics rather than cash.
There are two ways to look at this change. A sunny-side up perspective - the view held by Riot Games in official material detailing the new pass - is that this provides all players a trackable and surefire way to get mythic cosmeitcs. Mythic cosmetics - the rarest and most valuable type of reward you can get from the Teamfight Tactics battle pass - used to be prizes owned by either the most hard boiled high rollers or the fortunate few. Players who roll 60 times (done by spending 6,000 Treasure Tokens) are guaranteed to get a mythic now, a nice reward for long-term support.
However, those in the Teamfight Tactics community who have boiled over with these changes point out how this removes the surefire selection of cool Little Legends players used to get with a singular purchase of a premium pass, and replaced with with a dice roll that may very well result in dissapointment. Not to mention, the time it'll take to actually hit that 60-roll mark is certainly substantial.
"If we have a quick look at the maths on the pass, it would take roughly 2 AND A HALF YEARS for the average player to get a mythic," writes Reddit user ExcelIsSuck on the Teamfight Tactics Reddit in a scathing post warning players against buying the pass. "That is assuming a battle pass every 3 months, and that you buy every single one. This is an insane amount of time for some pixels on a screen."
That point stems from the fact that there are currently 600 tokens baked into the current pass. As such, while the idea of a 60-roll guarentee sounds nice, the time it'll realistically take for a get that the current mythic loot will take a long time. With the premium pass costing 1,295 Riot Points (premium currency) while prior mythic Little Legends like Chibi Teemo costs 1,900 Riot Points, the promise of an eventual mythic doesn't make too much sense in a financial sense.
With the excitement for the prospect of future mythics turning sour and pickling only hours following the launch of Runeterra Reforged, players are left looking at the value of the pass itself to judge it on its own merits. Whereas before, premium pass buyers would get nine eggs with two of those being current-set specific eggs, now you get six rolls on the trove. Non-paying players get hit especially hard, going from five eggs down to two rolls on the Treasure Trove. It's not a good look.
Riot Games has yet to make a statement on this backlash, but with hordes of players feeling the void of their beloved eggs, you've got to imagine it'll be addressed sooner or later. But what do you think? If you're a Teamfight Tactics player, do you think the premium pass is still good value? On a wider note, do you expect this style of gacha model will become more widespread across the industry? Let us know!