League of Legends: fixing the RNG of items in Teamfight Tactics

Teamfight Tactics can be frustrating when you don’t get the items you need. How can we fix the randomness of items in this League of Legends game mode?

Tell me if you have come across this scenario during a game of Teamfight Tactics. You’ve been doing all the right things, getting plenty of League of Legends champions that have synergies together, building them to 2 or 3-stars, saving your gold when you can. But then you run into that dude, that dude who got kissed by the gods of RNG and somehow got three full items on his 2-star Tristana before you even hit the wolves round.

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Item RNG has been one of the most frustrating aspects of Teamfight Tactics since the mode was released. Initially, players were unhappy with the disparate items that were available deciding games based on luck (for instance, in Carousel rounds there tend to be only a few offensive items and a lot of Negatron Cloaks or Chain Vests, so getting minion drops of a BF Sword or Recurve Bow was massive). Now, though, a Reddit thread is pointing out the issue of item drop RNG is causing problems.

"The number of games where the top 3 people have 4+ completed items while the bottom 2 people have 3 parts of items is absurd.Getting slaughtered by someone with a 3 item carry before you get to wolves is about as tilting as someone AFKing in a ranked solo queue game.I get that it is still very much in beta, but I don’t get how the number of items was left up to RNG instead of just the type of items."

Riot attempted to partially rectify this disparity in the early minion rounds by adding the guaranteed gold in instances where the minions do not drop items. While this is a good step, the major problem is that players recognize that items are more important than gold.

Items are rarer, there are fewer instances to acquire items, and players are unable to spend gold to obtain items – as opposed to champions. Even though champions are more restricted (in that there are a fixed number of units per champion available), players feel as they have more agency with regards to acquiring champions than items. This lack of agency, as expressed in the Reddit post and comments, with regard to items is certainly causing frustration.

One obvious solution, of course, is to standardize the item drops so that everyone gets the same number of items per round. But there is one other way to re-work the item system to make it fairer.

I’m not going to suggest, as some commenters in the thread did, that you should be able to purchase items as others have. Instead, I would suggest that Riot allows players to disassemble their combined items or detach their items for a gold cost.

This would reduce those painful instances where a player put an item on a champion early on but finds a better user for it later in the game. Or a case where a player uses a Tear to build a Frozen Heart but doesn’t have one later on when he needs to combine it with a Spatula to get that Demon synergy.

This would also make items a bit more fungible as assets because, like champions, they can be maximized by spending gold. There would still be a level playing field in that the items are a limited resource and they would be (mostly) RNG-based, but giving players more agency with what to do with the items they get would make give them some control over the chaos.