State of the Meta: Rest in Peace, TT
Letās talk a little bit about the recent Nexus article, shall we?
Starting from the top, Riotās announced that they wonāt be producing any more temporary game modes a la PROJECT: Overcharge or Star Guardian: Invasion anymore. The biggest takeaway I get from this is that the RGM (Rotating Game Mode) Queue is finally dead for sure, which has been the de facto experience anyways, so not a big deal. Events will certainly feel not as exciting as they did with an event-specific game mode attached, but hopefully Riot is putting the resources they used for temporary game modes into creating something else (like something besides League of Legends, perhaps).
Next up, TFT got confirmed to be a permanent addition to the game, which surprised exactly nobody. We all knew TFT was going to be a forever addition when it skipped the beta phases that Nexus Blitz went through and got microtransactions added to boot, so Iām not sure why Riot felt that they needed to make an announcement. I donāt necessarily dislike this, but I do think that TFT is less of a savior for Riot and more of a stopgap that will drop in popularity over time.
ARURF+ and Nexus Blitz coming back is certainly a welcome surprise, as I assumed both modes would be killed alongside the RGM Queue. Evidently Riot are alright with some temporary modes coming back and not others.
And finally, letās talk about Twisted Treeline. After many, many years of neglect, Riot will finally be pulling it off life support and sending it the way of Dominion before it. They gave a bunch of excuses like low player count and poor pacing, but letās be real here - the mode is dying because Riot chose to not devote resources to it. They released it and didnāt support it, then reworked the map and didnāt support it. Without support, a mode wonāt attract a playerbase - and without a playerbase, it wonāt get support.
And at the end, itās the players at large that suffer. Twisted Treeline was a valuable addition to the game for multiple reasons - it was a shorter game mode that still felt strategic (unlike ARAM), it had a different meta that brought out different compositions and champions, and it was one of the few ways in which players could experience the different areas of Runeterra. TTās removal is just another way in which Riot have homogenized the League of Legends experience and brought it away from what it used to be.
Iām not going to say that Twisted Treeline shouldnāt be removed in its current state, but I will certainly cast the blame on Riot. If they had time to produce an Autochess clone, they definitely had the time to give TT the support it deservedā¦ and instead, they chose not to. Itās a sad day for LoL indeed.
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