Teamfight Tactics is allegedly a fun game. I would probably describe it as a resource management game in all honesty.
There are many choices in Teamfight Tactics and each choice you make affects the expected value (EV) of every other choice. You get items and have to choose what to combine them into, have to choose what Heroes to buy (I’ve changed my allegiance I can’t call them Champions anymore), have to choose augments, have to choose whether to reroll augments, have to choose how to manage your economy, have to choose where to place the units on a grid (they have a standardized notation for discussing this), have to choose which synergies you will go for, have to choose what portal to vote for, have to manage your streaks.
I think my biggest issue with this game is that I don’t know what I’m doing. In fact it is painfully obvious I don’t know what I’m doing and so I pick things and I have like 8 reddit tabs of r/CompetitiveTFT open and I still have no idea what I’m doing. Other people know what they’re doing and so they beat me or sometimes they know even less what they’re doing than me or just lowrolled and I’ll win a round. When I do win a round I feel exactly no feelings of accomplishment or joy. When I lose a round I also feel nothing. See I think what I lack that others have is that the joy of “choosing for myself” is mostly lost on me when I know that it’s made without rhyme or reason. I can make semi convincing arguments to myself about why I should take a certain action but I also know that I don’t know enough about the game to *evaluate* my own arguments. It’s like I’m trying to do a math problem I don’t know how to do on a test and gaslighting myself that my dumbass derivation will give me some form of partial credit.
See, I can imagine that the joy of this game comes from knowing its strategy on a deep level and making the most of what options you’re given to you. You have to balance your short term success and long term victory, much like building a deck in Slay the Spire, your options are subject to chance and you have to make EV calculation after EV calculation in order to maximize it. So why didn’t I hate Slay the Spire when I first started playing? It’s because in the early stages of that game, most complicated options haven’t been unlocked, you’re forced to play the simplest character with the simplest cards available, and there is a level of control given to you by actually playing your options directly. You see and react to what the enemy is doing. In TFT I look at the shop and look at my spreadsheet and look at the shop and just wonder why I’m doing this to myself.
I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with enjoying TFT but I would rather pound sand.
I employed the assistance of artificial intelligence for a few rounds and that was the most fun I had.
It at least felt like I was cooperating. Maybe this game would be fun to play democratically in a crowd. Maybe you could set up a prediction market or something of strong TFT players and somehow reach tft nirvana or something.