TFT: Battle Pass Panic!

It’s been nearly two years now since Team Fight Tactics (“TFT” for short) came out and yet I find it still incredibly intriguing. I play it on and off and it’s extremely chill while also being somewhat entertaining. At times, you’re really behind and end up losing a lot (or worse, you end up with a win-loss-win-loss-win scenario which means less gold overall) but you still somehow end up in the Top 3… and it just feels good to get some wins – and when you lose, you can blame RNG or something and not your horrible decision making. TFT and the genre of “auto-battlers” is a lot of fun and hence, I wanted to write a post on TFT and Dota Underlords, even if I’m a bit late to the party on that. I remember someone from the Blaugust crowd having played both (back in June 2019!) and comparing the two, saying that the characters in TFT are too similar and that they look the same – even though that’s the exact issue I had with Dota Underlords… but that post will have to wait for another day (most likely at the end of June, given the two-year anniversary). Today, I wanted to talk about the TFT Battle-Pass and a little predicament I’ve been in for the past couple of days.

The TFT Battle Pass is a wonderful thing full of incredibly cool rewards from Arena Skins to so-called “Little Legends”, as well as Finishers and Emotes. By playing the game, you progress through the tears, unlocking a bunch of rewards, doesn’t that sound great? If you’re not paying for it, you only get a reward every few tiers… but if you pay for it, you get a lot of value out of it, especially due to the exclusive rewards that you won’t get later for this price. The “Gizmos & Gadgets II Pass+” cost me ten bucks (ish?) and I was looking forward to unlocking all the rewards. The final reward at tier 42 is, after all, the “Toxitorium”, an arena skin that just looks fabulous. The other rewards are also quite cool but I’m honestly only after that arena skin and some other cosmetics in there… the only issue here is, however, that I haven’t really played for most of the event and then I realised that I didn’t quite get enough value out of the battle pass when there was only a week left.

My biggest issue this season was time. I frankly couldn’t find the time to play TFT, mostly because most games would be unplayable with my current ISP troubles. Hence, playing a Singleplayer game was often more enjoyable than playing TFT (or any Multiplayer game). Then the meta kind of moved on and I struggled to play the comps I enjoyed while also finding it hard to enjoy some of the new comps that got introduced from Debonairs to Syndicates to Innovators. My luck sucks in these sorts of games, too, which doesn’t make it easier to enjoy playing something you don’t enjoy. Truth be told, I regretted purchasing the Battle Pass… Those ten bucks could’ve gone into so many better things, possibly, like one month of Netflix, two Shawarma from that Arabian place I found recently, a good book, or a niche Indie Game from my wishlist. Truth to be told, I don’t like Battle Passes usually because they end up feeling like so much commitment. I hated Destiny 2’s Battle Passes and Seasons because they were so closely tied together. Owning the expansions up to Forsaken apparently meant that I still couldn’t access those new events and activities per season unless I paid for some stupid pass that often would turn out to be incredibly grindy and annoying to deal with. Anyway, I digress.

Hence, I started playing a lot of TFT these past few days and I had varying success with it. I have no idea what the best way to level the pass is but I tried my hardest to stick to the missions I got. Missions will give you 800~1000 experience points but they’d often be somewhat difficult to accomplish. Playing games will grant you 50 experience in Hyper Roll but the experience is a lot more chaotic and faster-paced than normal games. Since Hyper Roll is a lot faster, I spammed that mode for quite a while before I realised that it’s a bit ineffective to do it this way. I mean, winning in ranked/normal would grant me 100~200 experience depending on where I place while Hyper Roll games go faster but they can often also end up dragging on a bit. At times, a Hyper Roll game will last a solid 30 minutes when you’re in the top 3 and it will only award you with 100 experience points by the end of it because you placed this high. Meanwhile, a normal game will grant you 100 experience even if you’re losing and 200 when you “win” (top 3 or 4).

For a while, I tried to cheese the system by queuing up and just letting the game run in the background while I was doing stuff… but… being AFK doesn’t give you Battle Pass experience anymore, so this “tactic” doesn’t work, even though it would have worked out quite well hypothetically speaking. Hence, after trying to cheese the system twice, I gave up on that and just played normal games, amassing 100 to 200 experience points per round in the process. Who would have thought that playing the game instead of trying to cheese my way through the Pass would grant me the most experience? (It’s a joke, don’t answer that!) Either way, I ended up playing a lot of it even though I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did initially… and then I enjoyed it more… and then I enjoyed it a lot more. In the end, I ended up kind of having as much fun as I initially did back in 2019, which was a bit of a surprise!

Alas, I sadly didn’t make it all the way through the pass this time around. There are two more hours until the event ends (at the time of writing this last section of this post) and I frankly don’t have the time right now to deal with this, as I still have to study and do laundry and whatnot. The Toxitorium arena skin may be something that I’ll get in the future. Twitch Prime, after all, awards you with 350 or so “free” Riot Points every month, meaning that I might be able to purchase it with those. “Next time”, I’ll definitely try to play more TFT if I do decide on getting the battle pass in any game.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.