TFT lead dev Mortdog shared the biggest struggle as a public facing game designer at Riot: getting death threats, not only towards him but also his family.
Before the launch of TFT set 9, there was an incident where Teamfight Tactics could not be accessed for 2 days on League of Legends’ PBE client due to crash issues. Instead of overworking TFT devs, Mort decided to disable TFT for a day while they worked on the issues.
Hardly a controversial decision. However as the PBE was for TFT’s latest set Runeterra Reforged, there were many understandably frustrated players, and some of them decided to take it out on the public head honcho Mortdog himself. Comments included: ‘I want to kill your entire family in front of you and make you watch’ among others. This prompted a series of tweets response from Mort.
For years Mortdog had been by far the most front-facing developer at Riot Games, if not in the gaming industry itself. He runs a popular Twitch channel as well where he plays TFT at Challenger levels and answers questions as well as interacts with the community. Mort has always been very open about design decisions and given useful insights into the thought process behind balance decisions on TFT. None of this was part of his job.
While Mort certainly benefits from being the face of TFT, most of the time it isn’t worth it for him while TFT player base has benefitted so much. We have truthfully been spoiled, and facing the reckoning that the clear, direct and honest communication might just be gone due to the behavior of some of our worst.
To clarify, Mort has said that most of the community and interactions have been nice and supportive:
Don’t get me wrong, the PERCENTAGE of these is actually quite low. I’d say 70% of comments were very kind and positive, and 20-25% of comments were constructive criticism which is great. But if even 5% of comments are toxic and you read 1000, that’s still 50 horrible things
At the end of the day, these horrible 5% needs to be reminded that TFT is just a game, and getting so triggered over a video game that they opt to attack and blame a good dev for it is a horrid overreaction. Not that there are any case scenarios where death threats are justified. Chill.
