Off the backs of the popular sixth Teamfight Tactics expansion, Gizmos & Gadgets, the team behind TFT at Riot Games announced that the new game mode released with the expansion, Double Up, is going to stick around permanently. In a dev blog post released on Monday Riot Games is “doubling down on Double Up.” The news doesn’t come as a shock to fans as Double Up’s lead designer, Ananda Gupta said the mode has been a massive success.
But what is shocking, is that the mode isn’t even coming down for extended maintenance which was announced last year. Instead, Riot will look to improve Double Up while it’s on the live servers. The dev blog said that the in-Beta game mode is “90% of the way to Double Up’s final, non-Beta form.” That last 10% is going to be fulfilled through various improvements to the game.
The future of TFT Double Up
One of the improvements that a lot of players have been asking for is the implementation of custom lobbies so big groups can organize in-house tournaments and tournament organizers can open up another avenue of competitive TFT.
Another improvement coming to Double Up in the future is a “tailor-made” ranked system just for Double Up. Currently Double Up uses the same ranked system as the other non-standard game mode, Hyper Roll. This ranked system isn’t suitable for duo play. It’s hard to balance lobbies with big discrepancies in partner’s individual rating.
The blog post also mentioned that 90% of Double Up players are playing with pre-made teams. But that 10% who queue up solo don’t have a good way of communicating with their random teammate in-game. So the team at Riot is working on a way to make communication easier. Speaking of making things easier, the Double Up team will also be making quality of life changes to the game. For example, making team colors clearer and adding more clarity around reinforcements.
Finally, Double Up will also feature dedicated balance updates in the future. The hope here is that this will create unique metas that are exclusive to the game mode. All of these changes are scheduled to hit at the same time when TFT’s seventh expansion launches later this spring.
