Twitch Plays Teamfight Tactics Hits Gold 3 Ranking

Way, way back in 2014 (god, was it five years ago already?) a brilliant yet anonymous australian programmer figured out how to give people who viewed a Twitch stream the ability to control what happens in the game they were streaming. That turned into Twitch Plays Pokémon, a worldwide phenomenon where over a million people were tuning in to either try and help Red finish his mission to become a Pokemon master, actively obstruct his journey, or simply laugh at the chaos of the situation.

Since then, things have calmed down considerably, but “Twitch Plays” is still a genre on the streaming platform, with the community banding together to do everything from fight demons in Dark Souls to the flood in Halo: Combat Evolved. Usually, these go about as badly as you would imagine. But sometimes, there’s a game that just ‘clicks’ with the community, and they do really, really well.

Case in point: the most recent game to be Twitch Played: Teamfight Tactics, League of Legend’s own auto-chess clone. Because not only are they playing this game now, they’re playing it damn well. You see, Teamfight Tactics recently published a ranked mode, which uses the same tearing system as League of Legends – bronze is the lowest, then it goes silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master, grandmaster, and challenger. Each of these is split into four divisions, from 4, the lowest, to 1, the highest.

And right now, Twitch is at Gold 3. Which might not seem that impressive when you look at the number of tiers above that, but remember that around 80% of the player base never gets past silver rank in these kinds of things.

That said, there are theories as to why it’s doing so well: compared to Pokemon, the number of people voting on Teamfight Tactics are pitiful, sitting at around 200 most of the time. That probably means they’re all pretty devoted to trying to do well, and working together they probably come up with some rather cunning strategy.

But who knows – now that the world knows this is happening, I’m sure it won’t be long before some people go out of their way to try to ruin it.