How to Use Spectator Mode in TFT
With Spectator Mode being added to TFT last patch, Riot quietly extended their spectate API to cover TFT games as well as League.
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This article was written by MetaTFT Guthers
What does this mean?
If you're familiar with League of Legends, you'll know that you can search your profile on a website and see the details of the game you're currently in, such as the other player's ranks, stats and top champions.
Well now you can also do this for TFT games, as well as being able to spectate other player's games
- regardless if they're on your friends list or not.
I've been grinding over the weekend to try and put together some useful tools that use this data, and I'm excited to share what I've built with it.
Lobby Scouting
If you search your profile on the MetaTFT Match History Page, it will make a query to check if you're live in-game, and if so it will return some information about the players in your lobby.
An example scouting screen from one of Prestivent's recent games
There are some tags to try to and highlight some useful information about the players in your lobby. At a glance, you can see a One Trick and a Forcer that both favor Karthus and Akali — so might be best to stay away from that comp if you don't want to be contested.
Clicking on one of these players will take you to their profile — here we can scout the one-trick and see that they're quite likely to play Karthus/Akali again.
The One Trick's recent match history
There's a second tab to the scouting feature that looks at which units are likely to be more or less contested in this lobby, and compares it to the pickrate of other lobbies at this rank.
The Contested Units Tab from Prestivent's game above
We can see that the lobby is likely to be fairly AD heavy, and that Twitch/Vex reroll & Riven are less likely to be contested.
Spectating Games
We've also curated a list of interesting games that you might want to spectate, with the ability to filter by region. If you want to learn from top players and want to be able to switch viewpoints in a lobby to see what everyone is doing, then this could be an ideal way to learn.
Some example games featuring Top Players & Streamers
Once you've found a game that looks interesting, you can press the Spectate button which should load you into the game, without needing these players on your friends list.
Spectating Leaderboard Games
Another way to find interesting games to watch is from the Ranked Leaderboard. We've added an indicator to show if any of the top-ranked players on each server are in a game that you can spectate.
Here we can see the #3 ranked player globally is currently in a game that we can watch
My recommendation on how to use this would be to scan for players with an interesting playstyle — A red arrow means they tend to play one comp, and you can see their main carries highlighted on the right.
A couple of interesting players to spectate in the top 100 ranked players
In the above example, there are two players currently live that tend to force a comp. If I wanted to learn more on how to play Disco or Pentakill then I could spectate one of their games.
Some Notes:
The TFT Spectate API is very new and I've noticed a few issues with it so far. Sometimes it won't pick up your game, but it might pick up the game from other players in your lobby. The site will check for a live game when you load the player profile page, so if the scouting doesn't show up then you can try refreshing or looking up someone else in your lobby.
I've also noticed that the game sometimes fails to load when you run the spectate script. I've been able to fix this by alt+f4ing and running the script again, but it sometimes takes a couple of attempts.
Hopefully, these tools are helpful for people to learn comps, and to avoid getting contested in Ranked!
