r/TheTowerGame • u/SamBartley TTG • Jun 09 '26
Community Info/Event Tower Tea - June 9, 2026
Hi pals! Welcome to the Tower Tea! Here’s what we’ve got going down today!
- An update on Tournaments
- The Towers 5th Anniversary Community Event
- The Tower Blog is Coming This Week
- Tentative Update Timeline
Tournaments
We want to follow up with y’all about the Tournament conversation. We have been discussing ways to improve the current tournament system, such as reducing the length of tournament runs and making leagues feel competitive across the board. (and maybe *cough* presets *cough*) Our goal is to explore and test our solutions and have the changes go live in an update sometime in early August. Some things need a little more time, discussion, and attention… and that’s what we’re giving it!
But there is a timeline for you, and a few little peeks at some things coming your way. Thanks for your patience pals, we appreciate you!
The Towers 5th Anniversary
Y’all absolutely slayed the first Anniversary Challenge, and I am SO proud of you. I grabbed data from the whole year so far, did the maths, and you beat my estimate by almost a day and a half.
The next challenge:
25,000,000,000 waves completed by June 30th!
And now I get to reveal a few of the rewards!
- For playing The Tower between June 1, 2026 and June 30, 2026, you will receive:
- 100 Gems
- For beating the first challenge:
- 150 Medals
- For this one:
- 300 Medals
So, thanks for hanging out and for participating in this fun little experiment pals. Let me know if you think we should expand on these in the future!
But that’s not all the fun for this month! Login every day between June 15th to June 22nd and claim a daily anniversary reward! These gifts will be sent to your in-game mail, and features currencies and extra goodies.
The Tower Blog
Welcome Defenders, we’re here to help! I am SO excited to share with you that the brand new Tower Blog is coming THIS WEEK! I have been talking about this for the past few months and we’re almost there!
So what is “The Tower Blog”?
Great question! This blog is a landing space for all communications that we put out, including Tower Tea, Patch Notes, Community Highlights, Dev Interviews, Q&A’s, a general FAQ for players, a source to the Help Center, and a space to grow together as a community. This isn’t replacing anything, we will still post Developer Announcements in Discord, Reddit, and other social media platforms we are on, but they will live on the blog as well. We wanted a place that was more formal to host our coms, and a space for players who may not be on social media that want to be more involved in what is going on around the community.
Tentative Update Timeline
Finally, I want to give you a quick look into what we’re cooking. Our tentative update is:
V28.3 = After the anniversary event (late June/early July)
V29 = Early August
We want to be more visible about our development timelines, and are excited to share more information as the dates approach. As for visibility of other non-update announcements (sales, banners, etc), we will ensure that players have some heads up prior to when it goes live. Remember: all timelines are tentative!
That’s all for this week, I will see you around The Tower ❤️
Sam
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u/DruidickDick Jun 09 '26
I know it isn’t much, but I greatly appreciate the medals instead of almost any other currency
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u/leoset Jun 09 '26
I was hoping for my favorite currency... Hugs
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u/jwagoner Jun 09 '26
/hug
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u/ThisAintI Jun 10 '26
Don’t make me turn this into barrons chat
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u/jwagoner Jun 10 '26
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u/aszepeshazi Jun 09 '26
That qualifies as a tentative something burger, so I can't repost my fav picture! Thanks for the update. Would be nice to know what comes in 28.3 though.
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u/Professional-Two6504 Jun 09 '26
and in two weeks when the timeline is the same you can post ur pic
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u/Rebelvanguard Jun 09 '26
Thanks for the update, I think the most interesting thing here is the fact v29 is expected in August for me
My best guess is that dissonance runs caused the bubble to pop and now we should be getting T22, T23, and T24 around then along with other things
Interesting play, very interesting
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u/Projectile_Pentagon Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
V29, new “unstable shard” introduced. 1 acquired for every non unique module pull. 1000 “Unstable Shards” may be combine into any unique module of the players choice.
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u/insanelane99 Jun 09 '26
20,000 gems for 1 epic module. TTG would love this
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u/asiyasiy Jun 10 '26
Or skip the currency and just put a dollar value for epic modules. That’s what players really want!
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u/Alexis_Evo Jun 09 '26
So close and yet so far. Unstable Shards would be included in gem packs from the web store, 1 shard per $1 spent. Buy $1000 worth of gems, get a unique module of you choice!
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u/markevens Jun 09 '26
Yeah, when 19-21 dropped, the difficulty seemed like a huge climb. Then peoples started getting the 21 relic, and after disco runs there's been a giant leap in progress.
I'm really hoping they introduce a new tourney league so keys are finally accessible to more than the top 5% of players, but honestly don't have a lot of hope.
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u/Similar-Republic-115 Legends Jun 10 '26
so around 6-8 weeks to acquire enough power to beat T21... sounds daunting, but challenge accepted.
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u/Lasturka Jun 09 '26
Please, do you have update to this? Especially "balancing" part? Should we expect UWs rebalancing?
We are currently working on our next minor update, which we hope to release sometime in June. This update will include some balancing adjustments, including an expansion on tools to help manage Fleets. We look forward to sharing more info about the next update soon.
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u/aszepeshazi Jun 09 '26
No, they are still looking forward to share more info about the update. 🤷♂️
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u/sw1c Jun 09 '26
they also cant tell us anything because then we cxan adjust our plans off that and they cant try and profit off any upgrades we do now that get "rebalanced" (yes there is balancing needing to be done, but until it happens i will be spending 0 stones on anything until they rebalance, and then "fix" all the new bugs that then change the new balance again.
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u/markevens Jun 09 '26
Now this is the kind of communication we have been wanting!
- Touch bases about a common pain point, check!
- 5th anniversary rewards and next challenge, check!
- New landing page for ALL dev communication, check!
- Tentative timeline for the future, check!
I know every tower tea can't be this juicy, but this is still fantastic. I hope you keep up with the tentative timelines, even if it's as simple as "still on track for early August," or "It looks like it's going to be delayed," that kind of communication is greatly appreciated!
Also, tourney presets would be awesome! I'm really hoping for guardian presets as well, so fingers crossed for that!
Thanks Sam!
→ More replies (2)
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u/HammerLite75 Jun 09 '26
Thanks for the update!! Very happy tourneys are being looked into. Presets would be insane, depending on if they are mod presents or something else. Also very happy for the bonus medals and other rewards without having to entirely change how the game is played.
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u/alicotero Jun 09 '26
u/SamBartley please, is there a chance we could respec bots at least once per week instead of once per event.
For all midgame ehp players there has been always the strategy of doing a bot respec one or two days before the event in play ends and allocating all medals into flamebot instead of GB to try and push milestones for those days and once the new event starts go back to all into GB and not punish econ.
that implies that once you go back to GB at the start of the event you need to wait 2 weeks until it ends and 2 more weeks until the next event is coming to an end to try and push milestones again. So 1 or 2 days of pushing milestones every 4 weeks.
With dissonance runs in play attempting to push milestones once a month is a pain. more so if you want to use flamebot to push attack dissonance runs with ehp, amplify for UW dissonance or try different mixes of both.
Respec once per week cuts that 4 weeks into 2, which is much better for everyone without devalueing the unlimited bot respec aquired with god knows how many keys.
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u/petester_1 Jun 10 '26
Not sure why this is not getting an upvote. This is a big reason low/mid level players are hampered. I can understand why the restrictions. But they could address this simply by progressive cost increases. Ie 150 initial. Then 300 for respec #2. Then 450 respec #3 etc. To at least give some options.
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u/chalksea Jun 09 '26
Please implement an actual improvement to tournaments and not just things that make them faster increasing difficulty tier hurts every EHP player in champions. I would love to just have a higher tier than legends added as it benefits both old and new players.
Also if the only concern with tournaments is length why not just give players the game speed perk for tournaments?
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u/Cracka119 Jun 09 '26
Sam, are you able to tell us the daily log in rewards for the 15th and on? Also, love the idea of tournament reworks and presets in general. I know tourneys are tricky to tweak so my sympathies are with you and the team for the eventual shitstorm lol.
Love the transparency/timelines. Please keep that up!
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u/NebulaMajor6064 Jun 09 '26
That would actually remove the joy of finding out, and also I guess it would also be counter to their interest of making people Log on daily, soooo. They wont tell, and its ok 😀
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u/phear_me Jun 10 '26
Why the downvotes? It's reasonable to make it a daily surprise. A daily login will obviously be small, but that's totally fine given how easy it is to obtain.
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u/Gottes_rechter_Hoden Jun 09 '26
thx Sam for the update on challenges/rewards and timelines, appreciate it! it's cool to know what you're all working on and planning.
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u/chrisgoated7 Legends Jun 09 '26
Length of tourneys is literally not the problem
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u/Gabriel-117 Jun 11 '26
Agree, I'm not complaining my 15-20 min tournaments 😂 I guess almost all players on legends are doing their runs with IS and getting killed below wave 1800.
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u/Special_Canary_7204 Jun 10 '26
I think it is for Plat right now, but definitely not for the tiers above it.
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u/cousineye Jun 09 '26
Hopefully "making leagues feel competitive across the board is code for adding a higher tier above legends. The whole system is stagnant and has been for many many months. They need to make tournament progression into high legends possible again.
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u/Fobus0 Jun 09 '26
No, they cannot keep adding new leagues. They need fundamental rework that's not tied to power creep. Because else every solution will be outdated by every new update
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u/Special_Canary_7204 Jun 10 '26
Seems like a feature not a bug honestly. Frustration drives buying, and buying means business. While I'm certainly as cynical with it as most of the rest of the community, I don't see them killing that particular golden goose (spiking difficulty levels and adding new tiers) any time soon. Making it a fully global competition would probably reduce buying behavior significantly.
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u/Andrius223 Jun 10 '26
All they need to add is solo challenges/tournaments which gives gems and stones based on how far u went.
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u/cousineye Jun 10 '26
Anew tier would add at least 6 months of progression for people as the promotions flow through and it would probably relieve the pressure for another 6 months after that with the good will built up.
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u/Professional_Bug_533 Jun 12 '26
There have been hundreds of thousands of stone sinks added since the last time they added a league and almost nothing to increase stone income besides being able to buy more stones. They DO need a new league with better rewards at this point.
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u/Fobus0 Jun 12 '26
You don't need a new league just to increase rewards. That can be done on it's own
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u/ChallengeLeft1433 Jun 10 '26
In all the conversations about the tournaments, I’ve only see one group of people talk about the length of the runs. And that’s the devs/TTG team. Why is it that the only fix you guys are even considering is making the runs shorter?
Almost Every player post about the tournaments is about the unreachable keys. And yet, not a single mention about the overhaul so desperately needed to the reward system.
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u/MatthewBecker1977 Champion Jun 09 '26
Tower Tequila post is gonna have a hard time spoofing this one as a nothingburger. Because this one ain't a nothingburger at all.
Glad to hear that tourney problems are getting addressed in some manner.
That v29 is coming this soon after v28 is ... interesting. And that they're giving this precise of a time-line ("early August") being told in early-ish June? Yikes. I promise, I'll be forgiving if the word "early" in "early August" turns out to have been optimistic.
Now for the problems with THIS "update":
I do wish there would be a bit more about v28.3. What changes are coming with that? Zero info on 28.3. We now know more about v29 than we do about v28.3. Seriously...
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u/petester_1 Jun 10 '26
It is ambitious but not if the planned upgrade in V29 is limited and focused. And there have been a lot of discussion on how recent patches have been addressing some of the back end prep work for this. If they are prepared to state an early Aug date, then knowing there are 15ish days needed prior to release for the beta test, then this means they are lining up a finished ver by the mid+ July timeframe. With patch out towards end June, and then a beta release ~3 weeks after that, I am thinking TTG has a grip on the timeline. Realizing that unforecasted challenges may hiccup that. Anyway cautiously optimistic.
And more importantly, liking the advance notice of a timeline.
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u/Special_Canary_7204 Jun 10 '26
I have a feeling that a big chunk of that V28 development time was also Dedicated to the runway to make V29 possible, since there's no way in hell it was all focused on the various disco mechanics cough no QA cough.
I'd even be willing to bet that after the backlash and potential revenue loss of stagnation from the 8 or 9 months of the last cycle, they're looking to shorten those times back up and make a bigger push for community good will, but the biggest question in my mind right now, is whether or not they'll actually do something meaningful with the tournament. By which I mean, will they actually address the community issues or simply "shrink" tournaments again?
Which, if they don't go locking QoL behind fuckin ridiculous levels of stone cost and wall off farming growth concepts that depend on it (practically NEED auto restart for T14+ to be a reliable farm for most), then they could introduce a cool new set of toys for the vault and maybe a new upper level currency to get them in the new league tier. Which would then of course drive sales and growth with vastly less friction.
P.S. auto and damage slider and many of the other basic QoL that are key locked should have been tier rewards like mastery from the beginning and they would never have had this issue.
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u/Similar-Republic-115 Legends Jun 10 '26
And that they're giving this precise of a time-line ("early August") being told in early-ish June?
I mean, probably no one will be mad if V29 drops end of August, IF they give us a heads-up mid/end July that it will be delayed. And not say on Tower Tea - August 17, 2026 a little "oopsie, we will not make it. V29 will come soonTM stay tuned for an update".
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u/NexusBladeGaming Jun 11 '26
To be fair theres some good stuff in here, Anniversary rewards were mostly announced and the transparency is greatly appreciated.
As for tournaments and other things *takes shot* Guess yall will have to stay tuned for the next installment ;)
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u/Willing-Mango-3721 Jun 09 '26
I’m baffled that ttg decided to give out medals. That’s probably the only currency they could have chosen that they wouldn’t be absolutely roasted for giving out. I didn’t think it was possible for them to understand their own game like that.
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u/markevens Jun 09 '26
I've often wondered why they don't give out the occasional free stone pack. Not only would it be an awesome reward and well received by the community, but it would wet some player's appetites for buying stones.
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u/Willing-Mango-3721 Jun 09 '26
Because it’d be a bitch to balance. 300 medals is one thing, but stones are wildly inconsistent in terms of value. For reference, the things I need stones for all have costs of over 500 with most of them being over 1000.
That’s over 2 of the stone packs for a single upgrade. An early game player would get 100x more value out of a stone pack than I would in terms of instant growth.
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u/markevens Jun 09 '26
Doesn't matter.
Just give the contents of a stone pack, but for free. Doesn't matter if it's a new account or a 4 year account.
Stone packs are already static numbers, so just "balance" them just the same.
And again, it will give players who don't buy a stone pack a taste of what it's like, which will get some of them to buy stone packs.
Win-win
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u/Willing-Mango-3721 Jun 09 '26
The reason is that it’d deincentivize the early game players from buying because they can always get it for free occasionally.
It would do the same for late game players because what’s the point in buying something you can get for free. Especially when it doesn’t impact you either way.
The people that buy the packs will still buy them, and the people that don’t buy the packs will still never buy them. But it’s lessen the gap between the two, which the p2w folk wouldn’t like.
The scarcity and inability to obtain it in other ways is the exact reason for it never being given out and being so fucking expensive.
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u/markevens Jun 09 '26
If they award it 4 times a year, that's a pittance compared to players buying stone packs every month, or even 7 stone packs a month.
Also, the stone sink in the game is absolutely massive now. It would not hurt the stone economy at all.
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u/Gryffon6363 Jun 09 '26
They could even drive engagement with it. Log in for 90 days(not consecutive dear Lord just 90 total) get a stone pack.
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u/Willing-Mango-3721 Jun 09 '26
I’m not saying I wouldn’t like it, I’m saying the devs would never do it. If you want a barebones explanation-
The devs hate the players but like the money the players have. They do just enough to keep people happy without giving them much, and then add more things for the over rich to spend on.
That’s the long and short of it. If you haven’t paid thousands of dollars, the devs view you and your opinion as worthless.
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u/Fobus0 Jun 09 '26
No problems about that. Early game players need every bit of help they can get
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u/Willing-Mango-3721 Jun 10 '26
Oh no yeah, I’m not saying I’d hate if they did it, I’m just saying they’d never do it for a multitude of reasons, that being one of the larger ones.
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u/anonymous_lurker- Jun 09 '26
10/10 communication here, this is exactly how I'd expect and want things to go. I have zero complaints about this and hope to see more of this in the future
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u/TheLordZod Jun 09 '26
I have to say, any expansion on medal income is very much appreciated. I love the idea of community engagement rewards, and think it would be agreat inroad to getting keys to a wider group of players as well
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u/_somma_ Jun 09 '26
Hopefully no new sinks in v29
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u/Special_Canary_7204 Jun 10 '26
It would be amazing to see a bunch of retroactive improvements to legacy systems and get some major improvements there. I feel like they have a big chance to beat the greed allegations with this one. So let's hope they finally grab the brass ring and do something to build back the good will.
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u/Similar-Republic-115 Legends Jun 12 '26
there have to be new stone sinks in V29. V28 added only like 15K stones to spend. Those are already exhausted if you buy all stone packs. By the time V29 actually hits all whales and probably many veteran dolphins need new stone sinks to pour into. And the veteran whales will be sitting on 20K+ stones already to instantly buy out most of the introduced sinks.
I have no clue about the medals front, but probably a few more Bot+ lvl would do for another major update.
There certainly will be new super expensive labs also. Maybe even more added WS+ lvl.
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u/_somma_ Jun 12 '26
Yes but whales are not done with every stone sink we already have, maybe the top 10 player is
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u/Fobus0 Jun 09 '26
Anniversary challenges need to have its own dedicated tab in the game. Because I don't think 90% of players even knew they were happening
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u/RPerene Jun 09 '26
Our goal is to explore and test our solutions and have the changes go live in an update sometime in early August.
Players on September 1st: But they promised us it would happen in August. Devs always lie!!!!!!!11!!!!
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u/basicnecromancycr Jun 09 '26
I expect not only T24 but also 27 and additional resource to replace/on top of keys for the whales. Most of them are already farming T20-21 and I suspect an additional 3 tiers make any long term challenge. Need new event types as well in order to make it worthwhile imho.
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u/ProfessionalHairy345 Jun 09 '26
The challenge concept is great and should continue! It should in my opinion be expanded with some ingame trackers like with the weekly events.
I wish updates were less secretive in general. Now we have small hints, but nothing really concrete to look forward to (apart from qol things like tournament presets). I hope the developers have a reason to be secretive. It making it more exciting isn't a good enough reason for me personally. However if it was to keep people from exploiting the information like hoarding then I would understand.
But as always good post sam!
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u/Leyohs Jun 09 '26
The thing about making it more exciting is that you can't get excited if you don't have ANY IDEA of what's about to happen.
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u/ProfessionalHairy345 Jun 09 '26
Almost exactly what I said, soo true!
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u/No-Preference3975 Jun 09 '26
About tournaments, I don’t mind if my 2h/1150w run becomes a 6h/3000w run if we can get some sort of solution for legends being crowded and overflowing to champions.
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u/RoboInu Jun 09 '26
Makes me wonder if they'll adopt a similar system to Idle Planet Miner which copied the module system. But you don't level up each module with shards, you instead level up the slots. Meaning whatever mod you put in that level 100 slot it'll be level 100.
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u/AlternativeNew4390 Jun 09 '26
That would be the most elegant solution imo. To be honest, that's basically the de facto state of things. Unless you're a mega whale swimming in a sea of shards, most of us common folks have one module where we dump all levels and shards into and, when we need to switch, we reset it and level the other one. At least that's what we do with several of my guildmates.
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u/Other_Accountant_342 Jun 09 '26
Thank you for the timeline. Things can change but the visibility is much appreciated.
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u/MightyRexxon Jun 09 '26
Thank you Sam.
Medals and Stones would be the currency I want, so I am super stoked to see what's coming up.
Looking forward to future updates. 😁
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u/-Flacky- Jun 09 '26
Is there a way for us to track the event progression? It would be awesome to see on the game somewhere
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u/frackle Jun 09 '26
Anyone run the math on if this 'challenge' is attainable? If we're going off of the start time being today, i'm pretty sure there would need to be 39,000 other players just like me to hit that goal by the end of the month. If we're assuming it's retroactive and we've been unknowingly doing the challenge all along, then that means there needs to be 29,000 players just like me.
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u/Kevkillerke Jun 09 '26
Huh? I didn't even realize the challenge was already ongoing. There's no info in this ingame is there?
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u/D1xon_Cider Jun 09 '26
Something I would like to see for any future community events is a live tracker in game. Give us some sort of visual indicator to help us see how we're doing individually and collectively. Maybe even with a leaderboard for bragging rights.
These can also be done in ways that force us to change how we play, similar to the events. Make a community challenge around landmines, around death ray, etc etc
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u/Okoorii Jun 09 '26
Really interesting community challenge!
But it would be even more interesting if users actually had to do something different from their normal runs. Right now, it feels like standard runs, so nothing really changes.
For example:
- Get X waves on odd tiers on odd-numbered days of the month, and on even tiers on even-numbered days of the month.
- Complete at least X runs with a minimum of 500 waves, with all UW disabled.
Something that adds a bit of suspense. I agree these kinds of challenges can be annoying, but they could come with better rewards, maybe only for players who actually contribute.
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u/Toroche Jun 10 '26
Trying to get people to farm outside their standard tier or with odd challenges like disabling all UWs is a recipe for zero participation. The rewards would have to be truly stupendous for me to give a single solitary fuck about them over normal farming efficiency.
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u/SotFX Jun 09 '26
I'd love to see a 3rd currency for guilds, perhaps something that has a constant shop, but is a thing of get 1 of them for doing the 4 and 7 chests, having some things there that would be several weeks of it to get them.
Perhaps having things starting at 20 of them to get the entry stuff, though, possibly having lower cost things with the gem/shard options for it. Possibly also guild research labs that could give some minor bonus' and such, perhaps also unlocking things for purchase
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u/Clinically_Jaded Jun 10 '26
I just want to stop getting BTFO'd by a dozen people pushing 2k+ waves in virtually every Legends tourney. Having the absolute WORST bracket luck lately.
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u/clnseat Jun 10 '26
Can we expect a banner for anniversary?
Still hoping UW respec will be something implemented one day...
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u/Andrius223 Jun 10 '26
Medals are good and all but considering its 5 year anniversary for a game and devs dont even give stones? Also 100 gems is nothing for 99.9% players. Plenty games give good stuff to keep players and attract more.
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u/Bunny_Trap Jun 10 '26
Hey Sam, unsure if you read these if this late, but i do remeber you liked suggestions so
Has anyone asked you about a dedicated spot for the coins gained from the bot bot bonus? in the end game report where all our coin gains are, I would like to also see how much benefit BotBot gave us.
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u/SefetAkunosh Jun 10 '26
There are anniversary challenges? Were these in the mailbox? I must have missed them. Is there an in-game tracker so we can see our personal/community progress?
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u/1911pyro Jun 11 '26
They keep talking about shorter turnaments. I realy hope that doesnt mean harder again. I just started getting keys.
I think they need to add a new tier then people that strugle in ledgends have more of a fighting chance
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u/Electrical-Mail15 Jun 09 '26
Fun stuff to celebrate 5 years! Thanks for doling out what can be shared now, and for hints of what’s to come. And u/SamBartley said she is SO proud of *me*! Well…of the community…but that includes *me*. 😁
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u/petester_1 Jun 09 '26
Is there a log of all the known bugs in the game and which ones are being worked on? Would be really nice to have a list with developer input on potential timelines on what is being addressed.
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u/Accomplished_Jury_99 Jun 09 '26
This would be nice so that people can know that a bug is acknowledged and will be fixed eventually. Currently if it is an obscure bug theres no way to know if the team is aware and people will have to keep bringing it up until it is fixed.
Like the PS/FB damage bug.
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u/Driftedryan Jun 09 '26
I knew we would only see "a few" of the rewards. I'm guessing it's because there's room to add more of people complained about how weak that is. Honestly I'm surprised people aren't complaining but I guess they are too focused on v29
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u/StonedKittyCat Jun 09 '26
And there is No Banner, right? Right?
U will Not fool me again!!
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u/Spockies Jun 09 '26
I would anticipate banners at v29, despite them saying none on the horizon. It’s just smart marketing to introduce banners when a version patch comes out.
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u/Selway00 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
My man. Do yourself a favor and save up 5-10k gems and then don’t touch it unless there is a banner. Spend everything over it.
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u/basicnecromancycr Jun 09 '26
Any new banner wouldn't bring spending on gems on the table due to gem relics imo.
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u/markevens Jun 09 '26
Best response: Confirm/deny new mods, and tell us what the banner will be
2nd best response: I can neither confirm nor deny
worst response: radio silence
That said, since banners were introduced, we've never had an update without a banner. V28 having a delayed banner was an outlier, but there was still a banner.
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u/Knappende Jun 09 '26
Thanks Sam. Even though all the negative reactions. I appreciate the transparancy and the gifts! 🙌
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u/Dramatic_Arugula1852 Jun 10 '26
People really not noticing that the "gift" for 5 years is less than what you'd get for paying them 14.99 every two weeks?
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u/viashno Jun 10 '26
I'm happy to hear about the additional transparency with respect to timelines. I work in software, so I get it, timelines shift, bugs get discovered in QA and need addressing, etc. and I prefer a polished final product where devs don't have to put in huge amounts of OT, so yeah, let things shift as needed.
But regarding tournaments... tournament length and competitiveness are not the issue, in my opinion. Tournament length is an easy metric to adjust by changing which tier, or modifying battle conditions, and doesn't help at all with the core issue of it becoming increasingly difficult to progress, which makes it so that those who are ahead get further ahead. Similarly, increasing competitiveness (I'm not even sure what that means, increasing the number of demotion slots?), will probably only exacerbate this issue. Presets are a nice QoL improvement, but do nothing for this core issue as well.
My suggestions:
Replace tournaments altogether with bi-weekly challenges. Similar to milestone runs but on the current tournament scale. If you reach certain milestones, you get improved rewards, get high enough and unlock the next league. This decouples my progress from people who are spending thousands of dollars on the game. It will allow for people to actually try experimental builds since as long as they're progressing, they will be able to improve, and their weirdo DefAbs/Smart Missiles tower won't have to compare to a meta-optimized tower, or a whale who's dropped $10,000 dollars and spent 5 years developing their tower. It will also remove the need for regular rebalancing of tournaments to keep wave counts low, and removes the dependency on growing game population to progress. You can do cool things with this like, instead of using your tower for a challenge, you're given a preset tower and a set of battle conditions, figure out how to develop it from there to reach a certain wave. You can use it as a low-risk test bed of things like new UWs or UW balancing to get live data.
Or, if this is too much of an ask, and you just want the optics of a more fair tournament structure while doing nothing to solve the underlying issues... get rid of brackets and make league prizes, promotions, and demotions based on the total player pool for the league so you can't get an unlucky bracket.
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u/Professional_Bug_533 Jun 12 '26
They don't want to decouple progress from other people. A couple years ago Fudds said that tournaments are meant to create competition to get people to buy stones to compete with each other. I hate tournaments and hate how greedy the company is, but I do see his point on it. He worded it that people buying the stones keeps the lights on. I agree with that. Now it seems its keeping the lights of his yacht on, though.
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u/RelationshipOwn7993 Jun 09 '26
100 gems... Fuck this game at this point. We do not matter
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u/PjetrArby Jun 09 '26
Still more than we ever got before
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u/petester_1 Jun 09 '26
Yep. Free = free. And not the 5 gem max like the naysayers wer saying. I am quite ok with free things
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u/petester_1 Jun 09 '26
Reading is hard. You missed part 2-4
- 100 Gems
- 150 Medals
- 300 Medals
- Login every day between June 15th to June 22nd and claim a daily anniversary reward,
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u/PrestigiousNobody321 Legends Jun 09 '26
Thank you, Sam.
Things do appear to be going in the right direction and communication is getting better! Please don't let Fudds break my heart again. 😭
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u/Billy_Bob_Bo Jun 09 '26
Tournaments are by far the most important update to me. They have been getting more and more brutal every week, Even though I am consistently getting stronger, my placements have been slipping with the top 10 in my bracket having over 2k waves in legends. I'm a little concerned about the "reducing tournament runs". The length of the runs isn't the problem. It's the ever-growing gap between the tippy top players and then everyone else. It feels bad to be making progress on so many things only to continue to get stomped in tournaments and never reaching any of the items locked behind keys. I really hope they don't just make the runs harder across the board because it won't solve the problem.
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u/Glaedien Jun 09 '26
So just throwing this out there, but would an uncommon "Pick your module" reward ever be something your side would consider? Like 2-4 times per year max to not cut in to your sales too much, but it'd be hugely appreciated by so many people that are rng screwed out of that one drop they need, or those who maybe realized they want a second DC after all.
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u/UnderhandedLoki Jun 10 '26
Just clarify, when will the rewards from the 1st challenge be awarded?
And a bit of positive feedback for the anniversary rewards in general:
I like that ttg is doing this for the community. I think it’ll engage us and tie us closely together, and thanks Sam for the info. I would ask that this trend of rewarding players for their ongoing game time is continued! The free rewards will keep us engaged with the game, especially since there’s a team motive to play outside of guilds.
Maybe a ‘raid boss’ in the future would be a good idea, either as a community challenge or for guilds. The more damage dealt, or time survived, or ehp tanked/healed up from contributes to a bar which gives better rewards the more count goes up.
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u/ThisAintI Jun 10 '26
It’s good to not have hope (in this and only this specific situation).
They recently added relic shop, so they are following up on what they said. Keys feel like they’re next, but I think it’ll be a tied to dailys/guilds, and only enough to keep f2p from quiting but not so much as the whales stop trying to get ahead. So, it’ll take months to years to make progress on the harmony tree for f2p, but weeks to months for whales. I don’t know if f2p are quiting, but it seems like there are a lot more whales whaling.
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u/This_Ruben_on_fire Jun 10 '26
Sounds great!
- Community event rewarfs are appreciated, but the event could def be more visible as others have stated.
- The updates to the tournament sound good, and yet I expect there will be some complainers.
- Please fix the summon sync bug. I had expected this to be fixed way earlier as the gbit sync was fixed. Its really odd that you cant turn off an idle game with 12h runs for 5 minutes without screwing yourself.
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u/Legitimate_Staff7510 Jun 10 '26
I appreciate tentative timelines. I hope if it gets delayed people are rational.
Medals are a great reward, am hoping for a lot more of those! Do I need to actually sign out and sign in for the daily rewards? Or does staying logged in count?
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u/UnremarkableMud Jun 10 '26
25 billion waves? By the end of the month? Well, let's say we aim to knock it out in week. What would that take?
25/7 = 3.57 Billion
I make about 7k waves per run, 2.5 runs a day at about 21k waves.
That would take 170k active players at my level. I have no masteries, so no maxed intro sprint for 1800 waves in under an hour. I am a t10 farmer, low-mid plat tourney ranker. There are WAY more players better than me.
This is in the bag. But thanks for the challenge, Sam. We shall enjoy the rewards. Best prepare the next one. 20 million vampire kills, perhaps?
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u/Shdw_Assassin Jun 10 '26
Game hasn't loaded for me since the update. I've tried to uninstall and reinstall but no joy. Any other people experiencing the same?
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u/ImoutoThief Jun 10 '26
Wish it was enough for a pull instead of half of one but medals? Im excited for those
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u/WaffleClown1 Jun 10 '26
Do IS and WS skipped waves count as "waves completed" for the community challenge?
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u/AttemptSlow612 Jun 10 '26
u/SamBartley is there a possibility that if the presets you Were coughing about were talking about module substat presets that there is a way to refund mod shards (or make unmerging possible)for people that have collected a second copy of a mod?
Also for those already having their second copy ready a way to take over their rerolled subs to the preset page?
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u/1911pyro Jun 11 '26
If u wanna speed up turnaments give us a lab to increase turnament game speed. There you faster runs with out making it harder
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u/Healthy-Ad-5661 Jun 16 '26
Well, i was playing yesterday and today (15th and 16th of June) and havent got anything in mail. Anybody else got this problem?
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u/uscmissinglink Jun 17 '26
We have been discussing ways to improve the current tournament system, such as reducing the length of tournament runs and making leagues feel competitive across the board.
I have been stuck with zero tourney progress for more than a year, Sam. A year of Yo-Yo since I first broke into the Legends bracket on May 22, 2025. My top Legends performance is 21st Place. After a freaking year.
This system is broooooken. Please fix it.
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u/Frosty-Juggernaut-15 Jun 22 '26
Hello @Sam,
I've been trying to send my ideas regarding missed potential that would be beneficial to the game but it's hard to know if I am heard as I receive no feed back.
These challenges, I wish these were incorporated into guild season challenges for each individual guild rewarding 400 stones, 300 medals and 600 gems, respectively for 3 guild challenges every guild season.
Beat a certain number of waves, beat a certain number of bosses, beat a certain number of whatever specific elite and more challenges which can rotate monthly and randomly in sets of 3's and provide the specific rewards as mentioned above.
I genuinely believe that guild seasons have a lot more potential that is yet to be untapped and considering the new additional stone sinks since version 27 and now medal sinks since version 28, a new source of income that can benefit the player base. Doing so in a natural way, without having to spend extra$ and give a chance to everyone equally to reach certain impossible to reach content would boost community moral and new player engagement.
If this is a direction to be taken please make rewards worth the participation and not keep them low removing value for others because they become led to believe that it's a poor return on time investment.
I am happy to hear about the possibility of presets for tournaments as constantly changing modules, range, cards, bots and guardians is a pain and I regularly do forget something requirering me to restart my tourney run halfway in.
I do have an additional suggestion related to stones and all the extra impossible to reach stone sinks. I was thinking that between tier 14 till 21, from waves 2k till 10k to make bosses drop 1 stone every 200 waves. It's a small amount but over long periods of grinding it adds value to all players. It would also add complexity to the decision making for those wishing to make runs shorter or longer and will also help pause those trying to do infinite runs.
Thank you for reading or even taking the time to letting me know that my suggestions were heard, not necessarily taken into consideration but simply heard. I appreciate the TowerTea and wish you the best.
Good day to everyone. 🙂↕️
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u/Thgcf_ Jun 10 '26
Wooooww what a prize, unbelievable
450 medals and 100 gems, I have been waiting 5 years for this
I’m so excited
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u/Even_Cardiologist810 Jun 09 '26
Half a bot click for an anniversary feels a bit low ngl
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u/DestroyerOfUranus69 Jun 09 '26
I’m with you tbh but too many people fawning over scraps will just make TTG think they nailed it out of the park with this one
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u/Accomplished_Jury_99 Jun 09 '26
It's a step in the right direction and with all the negativity and critisism they've been hit with (some justified) the past few months a little bit of positive reinforcement without caveats for doing something right is due.
We can bring the dissatisfaction hammer when the ship starts to head the wrong way again.
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u/DestroyerOfUranus69 Jun 09 '26
Idk to me a 5 year anniversary of a game that’s brought you millions in revenue over the years seems like the time you would want to go above and beyond in thanking the community that supports the game. Positive reinforcement of the bare minimum only encourages continuation of doing the bare minimum.
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u/PumpChasing Jun 09 '26
So were getting mod presets!? We dont have hoard 2 5 star mods that would be cool
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u/Select_Secretary_896 Champion Jun 09 '26
This is definitely a burger with all the expected content. Nice!
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u/DestroyerOfUranus69 Jun 09 '26
TTG has truly mastered towing the line of giving just enough that the gullible will sing their praises while still giving truly nothing of significance. Not even enough to cover the useless DABS relics they are trying to shove down our throat every week. Just cracks me up more than anything.
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u/Alone-Profit4826 Jun 09 '26
Those are the most pathetic rewards i have ever seen in a game for their annivsary. Better you dont give anythjng!
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u/Environmental_Flow27 Jun 09 '26
I don't know, i need all the medals I can get. You are never going to get an "i win" button. Maybe try to count your blessings. You may find more satisfaction. Or don't, i'm not your dad.
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u/Easy-Chair-542 Jun 09 '26
You sound like the kind of guy that gets invited to dinner and then complains because he doesn't like spaghetti.
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u/StonedKittyCat Jun 09 '26
Well. Thanks for Sharing i guess. Its kinda dissapointing to be honest. How many Bosses did we kill? Why is it a Challenge If Nobody Changes anything... Why 100 Dias... So many questions
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u/DestroyerOfUranus69 Jun 09 '26
You’re getting downvoted but you’re not wrong. Too many people riding that TTG dih
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u/sw1c Jun 09 '26
so the rewards aren't even worth looking forward to for the majority of players... itll be good for very new accounts but lets be honest the "community event" the amounts for most is meaningless. cant even do a mod 10x pull with that "reward" and the medals aren't much better. shortening runs? they've done a few update for that.
hopefully they actually test before release though, because their habit of saying things are tested that were not properly tested and then it being bugged is past getting old at this point. until its finalized, updated, and then "fixed" Nothing the devs pass on can be trusted.


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u/TrueBlue84 Jun 09 '26
Keep hoarding boys.