Day 34 - Matchmaking gone wrong

I have been playing off and on running assault hitting different characters. I've slowly been getting that bad vibe from the game so I'm not sure how much longer I'll last. I did want to note a problem I had yesterday and another general problem that has been recurring.

As I had mentioned the assault crew isn't as bad as the others in general, but we do get the occasional troll. I for the most part ignore them, but this guy started before the match and didn't stop until I muted him. The volume of junk he was spouting was affecting his gameplay since he was stopping to verbally abuse someone every few seconds. I decided to report this guy for harassment and included a couple examples of what he was saying. In the very next match guess who was on my team. The exact same troll. I'm not saying reporting, muting, blocking should make it so you never group with someone again, but at least a couple hours would be nice. Give me a chance to forget about the guy first!

My next gripe is about the matchmaking system. It's possible that I'm the worst player ever by a huge margin, but I don't think that's the case. There should be plenty other bad players to send my way so I have to wonder about this day I had recently with a 7 - 8 lose streak, followed by a win and repeated several times. The games weren't all in the same day, but things had started to feel off so I consulted my history. Either I'm teetering on some fine line or there is a problem. Ideally until you hit the very top or the very bottom of the scale the match making should keep you in competitive games, many of these were not and only rarely did I get the dialog asking if this was a good match.

Day 28 - Assault, Arena, and a lot of time

I've been playing most days at least a few matches. I pretty much stick to arena and assault but mostly just assault. I've come across a handful of pricks, but mostly not and it's still going well. There is one sort of taboo part to assault, you can choose to re-roll a different random God, but if you were the only needed say tank or healer, re-rolling might piss the rest of your team off. It is always disappointing to actually get a good spread of Gods and see someone make it bad on purpose. I've ended up playing a lot of different heroes along the way recently getting to do Freya and Anubis. Anubis is not hugely new, but he is still pretty OP in my opinion. A nice AE slow damage to keep people at bay, then a stun to basically hold people in your ultimate to death. Freya I played mostly as a ranged relying heavily on her 2 and ult. You can use her 3 to take someone out of the fight for a moment or slow them down in a chase, while I enjoyed playing her she seemed pretty safe and solid not really standing out. I think anyone could play this character with fair results.

Day 4 - Assault, Nemesis, and Cupid

I played a couple characters that were pretty new to me while running Assault. I think I do enjoy the other game types more if it was purely about the type, but the community for assault is definitely the best and toxicity increases as you move away from it.

Nemesis is one of the many hot women of Smite. She doesn't have the top of her head visible, but the rest is all in order. She's an assassin with a few options, a short little burst sprint type thing that you can use twice in the direction of your choosing.  She's got this sort of sweeping frontal with a stun move that seems to be her ma in damage then. A brief immunity to damage and her ultimate super cripples a target opponent. I don't really like this type of character for assault, you can't really sneak up on people in a single lane with no jungle.

I did use her ultimate to debuff for my allies though which seemed to work well. I'd sort of stay close by and try to whack anyone with my sweeping attack for the stun if they came in close to my allies. It wasn't bad and I'm sure a lot more could be done with her.

I also played Cupid, who is well... cupid. I basically played this character by spamming their second ability which pops out a few little hearts to heal your allies. I'd drop my ultimate, slow and damage after a few seconds, anytime a few enemies grouped together and shoot anyone with my first ability which is a straight line shot of damage, with a delayed second damage effect a few seconds later. You get a bonus stuff if you've stacked 8 hits on enemies with your bow which isn't hard to do.

My strategy that seemed to work well, for me at least was heart spamming like crazy. If anyone came after me I'd try and hit them with my first ability then dart away with my third ability which is just a straight line get away strip with an attack speed buff. If they did follow me you can turn around and pepper them with a bunch of arrows. I think I did well since the enemy seemed to go crazy trying to kill me after a few minutes.  It was another fun day, but I have a lot of things to get done tomorrow so I'm not going to play much if at all.

Smite is still fun, but I sort of have that inkling of it's sort of scratching an itch, but still missing some spots we'll see how this pans out in a few more days.

Day 3 - Thor & Siege

I hadn't tried Siege before because I figured I'd warm back up to the game with conquest. In retrospect that is pretty backwards pretty much anything BUT conquest has more forgiving players. I played quite a few matches and I think it's pretty fun. Running with warrior, hunter, mage, assassin seems to be the norm. I ended up playing assassin which in this case was Thor.

Siege has two lanes, jungle in the middle, and your goal is to spawn these giant siege monsters then use them to push the enemy until you win. You spawn an engine by killing 100 points worth of stuff or killing a boss in the middle of the map. You sort of play 2 v 2 most of the time, but can wander around too. Nobody complained that I was doing anything horribly wrong so I think it's pretty flexible as to play style.

I'm not great on Thor, but you can essentially fly into the air and snipe people using yourself as a bullet.  Hopefully you hit them, and do your spin move if they are still alive after it finishes, I typically bolted out of there unless they were on the cusp of death. For some reason on this map not as many people wanted to play assassin, not sure why, but I enjoyed it.

Day 2 - Chaac and Assault

I did a few more rounds of conquest and it went a bit better today. The matches seemed more appropriate and much less harassment. I'm hopeful for the matchmaking system so far it seems to be learning and acting appropriately.

I mostly played Chaac, who I was pretty decent at I think. I was also most often doing 'solo' which is a much better spot than 'support' for a new player. You basically can tend your lane, collect your local mana buff and be doing a good enough job.

Chaac in general I think is a great character for a new player. Chaac is generally tough to kill and also does decent damage. While you are melee with your auto attack which can seem dangerous, you have a lot of new player friendly stuff.

1. Axe you lob and does AE damage
2. AE close range (or at the landing point of your axe from 1
3. Self heal, run hide and heal, it also slows enemies in an area around you and axe from part 1
4. AE float around then crash down doing damage, at the same time you take 50% less damage

I did support on Ymir a couple times which I'm slowly getting better at it as well. The support job for some reason nobody wants, you are expected to rotate around a bit and be a bit of a play maker which you'd think a veteran would want to control, but you don't have as much pew pew power and that is quite popular.

I did a few matches of assault and generally the community there was pretty good, definitely more pleasant than conquest. I'm not sure if the matchmaking system applied to both categories or not, but that could be a factor. In assault you can't pick the hero you get.  Your team is 5 random Gods which cuts down on the drama I think. No bickering over who is doing what and you sort of have to make the best of what you get.

My biggest complaint for today was that I had conquest run really long and I had other stuff to do, but that was poor planning on my part and not a fault of the game.

Day 1 - The Return

I had played Smite before a while back, and I did enjoy the game. I never got up to where I would say I was good, but I was about not terrible. The key is that I enjoyed the game, and wanted to keep playing. There were a couple problems but those were more about the community of other players.

1. Matchmaking

Good matchmaking is never easy, I think a lot of the player base was pretty hardcore creating a huge gap in skill between the average player and a new player. People will throw acronyms at you left and right that you don't understand at first, or ever depending on if they drive you away. You'll get reported for 'feeding' if you suck. It sounds really bad, but if they use this to build better matches I call it a good thing. Group all us 'feeding' type players and we'll have a fun match and those hardcore people can do their thing together as well.

2. Toxic Community

The community isn't really nurturing. If you find one nice person out of the 5 on your team you are pretty lucky. So going from new to veteran you're mostly going to just take a lot of verbal abuse. It's pretty normal of any PvP game I think. Teenage boys and anonymity usually means dickish behavior. I'd like to think I wasn't that much of a dick when I was that age, but who knows. Quitting is also a big problem, people want to quit early on quite often never taking the match to the end. In my first run I was frequently in matches that we turned around and won after people started their quit spam. I'm guessing this has something to do with children wanting easy wins, which explains the massive traction of WoW.

So here I am attempting to try the game again. I've been away for a long time, maybe a year not sure exactly. My first 5 matches I have been back to being that 'feeding' guy. I warn people I am not great with each match and to account for it in their play style. So far it's going poorly, but I did just get a prompt after the match about the quality of the matchmaking. Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come.