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.