In my good faith, I tried my hardest before this point to write an endearing, thoughtful and thorough review of Smite: Battleground of the Gods, and in my honest nature I will admit that by the play hours you see, and the many I've played during the period of time where you had to use Hi-Rez's proprietary launcher, that I have spent more time in this game than I have ever had probably being in public in general, so expect immense and obvious bias.
At times I truly do hate this game. There is endless amounts of nonsense I've been able to notice no matter how small or seemingly trivial to even care about. I will just get my grievances out as a means to deal with the trauma that MOBAs poison the player with:
First and foremost, Hi-Rez the company is essentially based on the practice of stealing the concept of another type of game, and then making a decently addicting gameplay loop and taking other liberties from their contemporaries in a soulless, but somewhat genius and somehow money-making strategy. It would not be right to call them snake oil salesmen; moreso their products do actually have tangible worth as somewhat fun games and objectively as art projects, but there's something beyond comprehension and articulation that is inhuman about the experience of playing any of their games, and Smite is no exception.
Again, I do truly hate many things about this game, but the specific gameplay loops of the joust map, the assault map, some of the modes-of-the-day, to a lesser extent the slash map (those bastards took out the siege map for no reason other than they are demons), are not the subject of my hatred. These modes to me are perfect in their use of objectives and jungle usage (besides assault but it has an alcove) and most importantly, the tempo of experience gained and the pace at which laneing is carried out. I will give a genuine compliment to the Hi-rez Smite dev team for this one and only time. It is most certainly everything else about this game that makes me hate it like a dude who writes newspaper comics hates his wife.
Shocking: Dude who's played this game since they were 14 genuinely has only played the conquest map about 18 times in the 12 years of play time. Not shocking: the literal main mode that they balanced the game around and only cared about is the worst mode they have in the game. The conquest mode is neither an interesting, perhaps drawn out MOBA laning experience, nor a truly faster, more streamlined romp. The conquest mode is a childish, uninteresting mess with no real micro or macro play. Conquest games are almost 99% won by the team who wins a teamfight closest to the enemy's spawn. The gold fury is a horrible objective that essentially gives you nothing in return for slaying it. It's placement is ridiculous and getting your team around to take it is like reaching your hand into a Saw trap. The buffs are completely fine, but the means to do a rollout at the start of the game changed almost every patch, so keeping up to date with meta starting strats was essentially impossible without word of mouth. If you as a MOBA player insist on playing a genuinely fine-tuned and perfectly paced laneing experience, please waste your precious yet futile life on Summoner's Rift in the game that actually makes money, League of Legends.
Now, it is time to generalize the community of Smite players. Smite 1 players as a whole should be studied and tortured to find any conclusion as to how their brains actually function (me not included because I said so). I have many times had the most childish, ridiculous and obscene conversations with the 30 year old redditors that would somehow kill all 6 people in the trolley problem if given the chance. This is in part just the competitive nature of MOBAs in general, but also just the fact that the only real way to talk ♥♥♥♥ to your enemies on the other team is through private messages. There is no allchat feature, and Hi-rez probably will never put an allchat feature into their game, which only hurts it because receiving a chat message from your supposed support player telling you you suck while they have yet to CC anyone is so insufferable that I haven't have the teamchat enabled for probably 5-6 years (and no not just the combat chat, just straight up I do not have the chat enabled). Not being able to talk ♥♥♥♥ to the enemy team only hurts Hi-rez in the long run, but not more than they hurt themselves.
VGS...the VGS system seems like an amazing idea when you start playing, and in practice the VGS commands that are objective in what they convey can be so helpful. That being said, the player base really only uses the VGS system to act like snarky ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Try reasonably missing an ability with the VGS enabled; see if you do not immediately get a "You Rock! Cancel that." thrown at you by one of potentially 4 lobotomites. There are too many VGS commands that either straight up sound condescending and sarcastic, or are used for such purposes. Again, my VGS has been disabled for 5-6 years because my ears can only bleed so much blood. Sure, you can still be annoying with pings (lord knows I am) but it's not even close to the harassment the VGS system enables and ensures.
The ranked modes are notorious for objectively being beyond broken. The MMR your account has in ranked is only really a suggestion, and a minor one at that. There are more that enough times nowadays that I am the only person on ranked joust with somewhat decent MMR, and the system will go out of its way to put me with gold and silver players while the enemy team has 3 people playing who are decent at best and kinda ♥♥♥♥♥ at their worst. It does not work correctly, it was not designed correctly, I do not care how the math works out, it is worse that trench warfare to queue a ranked match.
I may not have a soft spot for the player base as a whole, but the one sect of players that I cannot stand are master tier ranked players. Masters rank always seemed like a real accomplishment for a player to earn, but after I grew up and actually became world class at this stupid game, I have come to the conclusion that masters players are worse at the game than any bronze players, or even those who are fond of playing normals endlessly. Every time I encounter a masters player in my lobbies, they 10/10 times feed their brains out like they got paid to specifically make me unhappy on that day. Getting to masters is essentially the start of the cycle, and the player is reborn to once again be in the learning phase of playing the game. It's like hitting the 32bit interger and looping back on yourself. I expect so much of them and they let me down every single time. It's just upsetting.
Items and Gods should have a section, but i only hate like 4 characters and respect every item in the game. Jormangundr, Ne Zha, Crenunnos, Shiva are the worst characters in Smite by far and whoever designed and balanced those gods should be fined.
There is no reason to play this game at this point so I can't suggest it.
I have ran out of things to talk about. This game is okay but I only play it actively because I have fallen to the sunken cost fallacy and will get my money's worth from Hi-rez until they inevitably shut down.
