SMITE – The Addiction That’s Turning Me Hardcore and “Pro”

I really think it has something to do with Loki, and all the new changes that HiRez is doing to SMITE to bring a faster, better MOBA experience.

I’ve found myself playing several matches a day, at the behest of my wife thinking I need an intervention.

With the latest changes made to matchmaking, and the overall queuing process itself – being invites come out at a set interval – I’ve made the happily casual leap from Normal Conquest, into regular Ranked Conquest match queues.

The result? Pretty happy rank climbing, and enjoyable gameplay that I before felt I wouldn’t achieve.

My experience has been that players in Ranked tend to be a lot more friendly than in normal, which is quite surprising and refreshing. It seems overall the community would rather be helpful to their teammembers in a match to win that current game, than to tear down the weakest link, and hope they don’t get queued with them again (by blocking).

I honestly wasn’t expecting that, and I’m curious as to what has fostered that response. Hit the jump to hear more.

I think it’s perhaps with the addition of god banning, that the top ranked member of each team gets to ban a god of their choice – usually either a god they have the most trouble fighting against, feel are the most overpowered now, or the god they feel they’ve seen way too many suck at.

With this desire of such power over the match, players want to see their entire team come up on top, so that their rank goes up enough to hopefully be given the chance to swing the Banhammer.

Hopefully this phenomena is mostly permanent, as I continue to delve into the life of ranked matches. As I gain more experience (literally, still only level 27), I’ll report what I’ve noticed as a player, in trends of player-to-player interaction.

I might just stream some games as well on Twitch.