[2020] Loki and the rest of the future reworks should be autobanned from ranked.

So, here we go again.

With the Loki rework coming up i had a small hope that he will be autobanned but nope he is gonna be instantly avaiable in ranked once the patch hit live. However on patchnotes Isiah said that he will be banned from competetive for a couple of weeks so pro players can get used to him...

And yeah... may i ask why is this a thing? Everybody remember how big disaster and stomp Odin and Bastet(she not that much) caused once they instantly got to the rankeds and how many nerfs Odin got.

We don't know yet if Loki will be op as Odin or still bad, but ranked is definitely not a place to test him and getting statistics. The point of autobanning new gods is so the players can learn how they work, how to play against them and to not let them causing destruction if they are OP, imagine if release Tsukuyomi could be played in ranked day one, definitely not a fun thing to fight against.

In ranked you are doing your best to gain points, MMR and division, now we have a random dude that plays against Loki that does different things and he thinks, what the f*ck is happening or we have another random dude that pick Loki because he thinks that he still have old kit, he don't know how to play him and feeds.

As much as developers may think that he is similar, he is not, Loki entire playstyle may be different, his abilities are very much different and do new things, what if his abilities are gonna be bugged that may let him win the game without a problem or even cannot use them, he is basically a ''new'' god that needs to be tested and get used to, back in the Season 1 when Arachne and Odin got their reworks they were autobanned to test them and now nobody knows who and why changed this rule.

What community thinks about this? It is better to first test Loki and eventually give him balance changes in Bonus Balance, or letting him to play day one in ranked and god knows what's going to happen.

External link →

I'd say we actually are leaning towards keeping all reworks unbanned in ranked. for 2 main reasons

People want to play them. Its a realy big dissapointment for our ranked players where they cannot even play the new updated characters without switching to casuals, and this actually has a very noticeable effect on pros and streamers, who tend to get better metrics when playing ranked.
"Rework" is vague - there is a lot of gray area between balance and rework, and we explore lots of different levels of change on these gods. Banning reworks would still need some case by case evaluation, and we don't want to be banning "heavy balance" gods as a side effect of this.

To comment on some other things ive seen in here

Pro play has specific constraints placed on it all the time. I guess most of this was not visible to the community, but gods like Persephone and Heimdallr were banned for months due to very rare bugs with very bad results. They remained on in ranked the entire time with very little risk, but we wanted to be extra safe for broadcasted pro games. Treating reworks like this feels entirely reasonable. There are definitely different considerations to be made on pro vs ranked.
Confidence in balance - lotta people just taking this thread as an opportunity to bash us on reworks/new gods being OP - obviously not our intent to make stuff super OP - i went into this in great detail a week or so ago on a Tsukuyomi thread. Reworks seem safer than new gods in this regard, and you always have your targeted bans to lock out these characters if needed.

I dont expect this group to agree with me, but I think this is worth giving some more background on the decision. (Also it should be noted all previous reworks have been allowed, this is the first one we semi-banned in a long time)

Recent Smite Posts

SMITE 2 is now FREE TO PLAY!

Ares aspects and +1 Ideas

Smite 2 | Open Beta 1 Aladdin & Joust Release - Discussion & Bug Report Megathread

Interact should be able to be separated from jump