Dangit whyd this have to blow up on saturday and my ONLY day to sleep in each week. Yesterday i was up early and ready to write. Im already quite late to the thread and im watching my son so we gotta keep this one quick, it wont have the time for additional revisions and feedback like ive been doing.
On new god launches, and the design challenges around launching them with the “right” power level and complexity level.
- We do not intentionally ship over-tuned gods. People still like to repeat this because of some older, more vague messaging. New gods are simply hard to estimate their power based on small group internal testing, this is true for a lot of games and for a lot of reasons.
- Tsukuyomi definitely launched stronger than intended.
- The ideal place for a new god to land in winrate stats in our current goals is somewhere near the middle of the pack... say #30 to #60 out of 110 gods. This falls into the place where people are generally still going to call it OP, even though it clearly has pros and cons, a reasonable skill cap, or counters keeping it in check.
- There is a common quote about “needing gods to be OP to get good data” and that isn't really true. You just need to understand the previous point.
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- This is a commonly referred to meme in all moba development, but also just a factual correlation we have seen over the years:
- If a new god's actual win-rate is middle of the pack, community will say the god is OP
- if a new god's actual win-rate is well below average, people will say its balanced
- If a new god's actual win-rate is actually the best or worst god in the game, then people will somewhat accurately call it hilariously broken OP, or complete trash.
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So we aim for the first one above, we know yall are gonna call it OP anyway, but its generally at a reasonable spot and a few targeted “anti-frustration” nerfs put them in a good place after 1 update. This is usually the ideal candidate, but can vary for gods that have specific goals. (ex: an intentionally very high skill cap god should launch even lower in the win-rate stats.
Its surprisingly hard to judge what a gods win-rate will look like pre-launch. A few reasons on why its hard to predict new god’s balance point:
- Every god is different.
We are especially pushing ourselves lates to create even more unique gameplay experiences with new gods. Often time players don’t grasp these the same way the dev team does. Baba felt strong for most of our testing, she had some RNG but she still did consistent safe mage damage for us, but live players struggled with her. Tsukuyomi has high damage but no mobility, assassins with leaps dashes were constantly outplaying him in our tests, but in live Tsuku just steamrolled harder than expected with his damage. Some gods tank in the stats after a few damage nerfs (Heimdallr) and others dont seem to budge at all (Tsukuyomi)
- Number of “impressions”
We do extensive playtesting with more casual SMITE players as well as ex-pro level players to feel this out, which helps immensely, but is nothing compared to the thousands of matches the new god will experience in a few hours after launch. We know we can’t perfectly replicate this many players, so we have a lot of processes in place to ensure we get the best approximation, this year we have tended to undershoot or overshoot the gods maybe a bit more than usual, but I think it's generally been a pretty successful few years of god launches for us.
- Mixed messaging
As ive detailed above, even if we hit our target “middle of the pack” range, people are going to shout that its OP at us from day 1 and from PTS. It can be difficult to tell if the new god is Tuskuyomi OP or just the usual, acceptable level of OP. PTS rarely gets enough games played to provide any sort of statistical accuracy. Some gods will be OP for pros only - and therefore harder to consider, and some will be statistically crushing at casual levels, but never really be considered OP by the veteran playerbase. A lot of this ties into general balance and player perception concepts, which I think our team is quite good at navigating.
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On the concept of “bloat” in god abilities
- This term gets thrown around usually as just a way of attempting to insult us, not as a reasonable point of feedback. However, we are empathetic to the concept and we try to keep bloat down whenever possible.
- We design our abilities more thematically. We are trying to reach a specific feeling, story, and presentation to fit into each ability and for the god overall. We designed Kusari Gama from the idea of: how would a character swing this weapon, and what would it logically do? We did NOT say - this god needs to be strong, so lets give him this long list of “features” on this one ability!
- SMITE has been going for over 8 years, its hard to just make simple gods and get good community reception, we try to find a reasonable combination of accessibility and complexity on each god, and we try to push hard for unique gameplay themes. Players seem to respond much better to this than when we oversimplify.
- As much as we get comments/posts like “oh remember how great it was when god abilities just did one thing?!” - we know from more current metrics that players don’t prefer that. When a good “simple ability” post does well on reddit, it gets maybe a few hundred upvotes max, but when a new god launch is deemed “too simple” or “boring” it gets tens of thousands less players who will every try the god, let alone main it or buy skins for it.
Pon and Clumzy are some of the best god designers SMITE has ever seen. The balance team works swiftly to correct these difficult to predict launch balance issues that we are always fully aware of before any launch. We will always be open to changing our processes and design goals to focus on what makes our players happy.
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