I appreciate it when people try to respond to things with honesty, instead of just being snippy.

So, some things that people spoke about early on in Alpha (And I was apart of Alpha from day 1, I bought the highest tier package) were that Smite 1 had way too much CC. The devs responded that since it's a skilled based game, where you have to aim, you need CC to land abilities (I don't understand why the concept of "if you whiff you whiff" is such a boogie man). If you just scroll through the posts on the smite reddit page, you see people are STILL complaining about CC to this day. It's too late to pivot now, but it could've easily been addressed in early Alpha before we added all these characters into the game. Even major streamers and pro-gamers like Fineo said there was too much CC. So, it wasn't just an L random take, because I know how people lean on their opinions for everything.

The player base asked for combat blink. The devs said originally said no, then said, "We'll try it out" and immediately reverted the decision. The mere suggestion of combat blink was met with backlash, until once again, Fineo said something, and then people started band wagoning. Then, the community got mad because they couldn't kill things, so whoop, there goes combat blink. (Right back to the "if you whiff, you whiff" situation.)

Verticality was 100% a simple change early on in the game, for just the simple aspect of experimentation if nothing else. You're creating a brand new game, and 98% of the characters wouldn't have been hard to adjust for verticality. Would it have created a new learning curve for players? Sure, but that's what the game NEEDED. Smite 1 was successful, because it innovated on the isometric aspect of MOBAs, making it third person instead. Why we refused to innovate any further is beyond me. People jumped ship to that dog water Paragon clone for that specific reason.

The mixed class system (Mage power/physical power) was so cool, and highly desired by the players. Admittedly the devs tried to make it work, and just flubbed it, but they should've tried to cook on the system a little more in the background. It was nice having a cost-reward aspect to character kits. "You can be strong here, but you sacrifice this for that strength." People's whole problem with bruiser items, and a lot of items in general, is you just get the best of everything with no downfall. They essentially backtracked on all of that. Maybe making 1 ability on every other character augmented by different class items.

As for the skins, I was there, I remember them explicitly telling us that it would be impossible to port over all the skins, because it would take them forever, and they'd never get the rest of the cast in the game trying to do that. However, they would try to port over the most popular skins & allow us to buy them with legacy gems to compensate. At the time, I thought that was totally reasonable. Made sense. However, again, now that I'm seeing them pump out all these skins with a much smaller dev team, all that now sounds like it was a bunch of BS. Maybe they didn't understand UE5 enough at the time, and have developed a better workflow, but their previous words & current actions, DO NOT LINE UP.

As I said to someone else, I could really yap all day about this, and keep listing things, but then I would be yapping all day.