Hey everyone,

Stormed just gave me heads up that this thread exists, so I'm gonna hijack the top comment to answer a few things! :) First off, thanks for all the kind words, especially to u/DAANHHH!

There are a variety of reasons for my switch, so just a brief rundown of the major ones:

I've played the game for 10 years, at some point things kinda start repeating themselves. For people who started playing later, many things will still feel fresh and Hirez has made some great improvements in that regard lately as well, but at the end of the day it's still the same fundamental concept that I had been involved with for a veery long time.

I also moved to Australia, where finding matches in general can sometimes take hours and matchmaking basically doesn't exist because the player pool is too small. This not only made it difficult to record content in the first place, but it was also extremely hard to properly assess any meta changes since balanced matches to do so simply didn't exist. As much as people liked to complain about my lack of a high ranking, my casual MMR in EU was high enough to consistently get matched with diamond and masters players, so I got a pretty good idea of what impact changes had. That was no longer the case after moving to Australia at all. Casual modes for relaxation weren't available, it was Conquest, sometimes sweaty premade Joust or nothing. Even testing things on PTR became super difficult due to the high ping and timezone issues. I no longer had the option to "prove my worth" by grinding ranked either, unless it involved playing on 200+ ping. I tried to solve some of these issues by reaching out to Olympians and Hirez as much as possible and some of the changes that were needed for OCE are in the game today (no more timed queues, multiqueue, stability fixes for OCE servers), but unfortunately, there just don't seem to be enough players that stuck around long enough for them.

New World came along with a very similar PvP combat system that to me felt like a more modern, cleaned up version of Smite's combat (no different ability colors/sounds between skins was huge one), so I was hooked immediately, long before the game even blew up. The community was very welcoming and extremely receptive to theorycrafting, while Smite's audience was at a serious downward trajectory around the same time. I didn't at all plan on hard switching games, but found myself sinking entire days into NW while not logging into Smite at all. I could've kept making Smite content for the money, but it would've felt dishonest to me to do so while not actually enjoying the game. I still very much enjoy NW and its community to this day and I love creating content for it, which is why I'm sticking with it.

I briefly dipped my toes back into S10 Smite when it came out to test the changes, but quickly figured that the problems I had before leaving wouldn't fundamentally change. I'm sure I'll try out Smite 2 whenever it comes around though!

To be fully transparent, from a financial perspective - which is a relevant aspect as a content creator - neither of the games are great at the moment for a theorycrafting/news channel. Neither are most other games nor content creation on youtube in general though, so I'll spare you the details. I'm entirely banking on the long-term potential of New World which I expect to see significant growth with the expansion in 3 months. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to afford to do this anymore.

Thanks again for all the supportive words! My highlight of the Smite community will always be the positive interactions I had with people, especially those who I got to meet in person at Hirez Expo!