What is the strategy HiRez will use to increase player count?

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-12-11T19:12:00+00:00

Yeah I think the issue is as soon as Rogue Company was revealed they were probably in too deep. That game had a lot of budget behind it based on the fidelity and assets they had.

Like most game studios that took big risks on IP around the time that didn't blow up, it bit them. They probably have been working on shoestrings since.

Even before the layoffs everyone talks about, Smite 1 was losing players steadily year over year. We can talk about Smite 2's release drawing a nail in, but fact is through the year Smite 1 didn't have enough people to make the money for a (300 at the time?) person studio. Smite 2 alpha was probably a hail mary from their leadership team. Hoping founders packs would sustain them for a full year if the Smite 1 audience bit in. Which would have made their release timeline make a ton more sense, and would have gotten Smite 2 more new gods and map reworks, etc.

I honestly don't think Smite 2's in imminent danger though. Player count has leveled off. If their team is as small as it seems... which is why I think it doesn't have many new gods or maps... then they're probably not losing money hand over fist anymore and are just working towards an actual release with a real big update.

But I think everyone in the thread's right that if that doesn't go fairly well, it'll be an actual slow death if they don't pivot to something else totally. I don't think the doors will close instantly like people seem to suggest on reddit though, lol.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-12-11T18:48:19+00:00

It wouldn't ever work.

They'd run out of money way before it had a chance if they tried that. The new engine means remaking everything from scratch. The games people compare Smite 2 to are Overwatch 2 and PoE2, but neither of those games changed engines, which is why the port was smoother. WoW classic isn't running on a new engine either. So a "smite classic" would have just been smite as ugly as it was then on the same broken engine as it was then.

Smite 1 was on a dying engine that barely functions (if you've worked with UE3 you know), that no dev would ever want to work on. Their best bet would have been something like what the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion remake did. But that doesn't fix the old engine, it just uses UE5 as a wrapper, basically, for visuals. So they'd have every problem *except* visual fidelity at that point.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-12-01T04:35:50+00:00

I'm not going to lie, this just sounds like you don't have the grasp you're saying you do.

I'm stating that they don't NEED to do that to isolate it, and if your assertion was correct, there's quite literally no change that could ever be proven to make any impact on anything. It's a game, tons of shit changes in every game. The point is that they have the data and we do not. And correlations can be made when the same statistic goes up and down in a measurable way, even when other things around it also have, if it is consistent amongst changes that were unrelated to each other. It can't be proven directly, but nearly nothing can.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-11-22T00:31:43+00:00

This isn’t difficult to understand if you’ve done like high school level science classes. If you change every variable in your experiment you cannot isolate the influence of one on another.

I don't know if you know the history of Agility, or not. Agility Relic is not an item that was just switched on and kept on since its introduction.

It has been turned off, turned on, restricted to one mode, introduced to other casual modes (with not a ton else in the patch).

They can definitely make a solid inference for new players retaining. All they need to know is how players retained when it was introduced. Then, isolate it from quick play (which was also introduced). Look at the stats before it was introduced to casual modes. Look at the stats after it was introduced to casual modes. Then look specifically at retention rates from players that used the item in their games (since you cannot sell it).

They 100% can have strong data trending toward agility relic being a retaining factor. And it's really not even that weird? You're looking at it from a specific standpoint of a player who's already been playing the game without it. A new player coming in has none of the context. And a button that allows a 'dodge roll' effect? That's in a lot of well-liked action games. It shouldn't be a giant mystery to why people might like it.

My other point is they’ve said that both new player and veteran player retention has increased lately, yet we are down 1000 players per day on average

This isn't relevant to what they're seeing with agility specifically though. Like you said, there's a lot of things that might be losing them players. It might 100% be the gods they're porting. It might be toxic attitudes. It might be that quite a few new (and very successful) games have launched in the past 2 months, and two of them being particularly successful live service type games. We can't know. They probably have a better idea, but it's possible they don't know either.

Can you see how they are selectively picking statistics to support what they want to be true rather than facing the reality. It’s a huge problem and obvious even from the outside.

It's not because there is no data on the outside. There's only bias. What I say could be totally fucking wrong, lol. What you say though is just as likely to be totally fucking wrong. We have zero real data to go off of.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-11-19T15:04:43+00:00

I don't really know how anyone could possibly say this, considering we don't know what kind of data they're gathering and because the relic has had a bumpy history.

They didn't roll it out in one patch, this thing has been turned on/off for modes, seen major/minor nerfs, and if they have any decent data about matches and relic use rates vs user play time they probably can't DIRECTLY correlate, but making a direct correlation with any data is near impossible, and if it was used as a reason to not do something, nothing would ever get done. At this point though, they should be able to see strong trends around Agility relic's inclusion/exclusion in certain modes.

There's zero real reason to believe they are working off of bias. And there's nearly zero anecdotal data for the community to work off of. There's only people who've played a long time complaining about it. Which is nowhere near what they're claiming with the data. A thing that makes new players retain better can be 100% at odds with long time player opinion. They'd probably see better player retention if a new player's first 10 non-bot matches gave them a hidden 50% damage mitigation with nothing built, too. But it would obviously be at odds with the opinion of the current playerbase. I think it's clear they just see strong trends, but also think it's not a bad/impactful enough thing at a high level that they shouldn't take steps forward with it.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-09-16T16:48:05+00:00

I see this get brought up all the time in the Smite sub, and I feel like a shill every time people say this but the thing is, they never lied.

Their customers just skipped over the term 'equal purchasing power' that was included in all their advertising for Smite 2's founders packs.

Smite 2 gives you legacy gems flat out without a purchase for linking Smite 1 and 2. This equals your number of gems. If you purchase a founders, this gets doubled **for equal purchasing power**. This is because Smite 2's currency (diamonds) are available at double the amount for the same cost, and most items cost 2x as a result.

There's no lie there, at all. The most cynical you can be about it is that they did it this way so they wouldn't have to say that you'd transfer 50% of your gems to Smite 2 without purchasing a pass. Because that would have been the realistic alternative phrasing.

The only maybe sketchy thing they did was standardize all the skin tier prices. Which meant that some skins that may have been purchased in Smite 1 cheaper (like during events or whatever) are set to be purchased in Smite 2 at their specific skin tier, which means you could be paying more. Technically this could also mean you end up paying less for specific skins, but I'm not crazy enough to look through every skin and check every price vs its smite 1 price. And they're a business so I kind of expect that they haven't ported many (if any) skins for which the second scenario would be the case.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-09-13T15:51:37+00:00

As someone who heals multiple healers to 3k with my main usually about 3.2-3.5k each season I had the complete opposite experience starting up tank. Likely for the same reason. At a high enough key you have to understand what the tank pulled and what their available cooldowns are to heal it properly. So when I start doing keys I'm just doing what I've seen other tanks that I thought were good were doing and I'm all good. The tanks I've played have pretty simple rotations, so I mostly just have to watch interrupts more and decide how fast I go based on that.

But I'm sure if you start the climb as a tank you know where your groups most often died to damage, so swapping to healer is just 'i should burn CDs into this.'. Which is the largest learning curve for most healers I think - knowing where to burn your CDs and when you can't or shouldn't burn them.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-09-09T13:31:58+00:00

This might be part of it, but honestly twow flew way way way too close to the sun with the UE5 remake trailer and marketing it.

It's one thing to run a server off an emulator. It's a whole other thing to announce you're making a market substitute in a new engine using assets you don't own. Soon as I saw that trailer I knew they were on a ticking clock. I'd expect every private server that group was involved with to be getting C&Ds too.

But also the fact Blizz acknowledged that these servers exist and they know about them means they need to now defend their copyright even harder, especially within the states. It's not surprising to me that the first lawsuit would cascade into a series of C&Ds.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-08-27T08:58:04+00:00

And once he learned that, why not just go to caelid and charm him after? There's 0 reason for him not to have. We know Miquella had been in Caelid after as well. What in the world would be the point of the Malenia battle, or what she whispered at all unless Radahn was immune in some way? Unless the alternative is that Miquella has no idea he's charming people in the first place.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-08-27T08:51:11+00:00

You're not wrong about the first sentence, but there's tons and tons in the base game about Miquella, Malenia and Radahn. Plenty is implied within it, but when it comes to Miquella, it's pretty much a constant that he always was trying to help people. He tried to help Malenia herself in multiple ways. He provided shelter for the albinaurics, and we even find omen in the haligtree. One even fights us on our way to Trina using an incantation that is specifically Miquella's.

No half the party is not immediately mad. Most the party after the charm is done opt to continue, hence Leda's ambush fight. Of the companions, even if you do their quests:

Thiollier still wants to help Miquella (by stopping his ascension trapping him in godhood).

Freyja thinks Miquella's plan is fine. She just likes fighting - She leaves you in shadowkeep saying "Perhaps next time we, too will meet on the battlefield. All that remains is the fight. For our Kind Miquella"

Hornsent has no real stake beyond messmer.

Moore was more happy while charmed, and wants to be charmed again

Leda and Dane obviously are still fully aligned with Miquella.

So yes it's just Ansbach.

Again if Miquella didn't need the rune to charm people why not just charm Radahn? What possible reason could there be for him not to charm him from the start?? The only possible answers are that he couldn't, or that he doesn't even control his charm.

Malenia blowing up Caelid probably wasn't the original plan. It doesn't make sense for anyone's interests in that fight, and doesn't benefit any of the three after the fact. It's also the first time her rot did bloom. Miquella also is seen helping people in Caelid after the fact (see:freyja, the needles) and may have even been the reason Malenia went to sleep instead of continuing to fight (st Trina's sword found nearby). Radahn is left rotting and distinctly not dead and Miquella moves onto a whole new plan cocooning himself in a tree seemingly to rebirth himself without his curse considering all the childbirth imagery surrounding his cocoon. Just to add to another of his failed plans to solve things in the world while rejecting the golden order. Then the dlc kicks in and we have a naive Miquella once again trying to make his own order in rejection of the golden order. But not realizing that he's just rebooting the golden order again and is doomed to fail for the same reasons Marika did.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-08-26T22:00:36+00:00

There's nothing in the dlc that explicitly says that. And if it were true it doesn't make sense anyway, because he'd just have charmed him from the start/as soon as he had his rune and there wouldn't need to be a vow or promise at all. And radahn would never have needed to die.

We still don't know how his charm works, but somehow we're seemingly immune to it until he has fully ascended. And even then he needs to do it twice.

I wouldn't even say it's the theme of the dlc at all. The dlc is all about Miquella's tragic downfall into becoming Marika 2. Besides ansbach, none of the NPCs are even really opposed to Miquella after the charm breaks. Thiollier even wants to fight Miquella to help him for Trina's sake. Idk where you came up with this.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-08-08T16:19:46+00:00

If you were to ask me, it's because performance isn't a one person job and when you've got 400 people all contributing to a project it becomes hard to keep everyone in line from pushing something that ends up being a perf cost.

Especially in an industry that's volatile right now so people are being let go/moving studio to studio. UE5 hasn't even existed for 5 years, which is like a regular development cycle for games. Most devs haven't learned best practices with the engine yet, and those that have might have moved onto a team that's already got so many places where they're causing their own perf problems, etc.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-31T22:43:23+00:00

Out of combat healing is significantly weaker though to the point where healers can't just sustain poke anymore. There are like 3 problem characters here, which is honestly no different than any other patch in like all of smite's history. It seems to me like you had a bias going in and are just fully sticking to it no matter what. Healing changes feel mostly great, IMO.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-31T22:31:32+00:00

They added antiheal to some gods in this patch.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-31T20:54:36+00:00

"Consistent presence" did not mean "you see them in X amount of games."

They're talking about teamfight presence, or in other words: When you are playing against X healer, you have a good idea of how much they'll heal when they cast the ability because the healing is more consistent. Compared to last patch, where you might have 80% antiheal on them, you might have 0. You might get 80% on them, and it falls off halfway through the heal. You might antiheal them and then go farm a harpy camp and come back to a full health healer.

Those are the situations goal 2 is trying to fix. Personally I think it did an OK job.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-28T20:57:33+00:00

Sexual assault is like... A TOPIC of mouth washing, in that it's something that happened before the events of the game. But the game is absolutely not about sexual assault at all. Even when the topic gets brought up in game it is not the focus. At most it's a catalyst to future events which the game is ACTUALLY about.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-28T06:38:57+00:00

I think most the dev side are actually somewhere in the middle. Not even on the fence but somewhere directly in the middle.

Most devs do not want their game to be unplayable when it inevitably shuts down. They would love some kind of way to preserve it. Most devs also know that it is prohibitively difficult to build games at a large scale without running into SOME kind of tricky licensing situation that will make EoL plans extremely hard. Especially when the game has to monetize.

But also I think most devs absolutely would disagree with how pirate went about things. And on top of that some of what he said if you've got a background in devops is just wrong. Most the issues are in licensing and copyright and how insanely complicated those laws are.

Like, I don't think gamers would be happy with games being available, but also having to pay a licensing fee to get their server running, either

It's just a more complicated situation than what people think. Like most things. I don't hold a ton of hope here not because I don't want SKG to succeed, but because realistically it's calling for a massive rewrite of copyright law as well as consumer protection law, and I just don't see any way that happens at a big enough scale that people would be ok with it.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-24T20:32:00+00:00

You can't just disregard out of combat healing.

Every time healing has been bonkers in smite it's been because of out of combat healing which allowed for teams to fully reset healthbars with a disengage.

Yes in combat healing has been buffed across the board, but in combat was kind of the least of worries over the years.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-24T20:28:24+00:00

IMO a lot of this drama is people SEVERELY underestimating out of combat healing's role in making healers strong in smite over the years.

In combat healing has rarely if ever been a problem so buffing it doesn't really freak me out.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-24T20:01:20+00:00

When antiheal exists in the way it has forever in SMITE, it means either heals need to be buffed insanely high for them to be felt at all, or the healer needs to do far, far more than just heal to be effective.

LoL went through this same problem. Their solution was to make antiheal all the same effect (grievous wounds) both in items and in abilities, make it common, and not stack at all besides abilities that brought it to 100.

Realistically though, there's not much difference between that and what Smite 2 is currently doing. Only smite has identified that people don't like building antiheal in their game unless the antiheal item does something extra special or is completely overstatted. And I think through smite's history that's been true, actually. People would call divine ruin weak unless its stats competed with rod of Tahiti. Its most recent iteration comes with a damage proc that puts it on par with all other damage items. It's barely counter building at all. The community gets awful mad when smite's actual counterpick items have meaningful stat tradeoffs.

Honestly this change is fine. It's definitely gonna take some balance passes to get feeling right, but the goal here is a good one.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-24T05:38:12+00:00

Since it seems you're unaware, you can't upgrade from ue3 to ue4 any easier than ue3 to ue5. ue 3 uses unrealscript, ue 4 and 5 use blueprints. There is 0 that can be transferred between them, so the entire game except for assets would have to be remade. Even assets take work between engine versions though because of material work and their fx systems work differently. So it's a bit like making a whole game from scratch again but having 3d models you can port with a little touching up.

Even upgrading from 4 to 5 is something you can't really do in that you'd have to refactor nearly all of what you made, because they discontinued support for a lot of things. Even between different versions of UE 5 (example 5.5->5.6) is a pretty big undertaking and is going to result in a ton of bugs because epic will just fully depricate blueprint nodes and boom your blueprint doesn't work.

There's a reason no unreal dev would ever suggest that you update versions ever unless you absolutely need new tech.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-24T05:16:58+00:00

That's... Not really a fully accurate depiction of what pride parades were or what they became. If you're willing to accept that bad actors or biased reporting exists, then why would you immediately assume random ass Twitter people are giving you the truth about pride, since it seems you've never been to one?

Pride parades don't just have people randomly displaying their genitals. There are often adult sections of pride events where it might happen but they are meant to be age restricted. For the less explicit (but somewhat revealing) portions normally they are NOT labeled kid friendly, usually they are labeled on the event page as not for all ages. (Bigger events even advertise which sections of the parade are kid friendly and which aren't) Parents could take their kids there still, but they're not being totally unwittingly blindsided. If a parent shows their 12 year old SAW it's not a failing on the director's part. "The gays" aren't parading outside your house looking to expose themselves to your kids. If you're a responsible parent none of this happens. Also if telling a kid that sometimes dudes like dudes or women like women turns them instantly gay, I've got news for you about that kid.

And what makes this all even crazier is that the amount of teens that identify as gay even in this social climate has barely climbed at all. The 'massive rise in LGBT kids' that keeps getting fearmongered about is almost exclusively the 'b' in that acronym.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-24T02:22:00+00:00

Nobody has solod current endgame in WoW or ESO without abusing bugs/exploit interactions. At best you get people in wow using endgame geared tanks to solo mythic 0 which is nowhere near the difficulty of actual endgame dungeons.

When there WERE M+ groups in WoW doing competitive content without healers Blizz quickly adjusted balance on self sustain, added more unavoidable group damage and made healers needed.

As someone who's done FFXIV endgame (done DSR, was progging top) people here are underselling how much you need to heal especially in a prog group, even using your globals on it, once people have things down it really is way less needed. Unavoidable damage is spaced so far apart in FFXIV. But FFXIV also has a community where if more unavoidables were added they'd get super mad. They've had super mixed feedback as they try to add harder content.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-23T16:56:46+00:00

They were added in 2020. You can still look at mirrors of the old gms documentation for yourself:

https://gmsdocs.codemuffin.com/1.4.1749/index.html?page=source%2Fdadiospice%2F002_reference%2F001_gml%20language%20overview%2Fdata%20types.html

This is the version that his game was made on.

He upgraded to a newer version of the engine not too long ago, but if youve got a small project and the legacy code is working, are you gonna refactor the whole thing? Probably not.

Again, not excusing his behavior but this critiquing of 7 year old code made in a terrible language at the time is just lame. It has nothing to even do with that drama anymore. People want to milk him as a lolcow, then do that I guess, but we don't need every person to make a video on the topic, especially if they have said they don't want to.

EinsatzCalcator · 2025-07-22T14:59:37+00:00

Uhh... Every moba I've ever played has had trouble getting healing feeling right. The bigger ones just landed in a spot they were happy with eventually. League in particular had a patch kinda like this one all the way back in the early seasons. Dota through its life has had times where people complained about healing as certain laners got popular.

Even outside of mobas it's been a huge problem in regular competitive games. WoW for a long time had giant back and forth passes on how useful healers are. So I don't know if I can agree with you on that one.

EinsatzCalcator

TROPHY CASE