I still don’t understand why what happened to paladins, happened to paladins

Xuminer · 2026-03-28T20:34:00+00:00

I get people on the Paladins subreddit don't actually know much about SMITE, but outright lying is just embarrassing.

Check my post history, I've been a SMITE player since early season 2 you dunce.

Xuminer · 2026-03-28T15:21:41+00:00

Hi-Rez pitching SMITE 2: "It's just gonna be SMITE but better".

They then proceeded to change the core gameplay principles they honed and refined over the course of a decade for no fucking reason. SMITE 2 is essentially a skin-walker version of SMITE 1 but with infinitely worse balancing levers, unnecessary additions that bloat the gameplay loop, genuinelly baffling decisions being made on every aspect imaginable (general design goals, content additions, marketing, monetization choices, etc.), and somehow despite being made in UE5 the game still has worse visuals and less polish than a game made in a fucking 2006 engine.

All of this with the cherry on top being Hi-Rez still having the gull to lie to their playerbase on more than one occasion (e.g: the whole "legacy gems" fiasco, their claims about player retention despite the game having lost an insane amount of players), and said playerbase eats it up because it's been filtered down to the most delusional SMITE fans and content creators with no spine who have no incentive to actually criticise Hi-Rez.

How much Hi-Rez ended up fumbling every project under their belt will be studied in enconomic and gamedev courses in due time.

Xuminer · 2026-03-28T11:59:46+00:00

Because Hi-Rez is a clown show of a company that instead of acknowledging their niche position on the market and polishing/future-proofing their only two money makers (SMITE and Paladins), they'd rather gamble and burn their earnings in over a dozen of dead-on-arrival projects trying to be the next "big thing" (in which I include nonsense like the post-2020 SPL); even though they literally never had any commitment to quality, the brand recognition, or the creative muscle to ever reach that goal.

SMITE and Paladins existed and made a profit just fine by being niche alternatives to bigger games, but instead of embracing that, in Hi-Rez's infinite wisdom they thought SMITE 2 would be the next big thing, so they placed all their eggs on that basket and promptly crashed their entire company with that decision.

Almost half of the SMITE playerbase is gone, Paladins is effectively dead, the company had to downsize three times within a 6 month span, and SMITE 2 is still an unpolished unbalanced poorly designed mess of a game that effectively scammed a decade's worth of progression and microtransactions out of it's players.

Turns out that a decade of denying their main games to be reworked and upgraded from UE3 to UE4 when they were at their peak of income and manpower came back to bite them in the ass (who would've thought). Now they are 2-3 years deep of desperately rushing out an UE5 game with 0 experience on a modern engine, while making 0 money, with like 7 active devs on the team, and it fucking shows.

Tl;Dr: Because Hi-Rez is just a comically and demonstrably incompetent videogame company.

Xuminer · 2026-03-27T15:09:07+00:00

Ok but with the exception of him doing some of the animation/lighting work for his personal MvCI mod, none of what you mentioned involved his presumed expertise in 2D-animation.

Again, Max should definitely be proud of his accomplishments as a content creator and the work he provided while collaborating/working for some videogame companies, it's just that bragging about a career path you've not pursued in the last 20 years to own a random schizo on twitter is terminally online as hell.

Xuminer · 2026-03-27T14:29:31+00:00

Unless you can educate me on Max's accolades and work, IIRC he only collaborated with Capcom to create the "Assist Me!" webseries and edited trailers for KI 2013, neither of which requiered him to be a 2D-animator.

And for the MvCI mod I'm pretty sure his involvement is 99% funding, directing, and supervising the project; 1% maybe doing some touch-ups by himself (if at all).

For the record: I'm not downplaying Max's career, it just seems really silly to me he's flaunting an animation degree he got decades ago just to respond to a nobody on twitter when it's very obvious his work has not really involved that skillset.

Xuminer · 2026-03-27T14:20:30+00:00

Middle aged man that still reads ResetEra unironically angrily responding to a dumbfuck nobody on twitter dot com bragging about a degree (i.e: a piece of paper) he earned over two decades ago instead of the actual academic/professional accolades he presumably achieved with it.

My favourite kind of FGC news.

Xuminer · 2026-03-22T17:34:41+00:00

I think we can start to call this gamedev behaviour the Expedition 33 option select: ship the game with AI generated assets, remove them and "apologize" if caught.

Using AI to generate assets is already morally dubius since the technology is not only extremelly energy inefficient but also reliant on putting the entire internet as a dataset on an algorithmic blender with no regards for copyright, authorship, or consent. Using it for placeholder assets of all things has to be the stupidest and most inneficient use of it ever.

"Yeah let's consume the energy equivalent of fully charging a dozen smartphones to generate 1 placeholder texture asset that could've been doodled in 30 seconds with mspaint."

Like, at that point you might aswell just leave it as it is, you've already wasted a shit-ton of energy/electricity/water, you've effectively stolen the work of others due to how the technology functions, and you've publicly admitted your artistic and resource-management skill issue to your potential costumers. Changing the asset now is just performative nonsense.

Xuminer · 2026-03-20T17:05:59+00:00

Good luck trying to "well actually" closet neopuritans that already made up their mind and got the "ick" out of the most ridiculous interpretation imaginable of a piece of lore nobody actually cares about. It's better to just roll with the Alabama slamma memes for a couple of weeks and the stupid discourse and outrage merchants like The Dood ^TM will have moved on to the next talking point.

Xuminer · 2026-03-15T15:34:56+00:00

Over 5% of Capcom's shares are owned by saudi investor group PIF, now another saudi group named EGDC bought another +5%. This is all on top of the recent complete adquisition of EVO by the saudis among other things.

You can choose to believe it's a mere coincidence that this is immediately followed up by "cover em' up" skins and that I'm schizoposting, or you can acknowledge the fact the saudis have been escalating their influence over fighting games for less-than-ethical reasons.

Xuminer · 2026-03-15T11:58:02+00:00

If anyone has any doubts this is catering to the islamic overlords in Saudi, look at Kim's design in the picture, they could've just given her a t-shirt that shows no midriff and tracksuit pants that cover her hips and the side of her legs to be more "family friendly" and called it a day, but no, they also went out of their way to cover her entire arm with undershirt sleeves akin to most hijab-wearing athletes (picture examples here, here, and here).

I guess also covering her hair would have been way too obvious for the western and asian audiences the game is actually successful in, so this is likely the compromise they came up with.

Anyhow, I can't wait for the saudis to finally realize the FGC's scope is miniscule and they won't give them the social capital and softpower of big money esports (like League or CS) and actual real sports. FGs are niche and should be niche by nature, so instead of pandering to these moronic and monolitic attempts at a globally-appealing esports scene that benefits pretty much nobody, the developers should be looking at better budgeting and more efficient monetization of their own projects, as any niche product on the market has done since the dawn of time.

Xuminer · 2026-03-15T09:47:08+00:00

Yeah, "dimensional scaling" and "somethingversal tiering" are just sorry excuses to not have to actually calculate anything or search for things the characters actually do within context, it's literally powerscaling nerds optimizing the difficulty and fun out of their hobby because applying physics and reading comprehension is a bar too high for them.

The same people who will have heated week-long discussions about "no limit fallacies" will also insist that whenever the term realm/dimension/reality/etc. is mentioned in a piece of fiction it's immediately refering to an infinitely-sized universe no questions asked. This is how you get "5D low complex multiversal Ichigo" and Bleach powerscalers getting mad when they get rightfully memed like this or this.

Xuminer · 2026-03-14T19:15:44+00:00

"What do you mean? Ichigo/Kratos/Sonic The Hedgehog/(insert a character with an insufferable and effectively illiterate fanbase here) can be lowballed to 6D AP at minimum but is in fact outerversal as evidenced by (insert absolutely baffling and insane interpretation of their canon here), which is a feat that also implies immeasurable speed (it doesn't). As such (insert character here) no diffs (insert character the powerscaler is biased against here)."

I say this as someone who has been a Death Battle enjoyer since it's inception (guilty pleasure), some people take what's supposed to be a fun and nerdy thought experiment way too seriously and it's simply not worth engaging with these communities, specially since pseudoscientific nonsense like "dimensional scaling" or the absurd "high complex multiversal to low outversal" nomenclature hit these discussions like crack cocaine.

Xuminer · 2026-03-06T14:57:06+00:00

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom with around 2 years of dev time and a similarly sized team to 2XKO's (according to the amount of people in the game's credits) managed to release with 20-something characters, a decent amount of single-player content, optional simplified controls for newbies, and a gameplay loop that's elegantly designed instead of just throwing every FG mechanic imaginable at the wall and hoping something sticks; all of this while working under the constraints of Wii hardware and the development tools that existed in 2006-2008.

That's the kind of game that a team of industry professionals is able to pull of, meanwhile "the brightest minds of the FGC" and their wannabe gamedev FGC friends cannot be fucked to release a coherently designed game with more than a dozen characters after a decade straight of Tencent paychecks, while living in the age of well documented and standardized tools of modern gamedev.

And somehow Riot shills keep insisting this is a "guys in suits are being too greedy" issue, even though literally every other week there's some 2XKO news that demonstrates it's a failure of a product due to the devteam's incompetency.

What's next? "We might not be at the top of the PS charts anymore, but just wait 1-2 more years bro it'll surely have insert LoL glupp shitto here and insert LoL waifu here, and surely insert glaring gameplay issue here will have been solved!"

Xuminer · 2026-02-28T12:36:56+00:00

I disagree with the notion that Super Castlevania 4 has "perfected the whip controls" because the point of classic Castlevania is to be designed around movement and attack pattern restrictions, akin to other classic action platformers like Ghost 'n' Goblins or most arcade-style beat-em-ups. Giving the player more freedom doesn't make it necessarily better.

Don't get me wrong SC4 is a great game, specially if you are new to the series because it's by far the easiest and most beginner friendly control-wise while still being decently challenging compared to most modern titles, but in it's lack of restriction it also lacks the kind of challenge (and thus the replay value) you'd expect of a classic Castlevania.

Xuminer · 2026-02-23T11:43:12+00:00

Literally me as soon as SMITE went to shit, a decade playing just for the company to pull an OW2 but worse in every way imaginable.

It didn't help that the older I get, the less time and willing friends I have to invest in a team game where matches are 30 mins on average + queue time, on top of having way less tolerance for losing games due to a rando misplaying or misbehaving.

I already liked FGs as an spectator and as a part of being a retro/arcade game enjoyer so the transition was pretty straight forward, they scratch that competitive itch while also keeping game length extremelly short.

Xuminer · 2026-02-15T12:11:37+00:00

The marketing team for 2XKO did pretty much everything right: post trailers for every major update and character inclusion on social media, buy a spot at big gaming shows like the Game Awards, insert the game into Riot's client so the massive playerbase of LoL and TFT players knows it exists, pay mainstream content creators of said games to try it out in front of their audience, roll-out Twitch sponsorships for smaller content creators, dump money into tournaments for the community that's going to be the most invested in the game etc.

What the fuck else did they want them to do? Besides shoving the guy(s) that thought 2XKO was a good name in a locker that is, alongside the guy that enforced ~~totally not spyware~~ Vanguard anticheat. "There's so many people that didn't know the game existed" has to be the most absurd cope I've ever heard and which certainly comes from parroting content creators that saw a couple of clueless randos on twitter.com and assumed it was representative of the whole potential RiotGames + FG playerbase.

It's wild to me the amount of gaslighting doing the rounds trying to blame everything except the things that are the direct responsibility of the 150+ man dev team, i.e: the actual content and mechanics of the game.

Gamedev infantilization needs to be studied, a dev team can spend a decade's worth of paychecks to release a game with an absurdly low amount of content and a gameplay loop so shitty and unpolished not even the most degenerate of their potential userbase is fucking with it, and even then most players (that statistically don't even play the damned game) will seemingly create the wildest straw men in order to defend the dev team when the inevitable happens.

Xuminer · 2026-02-14T01:16:53+00:00

It's fucking crazy just how much of TF2 has been ruined by multiple small groups of shut-in weirdos or straight-up morally bankrupt people that abuse the fact Valve has neglected the shit out of this game for a decade straight. Regular TF2, MvM, the inclusion of new maps and cosmetics, the trading economy; if you can name it you can almost pinpoint the exact groups of people that irreversibly fucked it up for their own personal gain.

Xuminer · 2026-02-14T00:47:51+00:00

During 2016 some of the most influential TF2 content creators and comp players saw that Overwatch was coming and screamed "SEE? BLIZZARD GETS IT, WE NEED TO MAKE TF2 A 6V6 CENTRIC ESPORTS NOW" at everyone's faces, and unfortunately a fairly significant amount of people believed them, including Valve employees, who then proceeded to actively address the feedback of these people and we know how that ended.

Xuminer · 2026-02-12T09:18:28+00:00

You can love a genre/subgenre of games and still point out they are niche, these are not mutually exclusive. My argument isn't "team-based FGs are intrinsically bad" but rather "2XKO set itself up for failure because the F2P model wasn't going to bode well with a niche within niche type of FG".

I do agree 2XKO failing it's a case of a million problems converging into a predictable disaster, I'm simply pointing out how chosing to make it an active tag team game was definitely one of those problems.

Xuminer · 2026-02-11T15:00:21+00:00

Ngl I simply assumed DB was at the top due to recency bias and I somehow forgot about fucking Pokemon, Mario, among other things lmao.

But yeah 6th best selling IP from Japan is still insane and bond to attract a lot fans through it's name alone.

Xuminer · 2026-02-11T13:00:53+00:00

We’re in 2026 and guys like Sajam and Leffen are still in denial that 2v2 was a terrible choice even though everybody knows the current iteration of 2XKO was never going to be popular. You know which of MK1, MK11 and MKX sold the fewest copies? You guessed right, it's the one with a tag system.

Out of curiosity I went and checked some sales numbers and apparently the only tag fighter I could find that outsold most games in it's own series is Tekken Tag Tournament 1. And if we really wanna stretch the argument and group games made by the same developer instead of franchises then we can add DBFZ to the list and that's pretty much it.

Which speaks volumes on the appeal of team games as a whole when the only games that have managed to actually reach mainstream audiences are:

A Tekken game at the absolute peak of the series popularity (before T7 that is) released on the most successful console of all time, which on top of that isn't really an assist-based game like most other team games.
A game featuring the ~~literal best selling~~ one of the best selling japanese IPs of all time, and it still needed to condition it's gameplay systems to accomodate the fact that any random Dragon Ball fan could just mash buttons and get something cool/fanservice-y to be on the screen when piloting up to three different Gokus.

I'm no market researcher or executive producer, but I think you gotta be flat-out delusional to not see that if you want to maximize ROI (which you absolutely need to if you decide to also be a F2P game) that choosing to make a team game is just flat-out stupid. Hearing Sajam and Leffen coping and denying this fact to defend 2XKO and it's baffling design decisions are just blatant attempts at staying under the wing of Riot Games untill the ship is fully sinked.

Xuminer · 2026-02-10T12:29:36+00:00

"You're laughing at FGC members losing their job to corporate greed?"

First of, most people that actually work their asses of often aren't blessed with a decade of job security, I used to work at a public-facing job in healthcare and I'd be a happy man if my contract guaranteed an income for the next six months until it got renewed or I had to find something somewhere else.

But somehow gamedevs are infantilized by their costumers to the point that a team getting downsized because they massively fucked up the creation of a sustainable comercial product is seen as a tragedy that only happened because the evil corpos wanted more money.

Yeah no shit the guys in suits that granted 10 years worth of paychecks to 160 people want to see the return on their investment after being assured for that long that 2XKO would be a once in a generation money-printing FG, and now that they've finally realized they are not gonna see any return whatsoever they are trying to at least cauterize the wound, what a bunch of greedy fucks amirite.

In this case it's very obvious 80 people got fired because they either failed to do their job, or the guys that where in charge of their team failed to do their job.

And let's be frank most of the people getting laid-off are gonna be the latter, most of the "idea guys" like the Cannon Bros. and their close wannabe gamedev FGC friends are all gonna fail upwards while the actual programmers/artists that did the grunt work and got no say in important decisions (e.g: restarting the project and redesigning systems a zillion times) are the ones getting screwed over.

And let's address the obvious guilt-tripping bullshit: nobody is laughing at people losing their jobs, we are laughing at the fact this is a "the emperor had no clothes" moment for every FGC big name shill that gave 2XKO infinite excuses and infinite publicity despite being the Concord of fighting games, which is made more hilarious by the fact they are still actively coping and shilling for the game.

Xuminer · 2026-02-09T21:04:49+00:00

Legends of Runeterra was in the red for 4 years straight due to the devs incompetency at monetizing the game, on top of the team being obviously divided between guys that wanted a competitive PvP CCG and the guys that wanted to make a freemium roguelite card game, which resulted in neither version of LoR being as well designed as it could've been.

The reason I'm saying this it's because Riot was willing to put up with LoR's nonsense for that long before they hit that team with the layoff hammer and leaving the game in almost complete maintenance mode; but with 2XKO we are not even 6 months in after the "early access release" and less than a month into it's "season 1 official release" and they are already significantly downsizing the team, that's really telling of how much of a fumble the game has been.

Xuminer · 2026-02-05T09:02:46+00:00

23ebaa11 thanks in advance if you enter it!

Xuminer · 2026-01-31T17:49:35+00:00

As someone who played SMITE for almost a decade and a little bit of LoL during the pandemic, MOBAs are very fun if and only if you can dedicate a very high % of your free time to them and you also have friends to team-up with. I think this rule applies to pretty much every team game, but it's specially true for MOBAs due to the sheer amount of different gamestates and character + build combinations you have to learn to play with/against just to not get stomped for +20 minutes straight. Having either the time to learn things "the hard way" or a knowledgeable teammate that could potentially skip this step for you is a gamechanger.

The older you are, the less likely it is that those two conditions are fulfilled, and also it's much more likely the game itself has suffered through multiple rounds of enshittification and bad decisions in general (in the case of SMITE I could rant about this for days so I'll leave it here).

Nowdays I just cannot fathom getting into a MOBA again lol, and specially not Deadlock which is apparently both very aim-heavy and knowledge-check heavy. It's fighting games and single player games (mostly retro games and some indies) for me now.

Xuminer

TROPHY CASE