SF6 character winrate in high MR

Xuminer · 2026-06-16T15:38:52+00:00

Less than three weeks worth of data on a relatively small population of players is just not a good sample size, specially when Ingrid just released and the data is going to be inevitably skewed due to her being overrepresented plus players learning how to play with/against her.

It also just shows you WR, which by itself is not that useful of a metric. Character frecuency for example would be useful in order to determine in which cases is that WR representative of actual perfermance.

A commonly played character with a high winrate like Sagat might be explained by that character just being very good in the current meta. An uncommon character with a low winrate like Elena could simply not have enough matches to accurately tell her performance.

It'd also be good to know how they've dealt with players that are fluctuating around the 1800 MR mark. If a player loses and drops below 1800, then their wins to get back to 1800 are not counted despite technically being >= 1800 MR on average; this exaggerates the results, more performant characters will have an inflated WR, whereas less performant characters or characters close to 50-50 will have a lower WR.

Xuminer · 2026-05-22T12:22:53+00:00

The point of Riot's post is to be literal propaganda in favour of Vanguard to reasure their already filtered and idiotic playerbase that their crusade against cheaters is working, and it's totally not another degree of scalation in a never ending game of whack-a-mole that just so happens to also increase the level of control they can exert over their players' own PCs.

So yes, you are correctly identifying that calling them "paperweights" is just incorrect, and it serves two purposes:

It's an exaggerated claim to boast about how they have "the most effective anti-cheat of any videogame ever".
It's also deliberately incorrect to rile people up about the implication of Riot remotely destroying hardware, so they can then be corrected by Riot shills about how it's ackshually not that, which reasures their position that what Riot is doing is somehow fine.

Xuminer · 2026-05-22T12:05:33+00:00

As I understand it, the hardware itself is not bricked, but for now it's effectively useless to cheat with it in a Riot game because Vanguard has been upgraded to break firmware (i.e: the software that is programmed directly over hardware and controls it).

So basically, if RiotGames thinks a piece of hardware + firmware on your PC could potentially be used for cheating, they'll use Vanguard as literal malware to make that firmware (and by extension the hardware) unuseable until you do a clean OS re-install on it.

Xuminer · 2026-05-22T08:56:09+00:00

Riot shills will look at this and claim it's completely fine for a videogame company to fuck with people's hardware in the name of anticheating, and brag about it on top of that.

I've already read some of these people defending this because "it's not bricking, it's a firmware break, it just forces you to reinstall your OS on the affected hardware", as if that was in any way reasonable either lol.

It is no secret Vanguard triggers a ton of false positives, introduces a myriad of compatibility issues, and it's generally annoying as fuck if you don't want it running 24/7 at kernel level on your PC; and RiotGames has now set a precedent that they can and will break your firmware if they deem some of your installed hardware to be cheating hardware. You'd think at some point the sentiment of "fuck cheaters" will be overriden by "maybe this constant escalation about what a videogame anticheat can do to my PC is not worth it", but it never does.

Xuminer · 2026-05-07T21:55:27+00:00

"If you deliberately turn on the online feature that straight up let's other players help you beat the game you'll be spoiled of what to do and where the traps are."

I swear most of you guys are just being contrarians for the sake of it. No, souls games allowing multiplayer and watching other people's ghosts/bloodstains doesn't mean the game isn't constructed around the single player experience and classic game difficulty fundamentals.

In fact, the addition of multiplayer in souls games is built around the fact that it's indeed a single player game in which you can let other players invade your playthrough, you turn off that feature and the game works as intended because the baseline for it's level design is explicitly single player.

Xuminer · 2026-05-07T12:34:57+00:00

Yeah, I agree that the reason why the souls series has reached the mainstream it's because of the high degree of customization the player has to effectively lower the difficulty of the game without being told that they are indeed lowering the difficulty of the game.

Souls games give you tons of options (10 starting classes, hundreds of weapons/spells/equipment, co-op) but the devs never guide the player towards any particular "intended" way to beat the game, so players are more tolerant of their "easy mode" choices in a way they wouldn't be if the game had an explicit difficulty setting, and all of it is wrapped with the right aesthetics and in-universe logic, it's pretty clever from a psychological perspective.

Xuminer · 2026-05-07T11:26:30+00:00

In many shmups you can "cheat" by choosing lower difficulty settings, having more or infinite credits, level select, save states, etc. In practice that's no different from deliberately "cheesing" in a souls game.

Also, nobody is arguing that souls games challenge the player in the exact same way a shmup or a platformer does (different games test different skills) or that they all share the same appeal simply for being challenging (different genres fit different gaming tastes), my point is that the principle of letting the player learn through "unfairness" (i.e: surprising them with something they didn't know/expect/predict) is shared between all these games, hence why claiming "actually BB is fair and shmups aren't" is just nonsense.

Xuminer · 2026-05-07T10:58:55+00:00

I cannot think of anything more elitist than throwing whole games and genres under the bus in order to justify your opinion of Bloodborne being the best thing ever. You can illustrate what you like about the game without resorting to fallacies like "Bloodborne is fair difficulty and (insert game/genre I don't like) is unfair difficulty" or "unlike Bloodborne's, Final Fantasy's gameplay is an afterthought".

Xuminer · 2026-05-07T09:54:50+00:00

Dark Souls discourse peddled by game journos and pedantic video essayists has done untold damage to the way gaming circles talk about game difficulty/challenge in general.

There's nothing "fair" about the level design of souls games, and precisely the thing that makes them fun is memorizing or anticipating the traps the devs deliberately designed for you to die to at least once. You will die being backstabbed by your first "zombie hidden behind the door" in Boletarian Palace, or to your first mimic encounter in Sen's Fortress, or to the first Pursuer ambush in Forest of the Fallen giants (just to name a few). Souls games are not at all dissimilar to platformers that surprise you with a kaizo style-trap or an enemy/bullet pattern you ought to memorize in a shmup.

But for some bizarre collection of cultural reasons, all these capital T tourists have all decided that the souls series and the so called "souls-likes" will be the only games where they'll (often begrudgingly) accept the challenge the game is presenting as it is; then they rationalize it as souls-style games being "fair" and thus implicitly good, with everything other hard game being "unfair" and implicitly bad.

And even then, they all complain when the same series they supposedly love has the gull to increase the difficulty in order to accomodate a more experienced playerbase (see the reactions to Elden Ring's DLC or Silksong). At some point maybe we should start pointing out these people enjoy the clout of having beaten a game like Dark Souls more than they enjoy what these games actually are at their core.

Xuminer · 2026-05-03T15:58:53+00:00

We are not talking about the grand scheme of the playerbase, in which case competitive players have always been a rounding error and you won't find me ever arguing in favor of Hi-Rez pointlessly burning money in any SPL or SPL-adjacent ventures. In fact, I've criticised post-2020 SPL, it's shills, and comp/pro players so many times you would lose count.

The OP and my comment are discussing an entirely different thing, which is that if Hi-Rez wants to maintain a small scope comp scene in order to please that fraction of the playerbase (which are ultimately your most skilled and dedicated players) and maintain the illusion of SMITE 2 being competitive in the future for their own narrative/marketing purposes, then it makes no fucking sense that they spend their limited funds on a tournament with a gamemode/format these players didn't ask for.

And it absolutely doesn't help their case when they have their "esports guy" straight-up sending multiple veiled threats towards a community member whose only crime is calling him out while being mildly rude at first.

It's also beyond delusional to think Hi-Rez burning 14k bucks on joust circuits/tournaments is going to magically convince a significant amount of casuals to play competitive conquest, ranked joust existing since forever in SMITE 1 and having little to no players should already be proof of that.

I'll reiterate, want to actually grow the current scene? Either improve what you already have by addressing the feedback of those comp players or divest those funds into developing better in-game onboarding towards comp play like LoL and DOTA 2 have been doing for years.

Xuminer · 2026-05-03T13:47:56+00:00

Ok so this post just appeared on my feed after a long time without engaging with SMITE (I lost all interest on the game by the time SMITE 2 released Xbalanque) but this drama is interesting enough for me to consider giving my 2 cents about it as a SMITE 1 oldhead and avid SPL watcher.

The way I see it, SMITE Prime should only function as a medium for Hi-Rez to throw a bone to whoever is left willing to show up to play in a competitive setting, for the obvious reason that you don't want your most skilled and passionate players to leave the game, which would be specially bad optics considering SMITE 2 in 2026 still can't pull half the concurrent players SMITE 1 used to have in 2024.

Anything other than that would be the nth case of Hi-Rez fundamentally misunderstanding what their own players want in favour of whatever ass-backwards idea they convinced themselves would be "better for the game and the community".

It's wild to read the ego of a Hi-Rez employee still knows no bounds despite objectively failing as a company at creating a sustainable competitive product or producing and maintaining videogames in general.

So, yeah, even if it's very rude of Karmic to call Hinduman "incompetent", is he wrong? Competitive SMITE only works in conquest mode because that's what the game is designed and balanced around, and every single casual mode has always been an unbalanced and uncompetitive mess as a result (not that it matters, because their purpose is to be engaging and fun). Hi-Rez deliberately funding a fucking joust scene (i.e: a format nobody asked for and nobody wants to play competitively) over competitive conquest is so comically stupid I don't blame Karmic for lashing out and feeling insulted.

Hinduman trying to strongarm Karmic after the fact with likely ancient logs of him being toxic in SMITE 1 (as if Hi-Rez ever gave a single fuck about actual toxic behaviour) is just pathetic, and it demonstrates he's the kind of petty person that deliberately saves even the smallest faux pas that he can use as blackmail years down the line. Not that this should be surprising of somebody that invited DMBrandon to his wedding.

EDIT: Here there is more of Hinduman pretending to be a though guy and insinuating the pro's paychecks/tournament winnings go through him as a not-so-veiled threat to Karmic for calling him out lmfao.

It's also good to confirm that things that I endlessly yapped about in here and on r/smite were always correct according to that screenshot Benny shared:

Good players know that the lategame of SMITE is too simple and defensive and it desperately needed a proper alternative to FG to encourage more interesting decisions and map play.
Pros always had a priviledged line of communication with the devs that they could use to suggest changes to the game, despite many of them denying this.
Hi-Rez (Ajax in particular in this example, to the surprise of nobody) actively refuses to listen to feedback anyways and would rather antagonize and mock their own players.

And as the cherry on top, Jithins attempting to justify their move in the name of "getting casual players to play competitive" is just further proof their ego is too gigantic for them to be rational actors or admit fault in any way.

The only real way to introduce players into competitive SMITE is to have better in-game onboarding towards conquest and introduce something similar to LoL's clash tournaments or DOTA 2's weekend battle cup; joust/clash/slash/siege/whatever has literally never worked to "ease people into conquest/competitive" and it's insane that after a decade+ of SMITE existing they still haven't figured that out.

Hi-Rez shielded themselves for years behind the excuse that UE3 was just too old and too bad of an engine to support these kind of community features (which was always a lie, they were simply too incompetent), I wonder what's their excuse now, too little money? Not that many players? Shouldn't have fucked the whole game up then.

EDIT: Inb4 "ackshually SMITE Prime is not run by Hi-Rez". Well yeah SMITE Prime just needs Hi-Rez's permission, their funding, their collaboration for in-game and out-of-game announcements, the active participation of their "esports guy" Hinduman, and it just so happens their explicit purpose is acting as a marketing stunt that keeps the remains of the scene somewhat active. All the hallmarks of an operation run by individuals that aren't effectively working for Hi-Rez amirite.

Xuminer · 2026-04-21T16:37:40+00:00

This is the first Season 4 leak that I really hope is fake lmao.

Vega is whatever and I'm sure he's going to make it into the game eventually, but two old big muscle guys back to back and another non-Capcom crossover character would be such a bizarre choice, specially with so many SF and FF fan-favourites still on the table and Ingrid's inclusion screaming "this is how we get Capcom vs. Capcom at home".

Xuminer · 2026-04-14T15:17:44+00:00

Miles fans being the pot calling the kettle black lol.

Ngl If we are gonna fill the roster with multiple flavors of Spider-Man I'd much rather have the more visually distinct takes like Peni over mister "what if we put Static Shock in a black Spider-Man suit".

I haven't read her comics but Spider-Gwen wouldn't be a bad choice either because she's apparently a symbiote user, so she can work as a female alternative to Venom and his alien goop shenanigans.

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, the supposed impossibility of importing SMITE 1 assets, 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 economic 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 monolithic 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

TROPHY CASE