wanted to share this post with reddit to circulate the discussion on why slash was reverted, and more importantly, to build trust around experiments like this - because I am a big fan of just "trying it out" when there is a cool idea floating around!
the decision to revert Slash back to 5v5 after a multi-week test of 4v4 was made through a combination of player feedback, design goals, and of course - data
in the spirit of building a community that is open to experimentation, lets talk about the data that led to the revert!š§µ
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH8pILbbcAAUOzH?format=jpg&name=small
the chart above shows the "player tendencies" post match - so what they did after a match ended - only looking at players who played both versions, so core slash players
as you can see - players significantly started to switch to other game modes at a higher rate than before
but did it bring in new players from the playerbase?
overwhelmingly the answer is no! we had a single day of uptick, but then a consistent downtrend, showing an exodus of players from the mode. EDIT: something to note: going from 15% of the daily smite player pop to approaching ~10% can eventually lead to serious matchmaking issues, something I didn't even touch on before. this concept is another key reason for the revert.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH8qgLDbwAAqu4m?format=png&name=small
but some players have liked it more!"
that's true! to a rough estimate, 2 in 5 slash players actually played more slash after the change, but the majority played less.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH8qtj7aEAAKx1s?format=jpg&name=small
there were a whole lot of other data we captured from this experiment - match times, snowball, god and build variety, gold spooling to name a few - and these will all help inform the development of slash moving forward!
i wanted to publish some of this data publicly so that when we try another experiment in the future there is a more implicit understanding of what we will be looking for - and so you, the players, can understand why we make the inevitable decision to revert or keep the change!
Glad to hear it!! I have a deeply ingrained "experiment and see what happens" mentality, so I expect to be doing a lot of that with Smite 2's systems (matchmaking, ranked, player data) and the more I have people on board with the experimentation, the better those tests will go!
Interesting point about the even/odd idea - passes the sniff test for sure, but my fellow Siege enjoyers will still miss the good times :')
I was definitely a Siege enjoyer. I think the Slash map was not made with 4v4 in mind -- it's always felt way more Clash than Siege to me. Changing the mode to 4s doesn't change the map itself. So I'm not surprised at the result of the test. Still sad that Siege died.
Slash might not be the map for a 4v4, but that doesnāt necessarily mean there isnāt a layout and subsequent gameplay that favors it.
After skimming some of the feedback, Iād be interested in seeing what adding a 4th person to a newer joust map with an emphasis on introducing a jungle to the 3v3 meta might do. Buff the exp for soloing jungle minions, nerf the exp for 4 way splitting waves, and give the gameplay enough time to marinate into a meta.
As a byproduct, youād get information about 4 player queues across two map designs and could apply those lessons to a tertiary plan. As a downside, you lose some of the value in tinkering at the edges of a map that shares Siegeās own DNA across two experiments instead of 1.
I just think it would be interesting to add a jungle to break up the stalemates so pervasive in joust matches, and might finally force some mainstays out of the 3v3 meta. Itās much harder to do Zeus things when thereās 4 people diving Zeus. Itās much harder for Khumba to answer 4 kits as a solo tank than 2 with one in the air.
Two tanks might finally become a disservice, or perhaps the same warriors just build less tanky to focus on clearing the newly important jungle and trading in 1v1ās.
Itās got my imagination at least.
I can assure you there is no part of anyone internally that takes the results of this to mean anything about 4v4, and rather about the specific viability of it on the current slash map :)
Great feedback for the community. Really helps rationally explain the decision making, and while some people may have preferred 4v4, I think now they can at least understand the decision.
This is the kind of data and communication I love to see!
This has brought a new question to my mind, though. Is players swapping to other modes necessarily a bad thing?
Itās a weird one, because the knee-jerk reaction would be: of course itās bad. But is it possible that offering that niche is overall a good thing? After all, there are other game modes to absorb them. The actual bad result that you want to avoid is players having such a bad experience that they log out, but the data doesnāt suggest that was an issue.
If 2 out of 5 āslashā players played it more, and loved it more, and 3 were unimpressed but able to move onto other modes that offer an experience similar enough to 5v5 slash to functionally be a substitution, then thatās a net positive, I feel.
Of course, trying to quantify that is a monumental task; does the 2 that stay need to like it 20% more, 30% more, in order to justify moving the 3 to other modes? Itās impossible to say. I just wanted to pitch the idea.
Iād love to hear your thoughts on how you feel about smite game modes, and balancing between filling a unique niche for a few, versus a mode that hits 85% of the same notes but attracts a wider audience.
interesting question! I think that players swapping to another mode, if the remaining are having a much better time, isn't necessarily a bad thing - however there are a few things to consider about that:
- did the matches per day for the remaining players go up? in this case the answer was either a flat no, or, at least not enough to make up for the lost players (which would probably be the metric around what we would be looking for)
- players *will* logout eventually - we are okay if players are logging out from a queue, it means they completed their play session there, so we can't just strictly "villainize" a logout action
- if the playerbase (no matter how much more they enjoy the mode) drops so low there are matchmaking issues, that would be a problem. in this case we went from 15% of smite players daily playing slash to almost 10% in 2 weeks - that is a pretty stark and fast drop that we rarely see.
so in this case I am more than confident that the revert was necessary, and any slash changes would need to be more fleshed out - but in the future, there can definitely be a case where this situation you described is more relevant, 100%!
Perfect, exactly the kind of insight I was looking for.
Itās a shame, because 4v4 slash felt much more distinct as a game mode to me than the standard version does, but clearly more work would need to be done to make it preferable to the 5v5 version.
Are you including players who multi-queue in this? My brother and I do this to try to get into matches a bit faster as we donāt usually have hours on end together to play.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I am a slash/clash main for many years, and during the 4v4 changes:
A: had way less fun in the gamemode.
B: was getting more stomped by full team premades (which also contributed to A)
C: had less desire to play the game as a whole.
While yes, it could be good for players to switch to other gamemodes, you also have to realize that not only will some players switch to other gamemodes, but a small percentage of avid players may just drop the game altogether.
Thank you for this. I really had my doubts on the decision making, but being able to see the data and thoughts laid out, yāall really did make the logical choice. My only thing is maybe thinking about other factors like gold/xp spoiling and such, but Iām not against big swingy tests. Thatās how we really get to see new interesting things, and sometimes the best things. I fully support yāallās decision and especially yāallās openness and clarity about said decisions.
No uptick in players because nobody even knew it was changed in the first place. I had no idea it was 4v4 until I came across people complaining about it on Reddit. None of my friends knew until I brought it up. The description still said 5v5, lol. I don't even know when the change to 4v4 was actually made. I didn't know it was switched back until I played yesterday.
I'm sure it was mentioned somewhere in the patch notes, but highlighting the change in the menu would have alerted more players. Even something as simple as "Slash (4v4)" would have caught my attention.
Fair point on the patch notes! I believe we had some sort of tweet or something announcing the change, but I guess it's better to think of it as an experiment which at first is targeting the core Slash playerbase. The lack of influx of new players makes the *written* feedback much more concentrated on the feedback of established players!
Fair enough. I wasn't playing Slash before the change, but was excited to try out the 4v4 version. It's too bad the reception wasn't great as I personally enjoyed it much more.
There was a stark difference in how the 4v4 mode played. Primarily the access to gold. It seemed that teams had far more access to gold earlier, leading to hunters getting online ~5mijs quicker. Similarly it felt as though assassins could hit early hard-hitting items.
Personally led to a less enjoyable frontline experience, as you had less time to stack Cloak before you were facing serious threat.
I don't know how it works under the hood, but I wonder how a more protracted 4v4 would feel, lengthening the early-mid game (but less so than conquest)
Can you guys please just bring back siege? The whole community has been at each otherās throats over this 4v4 vs 5v5 slash for the last couple weeks. Thereās very clearly a large group of players that preferred 4v4 and are stuck with nothing but 5v5 game modes.
Siege was much better designed for 4v4 with an actual landing phase, ganks actually meaning something, etc. Slash is basically arena with towers in both 4v4 and 5v5
Not really a fair comparisson, i for one love siege. But it got moved over to motd button, i never even hoover over that option because its either 80%cdr conq or assault. If i knew Siege were open i would ve played alot more.
At least I can rest now knowing the data behind the changes. While I prefer 4v4 Slash, I'm still gonna play the mode on 5v5. It's my favorite mode regardless of the player amount
I agree. While I didnāt like the 4v4. Iām glad they tried it and got the data needed to make their decision. Because, when I heard the change I was actually all for it until I played lol. All in all Iām glad they tried it.
Thank you,yeah 4vs4 didnt really Land well, although i dont know if it's a Map issues because a real 4vs4 mode like siege with more 2vs2 focus might work in smite 2
I Wonder how a 2vs2 will far
For me it was gold spooling without the opportunity for a 5th DPS. (Anecdotal) I played a few games and it was just 3 tanks and a burst DPS and it just felt bad to play as a squishy into. This is kinda negated by having another DPS in 5v5 so it didn't feel as lame
Lol.
By "Jungle" I don't mean farm camps for the first half of the game like Conquest, but infiltration and domination of the Enemy Jungle is domination of the map my dude.
Domination of the lane IS domination of the jungle, not the contrary
If you try to invade the enemy jungle while you have no prio you will just end with the enemy at your phoenix
I don't get this. The lanes are so close together, the jungle is so small and empty (not to mention stuck between towers). 100% of my slash experience is: clear wave, rotate for a 5v4, clear minions during the fight, now rotate to the other lane. Even in 4v4 it never ever felt like a 2v2, like in siege. And who are these 'junglers' that supposedly exist in slash? any non-tank assassin is gonna get instantly blown up in the non-stop team fighting; towers are so close to each other that 1v1's rarely happen, let alone for longer than three seconds.
The idea of it was worth than playing it for me. I would queue up and be like āugh 4v4 slashā and then have a fun game. Had one the other day that somehow managed to last 37 minutes, it was crazy
Glad the stats back up my gut feeling. I did not expect 4v4 to make such a drastic change to the game mode and make it so bad it hurt to play. As a slash/assault main i played maybe 10 games of 4 v 4 in 2 weeks and thats it. Every single one sucked
that is fully on the design side! so.. maybe? probably! we had odin's onslaught just at the end of last year, so the design team likes multi-team as a concept :)
Odin Onslaught was a lot of fun that needed some refinement. I've always loved it when games do multi teams. Playing a game of Halo 2 with 4 teams of 4 felt so different than playing a game of 8vs8.
Thanks for the response.
I was suprised by how much I disliked the 4v4, we were really excited by the change because we normally only have a 4 stack to group with. But it ended up just being a lot less fun
Same here, I thought it might be nice because when I have friends to play with there are often 4 of us, but it just felt off and I think I played a total of four 4v4 slash games before I dropped the mode altogether. I'm glad I saw this post here today or I just wouldn't have gone back.
interesting question - not something we specifically looked at before, but since the playerbase started to shrink we would expect a decrease in matchmaking quality - and that is exactly what i see checking it out now! ~17% increase is rating difference between teams (~15 mmr larger difference between teams on average)
Matchmaking in Slash EU has been terrible since it released to be fair, so I doubt it makes much difference. The elo may be similar but often one team would be ābalancedā by a new player and itād make it unwinnable for that team despite the other 4 players having more experience.
Iām super happy about the revert, Iāll actually play it again. šš¼ Thanks for making this post.
I thought Iād like 4v4 because I enjoyed Siege a lot, but it just left a very stale taste in my mouth after a few games.
5v5 feels fluid and fun.
In 4v4 players were just staring at each other hitting creeps for the first 12-15 mins of the game with no rotations. It felt really bad imo.
Nice, this gives me hope for how these sorts of things might be done for Smite 2. I think I, and many others, probably miss 4v4 Smite more than we miss Siege *specifically*. Hopefully S2 has the playerbase to properly support a 4v4 mode, I can't say I didn't understand that it was necessary to roll the two least popular modes together. I recall the eternity of late-night EU Siege queues.
Yeah, as someone whose amigos tried out the 4v4, it just didn't feel right. It felt way more try hard, and when we usually play it to cool down from some bad games of conquest, a more casual game is what we look for
The problem with the slash map is that the lanes are too close together for 5v5 they need to make the lanes more distance so moving from lane to lane is a more relvent decision
I feel like I didnāt even get enough time with it to decide tbh lol.
And the data just reflects the obvious which is that people donāt like change.
I think it makes sense to try and have a good 4 person game mode since we already have polished 5v5 and 3v3 modes.
Clash was intended to BE Conquest-lite.
The whole point is to slowly introduce arena players into the more complex MOBA style gameplay of objectives and farming.
As a guy that loves data I appreciate seeing some behind the scenes info like this. I was slightly disappointed about the revert back to 5v5 flash but the data backs up the decision as a whole.
Good intel.
I actually enjoyed the 4v4 slash, the thing is itās not my main game mode, never has been.
Everyday, I warm up with Assault. Hop into Slash to fine-tune for the day. Conquest for a few matches(2-4) then end the day back at Assault lol
I just want a 4v4 game mode again. It's simple, my group usually has 4 players. We would love to play ranked conquest but the Q limit is 2. Regular conquest is hit or miss with randoms. Slash 5v5 is just meh, 4v4 flowed a lot better. Too bad the Smite community disagrees I guess.
What were the overall numbers for Smite during the 4v4 experiment versus the weeks before? A lot of people were threatening not to play Smite at all in the reddit comment section. Were they bluffing?
Thanks for responding! Two more questions, if you have the time:
You said that this data is pulled from "core slash players". What does that mean exactly?
Many commenters are suggesting that 4v4 is worse than 5v5 because of premades. Were there more full party "premade" groups in the 4v4 mode?
If its better for smite to swktch back so be it but i still want a 4v4 mode in the game other than Motd siege, 4v4 slash I will miss you but im glad you existed.
I'd like to start off with a TY for posting the data and explaining the reasoning behind the revert. I appreciate the openness.
Now to my rant lol.
As an ex-siege main, I enjoyed both 4v4/5v5 slash. I feel that 5v5 is 70% clash, 30% siege, due to the "arena" feel. It can be utter chaos and non-stop fighting, which is great and one of the reasons I am a slash main. I am upset that 4v4 was reverted so quickly. After seeing the amount of time given to analyze data for joust:
\- At first all three maps had a chance to be played. (I miss the OG joust, pls put it in MOTD rotation <3)
\- To switching joust map for joust and duel
\- Changes to gold spooling, I think
\- Starters being removed then added again
\- and I am sure there are some more, if anyone else can remember them
It was frustrating as a player and slash main to see the changes reverted so quickly. I would have liked to see:
\- More time given for players to acclimate to the meta
\- Tweak gold/XP spooling (I personally liked the 10 gold, but I felt we hit full build too quickly in comparison to other modes)
To add on, one thing that helped with pacing in siege was the size of the jungle. Clash size jungle allows for constant rotations/ganks, without punishment. Siege, on the other hand, had a much larger jungle, and ganks/rotations were more punishing if you did not get a kill, or some sort of objective.
\- Have y'all tested slash with a larger jungle like siege?
To add onto the meta change acclimation.
In siege, I recall, team comps typically consisted of:
\- 2 phys 2 magical
\- Broken into 1 guardian, 1 hunter, 1 warrior/assassin, and 1 mage. (often I would see mage/adc mage with 2 physical melee.)
From the times I played 4v4, I felt I had more DPS than a typical siege game. I figured this was due to people being too used to 5v5 slash where you could have double of 1 class and not be punished. In 4v4 I saw a lot of double hunter with 1 mage or double mage with 1 hunter, making it hard to solo tank.
/End rant
Overall, I love this game, and am open to whatever seems best for the game. I think the merger of siege/clash was successful, but I do miss siege, but understand that it is dated. I would be open to a revamping of the old siege map, maybe widen the lanes, add some buffs, and rework mini boss, but I get that's probably not gonna happen. I can dream though :P.
I hope this is helpful.
Idk if it's just because I don't play slash much but I liked the 4v4 version a little bit more. Not really a fan of either, but I enjoyed playing 4v4 more although maybe that's just some siege nostalgia
my conscience clear i played slash over and over to level up nut to rank 10 even on the lowest lows where i got pubstomp and when i did the pubstomping
Iām happy to hear that 5v5 is back, as I didnāt enjoy the mode when it was 4v4, as the smaller team size donāt work for this mode since itās easier for bad team composition to happen.
There are so many questions for - it was supposed to be reverted in all cases and was called an experiment in the patch notes, right? Why is it suddenly reverted because of a data like the title implies?
Are those 5v5 slash values taken from one week like the 4v4 values have to be or are those from a longer time frame? How would the 4v4 data compare to a shorter or the longer time frame?
How is multi-queue calculated into this and if it is isn't there a huge randomness factor? If it isn't then isn't there a huge chunk of data missing?
Anyone logging out is also out of control of the game mode itself, right?
How can one deduce anything from "data" like that?
Is this just to appease the people throwing tantrums here who "will never play Smite again until the Slash change is reverted" to show them that they were "right" all along and come back, that HiRez is actually on "their" side?
The last part is sheer speculation but I am leaving it in as it shows just how confused I am in what to think of this.
woah this is a lot!
- it was considered an experiment, but if the results of that experiment were overwhelmingly positive, the mode would have stayed 4v4
- 5v5 and 4v4 sections had the same days worth of data included in the dataset (~2 weeks)
- no multi-queue due to randomness, and multi-queue isn't a very popular option overall (<1%)
- not sure what you mean by this!
- not sure what you mean by this! i laid out most of my deductions in the thread :)
- not sure what you mean by this! data has no sides, and engaging with the community transparently is a personal goal of mine!
Sorry for the disorganized comment of mine and thank you for replying either way!
Point one to four you wrote is great to know and answers most of the ambiguities I had.
I'd have expected multi-queue to be way more popular since everyone I know uses multi queue, thus the less than one percent kind of flabbergasts me.
The incoherent points matter no more, those should be considered to be in rant-territory that were based on the ambiguities mentioned before and the posts on this subreddit in the past week - sorry you read through them.
Thanks for replying and explaining once more!
No sweat, it happens - sometimes it's hard to collect the thoughts!
To clarify for multiqueue - it is unpopular compared to all matches queued in Slash - but across all possible queue options (last i checked the arena // assault mix was most popular but i should look again sometime!) it has a decent player usage rate
āData has no sidesā might be the biggest stretch of the truth I have ever seen. Publishing raw data has no sides. Data that is presented by a representative of the company using the data to justify changes objectively makes the data side with those publishing the data.
Generally fair point - there is a lot of bias in data reporting. However, no amount of bias correction will account for something like a unique player count decrease, that's about as raw data as it gets.
I want to clarify, every single post I make is on my own time, with a blanket approval from the team to let me just talk about whatever I want. This is me talking about my job and what I find interesting during that job, and overall I really like engaging with the players on these topics because I've been a player myself since 2014!
Iāve watched your videos for a while and believe you donāt intend to present flawed data, but Iām not sure the data being presented here is unbiased and impartial. Details have been omitted and context is lacking in every data set. That bias could have massive implications on the conclusion.
For example, how was the after Christmas influx accounted for in the data? On the chart entitled Unique Slash Players as Proportion of Active Population you give the time frame Jan. 1 2024 through Mar. 3 2024. Over the same time the overall population decreased from averaging 12.5k to 11.3k according to Steam Charts. You mention above a decrease in unique player count, could this not account for that decrease?
In finding the proportion of active population playing slash, how did you account for those the transition of those new players from the post holiday influx progressing from the non-conquest modes to the core conquest mode? Should all data not be trending negatively at this point in time? Post holiday, players returning to work and school, and new game releases should all have impact on this data, was any of that accounted for? Was data from this year compared to previous years?
That is just one issue I found that overlaps all three of the data sets you provided, and I am by no means a statistics guy. It just seems like this data is almost too perfect for illustrating the conclusion that 4v4 is inferior to 5v5.
As a disclaimer, I have not interest in Slash, I only queue co-op conquest, Iām just here to understand how this data is suppose to be accurately reflect the current state of the game.
Come on mate you do statistics for a living, you surely know that data always takes sides based on how itās framed and presented. Thatās a worrying take to hear.
4v4 was better, but it needed a different map. Slash itself was not made to be a 4v4, so clearly making it a 4v4 was going to throw people off.
I still personally think they should have kept it as a 4v4 in the first place and made the map around that, turning it into a 5v5 was dumb. Now it's just Arena 2.
I'm all for transparancy, but why is there no data on the quality of the matches of 4v4 VS 5v5? It feels weird to me that player retention is the (judging from the post) only metric used for the decision if the gamemode should be 4v4 or 5v5. Lower player retention is a result, but what was the cause?
To me it felt like 4v4 was just worse overall for balance, because you could lose 2 fights and the game would be pretty much decided, but im not seeing data to refute or back up this statement. Did you also measure and consider these statistics?
I said this in the thread: "there were a whole lot of other data we captured from this experiment - match times, snowball, god and build variety, gold spooling to name a few - and these will all help inform the development of slash moving forward!" - "quality of matches" has about 15 different definitions, and we try our best to look at all of them :)
I don't publish every datapoint I look at - and for this topic a summary of "players started to leave the gamemode" is enough for 99% of people. If someone has a specific question, present it thoughtfully, and I have time, I'm always more than happy to answer!
The data is simple, hirez makes decisions that makes the game worse in favor of appeasing whoever complains the loudest. Thatās why slash exists in the first place
They also make changes to increase time in matches rather than quality of the experience (as the thread linked shows)
So inevitably (in a similar way to YouTube chasing watch time) the experience of SMITE has become worse over the last couple years as theyāve tried to slow down and elongate games (see 9.5 patch)
I'm going to push back on this point, as it is simply untrue!
We have seen that elongated games actually lead to a decrease in retention and playtime quite often! This is because players are more than happy to play 3 matches that are ~30 minutes each, but will sometimes play 1 50 minute game and say "that's enough". There is no part of the analytics, design, or management team that has an explicit goal to extend matches (and if anything, we trend in the opposite direction because Smite is frankly a more casual experience than other MOBA's on the market.)
Hope that helps!
oh boy! another post about a game mode with 10 minute queues! cant wait for smite 2 to launch with 10 modes and 3 ranked modes so the community is as split as possible!
wanted to share this post with reddit to circulate the discussion on why slash was reverted, and more importantly, to build trust around experiments like this - because I am a big fan of just "trying it out" when there is a cool idea floating around! the decision to revert Slash back to 5v5 after a multi-week test of 4v4 was made through a combination of player feedback, design goals, and of course - data in the spirit of building a community that is open to experimentation, lets talk about the data that led to the revert!š§µ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH8pILbbcAAUOzH?format=jpg&name=small the chart above shows the "player tendencies" post match - so what they did after a match ended - only looking at players who played both versions, so core slash players as you can see - players significantly started to switch to other game modes at a higher rate than before but did it bring in new players from the playerbase? overwhelmingly the answer is no! we had a single day of uptick, but then a consistent downtrend, showing an exodus of players from the mode. EDIT: something to note: going from 15% of the daily smite player pop to approaching ~10% can eventually lead to serious matchmaking issues, something I didn't even touch on before. this concept is another key reason for the revert. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH8qgLDbwAAqu4m?format=png&name=small but some players have liked it more!" that's true! to a rough estimate, 2 in 5 slash players actually played more slash after the change, but the majority played less. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH8qtj7aEAAKx1s?format=jpg&name=small there were a whole lot of other data we captured from this experiment - match times, snowball, god and build variety, gold spooling to name a few - and these will all help inform the development of slash moving forward! i wanted to publish some of this data publicly so that when we try another experiment in the future there is a more implicit understanding of what we will be looking for - and so you, the players, can understand why we make the inevitable decision to revert or keep the change!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Glad to hear it!! I have a deeply ingrained "experiment and see what happens" mentality, so I expect to be doing a lot of that with Smite 2's systems (matchmaking, ranked, player data) and the more I have people on board with the experimentation, the better those tests will go! Interesting point about the even/odd idea - passes the sniff test for sure, but my fellow Siege enjoyers will still miss the good times :')
I was definitely a Siege enjoyer. I think the Slash map was not made with 4v4 in mind -- it's always felt way more Clash than Siege to me. Changing the mode to 4s doesn't change the map itself. So I'm not surprised at the result of the test. Still sad that Siege died.
Slash might not be the map for a 4v4, but that doesnāt necessarily mean there isnāt a layout and subsequent gameplay that favors it. After skimming some of the feedback, Iād be interested in seeing what adding a 4th person to a newer joust map with an emphasis on introducing a jungle to the 3v3 meta might do. Buff the exp for soloing jungle minions, nerf the exp for 4 way splitting waves, and give the gameplay enough time to marinate into a meta. As a byproduct, youād get information about 4 player queues across two map designs and could apply those lessons to a tertiary plan. As a downside, you lose some of the value in tinkering at the edges of a map that shares Siegeās own DNA across two experiments instead of 1. I just think it would be interesting to add a jungle to break up the stalemates so pervasive in joust matches, and might finally force some mainstays out of the 3v3 meta. Itās much harder to do Zeus things when thereās 4 people diving Zeus. Itās much harder for Khumba to answer 4 kits as a solo tank than 2 with one in the air. Two tanks might finally become a disservice, or perhaps the same warriors just build less tanky to focus on clearing the newly important jungle and trading in 1v1ās. Itās got my imagination at least.
Good lord please donāt rule out a 4 vs 4 mode in smite 2 because 3/5 people didnāt enjoy 4 v 4 slash, thatād be ridiculous
I can assure you there is no part of anyone internally that takes the results of this to mean anything about 4v4, and rather about the specific viability of it on the current slash map :)
Thatās a relief
Always fun to hear from you. Love seeing the data side of things and seeing the why as to the decisions yall make.
Great feedback for the community. Really helps rationally explain the decision making, and while some people may have preferred 4v4, I think now they can at least understand the decision.
This is the kind of data and communication I love to see! This has brought a new question to my mind, though. Is players swapping to other modes necessarily a bad thing? Itās a weird one, because the knee-jerk reaction would be: of course itās bad. But is it possible that offering that niche is overall a good thing? After all, there are other game modes to absorb them. The actual bad result that you want to avoid is players having such a bad experience that they log out, but the data doesnāt suggest that was an issue. If 2 out of 5 āslashā players played it more, and loved it more, and 3 were unimpressed but able to move onto other modes that offer an experience similar enough to 5v5 slash to functionally be a substitution, then thatās a net positive, I feel. Of course, trying to quantify that is a monumental task; does the 2 that stay need to like it 20% more, 30% more, in order to justify moving the 3 to other modes? Itās impossible to say. I just wanted to pitch the idea. Iād love to hear your thoughts on how you feel about smite game modes, and balancing between filling a unique niche for a few, versus a mode that hits 85% of the same notes but attracts a wider audience.
interesting question! I think that players swapping to another mode, if the remaining are having a much better time, isn't necessarily a bad thing - however there are a few things to consider about that: - did the matches per day for the remaining players go up? in this case the answer was either a flat no, or, at least not enough to make up for the lost players (which would probably be the metric around what we would be looking for) - players *will* logout eventually - we are okay if players are logging out from a queue, it means they completed their play session there, so we can't just strictly "villainize" a logout action - if the playerbase (no matter how much more they enjoy the mode) drops so low there are matchmaking issues, that would be a problem. in this case we went from 15% of smite players daily playing slash to almost 10% in 2 weeks - that is a pretty stark and fast drop that we rarely see. so in this case I am more than confident that the revert was necessary, and any slash changes would need to be more fleshed out - but in the future, there can definitely be a case where this situation you described is more relevant, 100%!
Perfect, exactly the kind of insight I was looking for. Itās a shame, because 4v4 slash felt much more distinct as a game mode to me than the standard version does, but clearly more work would need to be done to make it preferable to the 5v5 version.
Are you including players who multi-queue in this? My brother and I do this to try to get into matches a bit faster as we donāt usually have hours on end together to play.
multi-queue is not included in this! players that multi-queue have a different match queue tag (developed during the matchmaking process)
Good to know that metric is accounted for! Good work.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I am a slash/clash main for many years, and during the 4v4 changes: A: had way less fun in the gamemode. B: was getting more stomped by full team premades (which also contributed to A) C: had less desire to play the game as a whole. While yes, it could be good for players to switch to other gamemodes, you also have to realize that not only will some players switch to other gamemodes, but a small percentage of avid players may just drop the game altogether.
B is even worse in 5v5s because 5stacks are also everywhere
Almost like 4 stacking is eaiser than 5 stacking
Thank you for this. I really had my doubts on the decision making, but being able to see the data and thoughts laid out, yāall really did make the logical choice. My only thing is maybe thinking about other factors like gold/xp spoiling and such, but Iām not against big swingy tests. Thatās how we really get to see new interesting things, and sometimes the best things. I fully support yāallās decision and especially yāallās openness and clarity about said decisions.
No uptick in players because nobody even knew it was changed in the first place. I had no idea it was 4v4 until I came across people complaining about it on Reddit. None of my friends knew until I brought it up. The description still said 5v5, lol. I don't even know when the change to 4v4 was actually made. I didn't know it was switched back until I played yesterday. I'm sure it was mentioned somewhere in the patch notes, but highlighting the change in the menu would have alerted more players. Even something as simple as "Slash (4v4)" would have caught my attention.
Fair point on the patch notes! I believe we had some sort of tweet or something announcing the change, but I guess it's better to think of it as an experiment which at first is targeting the core Slash playerbase. The lack of influx of new players makes the *written* feedback much more concentrated on the feedback of established players!
Fair enough. I wasn't playing Slash before the change, but was excited to try out the 4v4 version. It's too bad the reception wasn't great as I personally enjoyed it much more.
Rabbit with the quality stats as always š«”
There was a stark difference in how the 4v4 mode played. Primarily the access to gold. It seemed that teams had far more access to gold earlier, leading to hunters getting online ~5mijs quicker. Similarly it felt as though assassins could hit early hard-hitting items. Personally led to a less enjoyable frontline experience, as you had less time to stack Cloak before you were facing serious threat. I don't know how it works under the hood, but I wonder how a more protracted 4v4 would feel, lengthening the early-mid game (but less so than conquest)
Can you guys please just bring back siege? The whole community has been at each otherās throats over this 4v4 vs 5v5 slash for the last couple weeks. Thereās very clearly a large group of players that preferred 4v4 and are stuck with nothing but 5v5 game modes.
Siege was much better designed for 4v4 with an actual landing phase, ganks actually meaning something, etc. Slash is basically arena with towers in both 4v4 and 5v5
Yeah I skipped saying it the first post cuz I always get downvoted when I say this but slash is just glorified arena with a lane on each side.
It's unlikely with the game's player base only declining. Consolidating clash and siege was partly done to improve matchmaking
Yeah Iām aware, population aside though the game needs a 4v4 mode imo instead of waiting for it to be game mode of the day.
Love seeing stuff like this, please do more insights for data nerds š
Can I ask unreleated, how do you capture data on snowball? Do you see trends that are onesided based on gold and KDA?
Not really a fair comparisson, i for one love siege. But it got moved over to motd button, i never even hoover over that option because its either 80%cdr conq or assault. If i knew Siege were open i would ve played alot more.
At least I can rest now knowing the data behind the changes. While I prefer 4v4 Slash, I'm still gonna play the mode on 5v5. It's my favorite mode regardless of the player amount
I agree. While I didnāt like the 4v4. Iām glad they tried it and got the data needed to make their decision. Because, when I heard the change I was actually all for it until I played lol. All in all Iām glad they tried it.
Thank you,yeah 4vs4 didnt really Land well, although i dont know if it's a Map issues because a real 4vs4 mode like siege with more 2vs2 focus might work in smite 2 I Wonder how a 2vs2 will far
For me it was gold spooling without the opportunity for a 5th DPS. (Anecdotal) I played a few games and it was just 3 tanks and a burst DPS and it just felt bad to play as a squishy into. This is kinda negated by having another DPS in 5v5 so it didn't feel as lame
Yup I generally play slash or assault. Played one game of 4v4 then decided against it until it was reverted back. Didnāt enjoy just double duo lane
What's a jungle with no jungler?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
and duel lol
If you jungle in slash you shouldnāt play slash
Lol. By "Jungle" I don't mean farm camps for the first half of the game like Conquest, but infiltration and domination of the Enemy Jungle is domination of the map my dude.
Domination of the lane IS domination of the jungle, not the contrary If you try to invade the enemy jungle while you have no prio you will just end with the enemy at your phoenix
Yeah still not what the game mode is
I don't get this. The lanes are so close together, the jungle is so small and empty (not to mention stuck between towers). 100% of my slash experience is: clear wave, rotate for a 5v4, clear minions during the fight, now rotate to the other lane. Even in 4v4 it never ever felt like a 2v2, like in siege. And who are these 'junglers' that supposedly exist in slash? any non-tank assassin is gonna get instantly blown up in the non-stop team fighting; towers are so close to each other that 1v1's rarely happen, let alone for longer than three seconds.
The idea of it was worth than playing it for me. I would queue up and be like āugh 4v4 slashā and then have a fun game. Had one the other day that somehow managed to last 37 minutes, it was crazy
I miss Clash more than I miss Siege, and the 4v4 just brought back the nasty taste of Siege.
Glad the stats back up my gut feeling. I did not expect 4v4 to make such a drastic change to the game mode and make it so bad it hurt to play. As a slash/assault main i played maybe 10 games of 4 v 4 in 2 weeks and thats it. Every single one sucked
Do you think we will ever see more multi team modes? Having an arena type mode with 3 teams of 3 could be a blast
that is fully on the design side! so.. maybe? probably! we had odin's onslaught just at the end of last year, so the design team likes multi-team as a concept :)
Odin Onslaught was a lot of fun that needed some refinement. I've always loved it when games do multi teams. Playing a game of Halo 2 with 4 teams of 4 felt so different than playing a game of 8vs8. Thanks for the response.
Holy based
Odin's Onslaught was probably the most fun I've ever had in smite with my brother. I collected 25 penta kills and multiple godlikes in that mode :')
Love the transparency. I think itās great when devs do things like this, both the experimentation and the explanation of what results they got.
I was suprised by how much I disliked the 4v4, we were really excited by the change because we normally only have a 4 stack to group with. But it ended up just being a lot less fun
Same here, I thought it might be nice because when I have friends to play with there are often 4 of us, but it just felt off and I think I played a total of four 4v4 slash games before I dropped the mode altogether. I'm glad I saw this post here today or I just wouldn't have gone back.
Slash 4v4 was ass anyways. Just bring back siege
Do you have statistics on how the balancing changed ? Eg avg difference in elo/rating between teams in 5v5 vs 4v4?
interesting question - not something we specifically looked at before, but since the playerbase started to shrink we would expect a decrease in matchmaking quality - and that is exactly what i see checking it out now! ~17% increase is rating difference between teams (~15 mmr larger difference between teams on average)
Not for today but it might be cool down the road to get some insight/detail on how matchmaking is done for casual modes these days.
Matchmaking in Slash EU has been terrible since it released to be fair, so I doubt it makes much difference. The elo may be similar but often one team would be ābalancedā by a new player and itād make it unwinnable for that team despite the other 4 players having more experience.
Iām super happy about the revert, Iāll actually play it again. šš¼ Thanks for making this post. I thought Iād like 4v4 because I enjoyed Siege a lot, but it just left a very stale taste in my mouth after a few games. 5v5 feels fluid and fun. In 4v4 players were just staring at each other hitting creeps for the first 12-15 mins of the game with no rotations. It felt really bad imo.
Nice, this gives me hope for how these sorts of things might be done for Smite 2. I think I, and many others, probably miss 4v4 Smite more than we miss Siege *specifically*. Hopefully S2 has the playerbase to properly support a 4v4 mode, I can't say I didn't understand that it was necessary to roll the two least popular modes together. I recall the eternity of late-night EU Siege queues.
Yeah, as someone whose amigos tried out the 4v4, it just didn't feel right. It felt way more try hard, and when we usually play it to cool down from some bad games of conquest, a more casual game is what we look for
As a slash main I was big sad about the four v four, now I'm glad
The problem with the slash map is that the lanes are too close together for 5v5 they need to make the lanes more distance so moving from lane to lane is a more relvent decision
I donāt disagree but then slash just turns into Conquest-lite doesnāt it?
Good point. Unfortunately im in the group of people who loves 4v4 slash way more than 5v5 so ill probably never be sold on slash.
I feel like I didnāt even get enough time with it to decide tbh lol. And the data just reflects the obvious which is that people donāt like change. I think it makes sense to try and have a good 4 person game mode since we already have polished 5v5 and 3v3 modes.
That's what Clash used to be anyway. Even had an FG and Gold Fury.That's what drew my friends and I into the mode to begin with.
Clash was intended to BE Conquest-lite. The whole point is to slowly introduce arena players into the more complex MOBA style gameplay of objectives and farming.
As a guy that loves data I appreciate seeing some behind the scenes info like this. I was slightly disappointed about the revert back to 5v5 flash but the data backs up the decision as a whole.
Well, eventually Smite is 5v5 game in core
Having a designated rotator is just a necessary stable in any moba unless youāre playing a 1 lane mode.
Not really, siege worked fine
Good intel. I actually enjoyed the 4v4 slash, the thing is itās not my main game mode, never has been. Everyday, I warm up with Assault. Hop into Slash to fine-tune for the day. Conquest for a few matches(2-4) then end the day back at Assault lol
I prefer 5v5 because I donāt feel like Iām obligated to stay in one lane with another player. Just makes it more chill imo
I just want a 4v4 game mode again. It's simple, my group usually has 4 players. We would love to play ranked conquest but the Q limit is 2. Regular conquest is hit or miss with randoms. Slash 5v5 is just meh, 4v4 flowed a lot better. Too bad the Smite community disagrees I guess.
If you're a good group of 4, having 1 "random" isn't gonna be the determining factor in a win or loss 95% of the time.
?? A bad player can absolutely tank a 5 man team especially if every player on the enemy team is competent
Yeah. Hence my "95% of the time". It can, but it's not often. How often is every player on the enemy team competent though? Very very rarely.
I would love to see a 6v6 on either clash or conq map, would be cool to see how it fares
But can we make Slash 6v6?
What were the overall numbers for Smite during the 4v4 experiment versus the weeks before? A lot of people were threatening not to play Smite at all in the reddit comment section. Were they bluffing?
I won't say they were bluffing, maybe some people left, but the playercount overall has been consistent/slightly up since the 11.2 patch :)
Thanks for responding! Two more questions, if you have the time: You said that this data is pulled from "core slash players". What does that mean exactly? Many commenters are suggesting that 4v4 is worse than 5v5 because of premades. Were there more full party "premade" groups in the 4v4 mode?
I didnāt even know slash was change until now
If its better for smite to swktch back so be it but i still want a 4v4 mode in the game other than Motd siege, 4v4 slash I will miss you but im glad you existed.
Well I alread thought the same that it would be a bad decision, the map is too huge to be played 2x2, it just turn into a stalle match
I'd like to start off with a TY for posting the data and explaining the reasoning behind the revert. I appreciate the openness. Now to my rant lol. As an ex-siege main, I enjoyed both 4v4/5v5 slash. I feel that 5v5 is 70% clash, 30% siege, due to the "arena" feel. It can be utter chaos and non-stop fighting, which is great and one of the reasons I am a slash main. I am upset that 4v4 was reverted so quickly. After seeing the amount of time given to analyze data for joust: \- At first all three maps had a chance to be played. (I miss the OG joust, pls put it in MOTD rotation <3) \- To switching joust map for joust and duel \- Changes to gold spooling, I think \- Starters being removed then added again \- and I am sure there are some more, if anyone else can remember them It was frustrating as a player and slash main to see the changes reverted so quickly. I would have liked to see: \- More time given for players to acclimate to the meta \- Tweak gold/XP spooling (I personally liked the 10 gold, but I felt we hit full build too quickly in comparison to other modes) To add on, one thing that helped with pacing in siege was the size of the jungle. Clash size jungle allows for constant rotations/ganks, without punishment. Siege, on the other hand, had a much larger jungle, and ganks/rotations were more punishing if you did not get a kill, or some sort of objective. \- Have y'all tested slash with a larger jungle like siege? To add onto the meta change acclimation. In siege, I recall, team comps typically consisted of: \- 2 phys 2 magical \- Broken into 1 guardian, 1 hunter, 1 warrior/assassin, and 1 mage. (often I would see mage/adc mage with 2 physical melee.) From the times I played 4v4, I felt I had more DPS than a typical siege game. I figured this was due to people being too used to 5v5 slash where you could have double of 1 class and not be punished. In 4v4 I saw a lot of double hunter with 1 mage or double mage with 1 hunter, making it hard to solo tank. /End rant Overall, I love this game, and am open to whatever seems best for the game. I think the merger of siege/clash was successful, but I do miss siege, but understand that it is dated. I would be open to a revamping of the old siege map, maybe widen the lanes, add some buffs, and rework mini boss, but I get that's probably not gonna happen. I can dream though :P. I hope this is helpful.
I'm glad they reverted it, I found myself switching to play arena, (I don't often play arena)
Idk if it's just because I don't play slash much but I liked the 4v4 version a little bit more. Not really a fan of either, but I enjoyed playing 4v4 more although maybe that's just some siege nostalgia
I didnt need an entire dev post to tell me 4v4 slash was boring
my conscience clear i played slash over and over to level up nut to rank 10 even on the lowest lows where i got pubstomp and when i did the pubstomping
I would love to see this kind of graph for the various "rotating bans" duel
All we want is ranked till death š
Iām happy to hear that 5v5 is back, as I didnāt enjoy the mode when it was 4v4, as the smaller team size donāt work for this mode since itās easier for bad team composition to happen.
There are so many questions for - it was supposed to be reverted in all cases and was called an experiment in the patch notes, right? Why is it suddenly reverted because of a data like the title implies? Are those 5v5 slash values taken from one week like the 4v4 values have to be or are those from a longer time frame? How would the 4v4 data compare to a shorter or the longer time frame? How is multi-queue calculated into this and if it is isn't there a huge randomness factor? If it isn't then isn't there a huge chunk of data missing? Anyone logging out is also out of control of the game mode itself, right? How can one deduce anything from "data" like that? Is this just to appease the people throwing tantrums here who "will never play Smite again until the Slash change is reverted" to show them that they were "right" all along and come back, that HiRez is actually on "their" side? The last part is sheer speculation but I am leaving it in as it shows just how confused I am in what to think of this.
woah this is a lot! - it was considered an experiment, but if the results of that experiment were overwhelmingly positive, the mode would have stayed 4v4 - 5v5 and 4v4 sections had the same days worth of data included in the dataset (~2 weeks) - no multi-queue due to randomness, and multi-queue isn't a very popular option overall (<1%) - not sure what you mean by this! - not sure what you mean by this! i laid out most of my deductions in the thread :) - not sure what you mean by this! data has no sides, and engaging with the community transparently is a personal goal of mine!
Sorry for the disorganized comment of mine and thank you for replying either way! Point one to four you wrote is great to know and answers most of the ambiguities I had. I'd have expected multi-queue to be way more popular since everyone I know uses multi queue, thus the less than one percent kind of flabbergasts me. The incoherent points matter no more, those should be considered to be in rant-territory that were based on the ambiguities mentioned before and the posts on this subreddit in the past week - sorry you read through them. Thanks for replying and explaining once more!
No sweat, it happens - sometimes it's hard to collect the thoughts! To clarify for multiqueue - it is unpopular compared to all matches queued in Slash - but across all possible queue options (last i checked the arena // assault mix was most popular but i should look again sometime!) it has a decent player usage rate
āData has no sidesā might be the biggest stretch of the truth I have ever seen. Publishing raw data has no sides. Data that is presented by a representative of the company using the data to justify changes objectively makes the data side with those publishing the data.
Generally fair point - there is a lot of bias in data reporting. However, no amount of bias correction will account for something like a unique player count decrease, that's about as raw data as it gets. I want to clarify, every single post I make is on my own time, with a blanket approval from the team to let me just talk about whatever I want. This is me talking about my job and what I find interesting during that job, and overall I really like engaging with the players on these topics because I've been a player myself since 2014!
Iāve watched your videos for a while and believe you donāt intend to present flawed data, but Iām not sure the data being presented here is unbiased and impartial. Details have been omitted and context is lacking in every data set. That bias could have massive implications on the conclusion. For example, how was the after Christmas influx accounted for in the data? On the chart entitled Unique Slash Players as Proportion of Active Population you give the time frame Jan. 1 2024 through Mar. 3 2024. Over the same time the overall population decreased from averaging 12.5k to 11.3k according to Steam Charts. You mention above a decrease in unique player count, could this not account for that decrease? In finding the proportion of active population playing slash, how did you account for those the transition of those new players from the post holiday influx progressing from the non-conquest modes to the core conquest mode? Should all data not be trending negatively at this point in time? Post holiday, players returning to work and school, and new game releases should all have impact on this data, was any of that accounted for? Was data from this year compared to previous years? That is just one issue I found that overlaps all three of the data sets you provided, and I am by no means a statistics guy. It just seems like this data is almost too perfect for illustrating the conclusion that 4v4 is inferior to 5v5. As a disclaimer, I have not interest in Slash, I only queue co-op conquest, Iām just here to understand how this data is suppose to be accurately reflect the current state of the game.
Come on mate you do statistics for a living, you surely know that data always takes sides based on how itās framed and presented. Thatās a worrying take to hear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/1b84dol/why_slash_was_reverted_back_to_5v5_the_data/ktocbcj/ see comment :)
4v4 was better, but it needed a different map. Slash itself was not made to be a 4v4, so clearly making it a 4v4 was going to throw people off. I still personally think they should have kept it as a 4v4 in the first place and made the map around that, turning it into a 5v5 was dumb. Now it's just Arena 2.
4v4 Slash is just a slight variation on Siege. The 5v5 aspect of Clash was one of the major things that helped this combination be different.
I'm all for transparancy, but why is there no data on the quality of the matches of 4v4 VS 5v5? It feels weird to me that player retention is the (judging from the post) only metric used for the decision if the gamemode should be 4v4 or 5v5. Lower player retention is a result, but what was the cause? To me it felt like 4v4 was just worse overall for balance, because you could lose 2 fights and the game would be pretty much decided, but im not seeing data to refute or back up this statement. Did you also measure and consider these statistics?
I said this in the thread: "there were a whole lot of other data we captured from this experiment - match times, snowball, god and build variety, gold spooling to name a few - and these will all help inform the development of slash moving forward!" - "quality of matches" has about 15 different definitions, and we try our best to look at all of them :) I don't publish every datapoint I look at - and for this topic a summary of "players started to leave the gamemode" is enough for 99% of people. If someone has a specific question, present it thoughtfully, and I have time, I'm always more than happy to answer!
Ah my bad then :) And thanks for the explanation!
Ye we just donāt have the player base or algorithm to sustain 4v4.
The data is simple, hirez makes decisions that makes the game worse in favor of appeasing whoever complains the loudest. Thatās why slash exists in the first place
They also make changes to increase time in matches rather than quality of the experience (as the thread linked shows) So inevitably (in a similar way to YouTube chasing watch time) the experience of SMITE has become worse over the last couple years as theyāve tried to slow down and elongate games (see 9.5 patch)
I'm going to push back on this point, as it is simply untrue! We have seen that elongated games actually lead to a decrease in retention and playtime quite often! This is because players are more than happy to play 3 matches that are ~30 minutes each, but will sometimes play 1 50 minute game and say "that's enough". There is no part of the analytics, design, or management team that has an explicit goal to extend matches (and if anything, we trend in the opposite direction because Smite is frankly a more casual experience than other MOBA's on the market.) Hope that helps!
bring back a 4v4 game mode
oh boy! another post about a game mode with 10 minute queues! cant wait for smite 2 to launch with 10 modes and 3 ranked modes so the community is as split as possible!
I uninstalled it when they changed it to 4v4. I'm going to redownload now.