Toxicity toward newer Conquest players is genuinely bad for player retention
I’ve been trying to get more into Conquest, and something that I think seriously hurts the mode, especially for newer or less experienced players
is how quickly some people become toxic when a match starts going badly.
Yesterday I was already having a rough game. We were losing, I wasn’t playing particularly well, and one of my teammates kept getting himself killed. Instead of looking at what was actually going wrong, he spent a good portion of the match blaming me and being incredibly toxic.
And at some point I just thought: How is this supposed to make somebody want to keep playing Conquest? Conquest already has a pretty significant barrier to entry. You have to learn roles, rotations, builds, objectives, matchups, warding, positioning, when to fight, when not to fight, etc. You can understand the basics and still get completely outplayed because you haven’t developed the game sense that comes from hundreds or thousands of matches. People have to be allowed to be bad while they’re learning.
And yeah, I get it. It’s a MOBA. It’s a competitive game. People get frustrated. Sometimes your teammate genuinely does make a terrible play that costs you a fight or even the match. I’ve been frustrated with teammates too.
But “it’s a MOBA” shouldn’t be an excuse for treating people like garbage.
There’s also a weird irony when someone repeatedly makes bad plays themselves and then spends the entire game searching for somebody else to blame. At that point, you’re not helping the team recover. You’re making an already losing match even more miserable.
More importantly, think about this from the perspective of somebody who’s genuinely new to Conquest. They queue up because they want to learn the main competitive mode, struggle because they’re inexperienced, and then get berated for 30 minutes by somebody with significantly more experience.
Why would they queue again?
If we want SMITE to retain players and have a healthy Conquest population, experienced players need to recognize that newer players are going to make mistakes. Give them advice. Ping something they missed. Explain what they should’ve done differently. Or, if you’re too tilted to do that, just don’t say anything.
There is a massive difference between:
“Hey, don’t push that far without wards because their jungle is probably rotating.”
and, “You’re trash. Never play this role again.”
One of those might actually create a better Conquest player. The other might make someone decide Conquest isn’t worth learning at all.
Competitive games will always have some toxicity. I don’t expect everyone to suddenly become incredibly patient and wholesome. But I really don’t think “that’s just how MOBAs are” should be the standard we accept.
If somebody is genuinely trying to learn, I’d rather have a bad teammate who is willing to improve than a good teammate who makes the entire match miserable for everyone the second something goes wrong. But I think it’s up to us as players to help new players, and not ostracize them because they’re new.