Pizza Gaming Disband

It turns out that Pizza Gaming will no longer be a team in SMITE. Member and Founder TapoutQQ posted this statment on Reddit,

"Hey community,
Today we decided that "Pizza Gaming" is gonna disband due to the new jungle meta. We played a lot since the mask was released and every day has gotten worse then the day before. The game is not longer enjoyable for us. Its really sad that this has come so far, but none of us wants to play the new meta competitive. And since Hirez is not planing to remove the item we decided to take a break from smite. Maybe one day, when the game is enjoyable again, we will return and play competitive. Special thanks to all our fans for that awesome time we had together."

Will we be seeing more teams dropout of the competitive scene because of this?

Good job Hi-Rez. You are officially one step closer to ruining the game.

Maybe if they payed more attention to what the players liked and disliked, then things like this wouldn't happen. But instead, they decide to experiment and do whatever they want at the cost of unhappy players.

Idiots.

The problem here is that the people who don't like it are the casual players whereas on the competitive scene the amount of people who don't like it are a minority, meaning as far as the competitive scene is concerned Bumba's has no reason to be removed.

That is very true, yes.

However, what it IS doing in both casual and competitive is making the game more passive. The people that are unhappy with it don't like how it changes the ENTIRETY of gameplay.

Plus, if an item is causing so much trouble that teams are disbanding, then something is not right.

Personally, I think that jungling was just fine without it. Baka/Arachne/Ne Zha can jungle just fine and using the item gets in the way of other items that those Gods could use much more. People who use it, in all honesty, aren't helping themselves or their build with its use.

Funny how this occurence coincided with the posting of my earlier thread.

The point still remains though: the forced passive playstyle is proving itself to be boring at all levels of play. It only feels like it's less of an issue at the competitive level because competititve players have no choice but to adapt if they want to keep their rating. They do so begrudgingly however, as evidenced by this team's disbandment. Pizza's options were reduced to either lose every game, or adapt a very boring playstyle just to remain competitive.

By that logic, I'm going to assume that we are going to see more teams disbanding.

This item has got to go and I don't think Hi-Rez is going to let it go easily.

This wouldn't be the first time HiRez implemented something and was adamant on trying to justify it's existence.

Remember the Focus system? People hated that too, and HiRez went to great lengths to try and balance it out, when the majority of players simply wanted the entire system gone and everything reverted back the way it was pre-focus.

HiRez will likely attempt to find some way to make the mask balanced, but the community would prefer it to be gone completely instead rather than having to build the game around it.

Of course I remember Focus, I got used to it but I was never fond of it. I was quite content with its removal.

I don't see how they can balance that mask. It's such a simple item but it has caused complex problems. In the end, I think they will follow in the footsteps of the Focus system and just remove it.

The game doesn't need a prominent jungling role, it is fine with just an occasional God jungling and ganking. This isn't LoL...

What is focus XD?

An old mechanic, what it did was just giving better cc