SF Update - Patch Sorting, Guest Voting & God Page Visuals

Just to clarify, member votes are always included in the score. It's either member's only, or members + guests - the higher of the two. So in your example the votes would be +2/-4




We have been using guest voting on MOBAFire since Feb 2018 - and it has been working out great there!



This is true, and something that's always hard to balance. In the end we felt that having guides up to date is important enough to warrant this, and after looking at the data there were many gods whose guides were very out of date, but had much more up to date builds.

I think you yourself have expressed a wish that builds got more attention - and this is a way for users like you who like to focus on competitive builds, but don't have time to write a guide for every one, can get your ideas out to the community.

Regulars like yourselves are pretty good about updating your guides every patch - this change more greatly affects authors who make a guide and then leave, or just stop updating it, or quit playing SMITE. Before, they would be able to stay at the top as long as the guide was still in season, but now it's easier for other authors to get in the game if the top guide doesn't update - which I'd say is a good thing rather than a bad thing.

HOWEVER I will say this is one of the changes that we'll be keeping an eagle eye on how the listings are looking. I think it'll just take some time to see how things play out. Just like with the guest voting we have also been testing this sort by patch ranking system on MOBAFire for quite a while now and it has worked out well - but we still plan to keep a close watch on things.

Thank you for addressing our concern, Mowen.

These are some fantastic updates. As a member, I will provide a short list of my thoughts/feedback.

Visual Update

Very nice new look that is aesthetically pleasing. The god pages have a clean look to them and the new logos provide a nice feel. The Builds & Guides list looks organized and ordered, especially with the new "tags" for Patches/Guides/In Depth. I especially like the way that the tags for the current patch gleam.

Sorting by Patch

Organizing by Patch as the default layout is a change that I personally like. The Top Rated filter tab is easily visible as well, so it gives users an easy way to filter guides by popularity if they wish to do so.

Displaying the Patch next to the guide is a nice change that is appreciated by guide creators. We will no longer have to specify the patch number in our guide title as we update it.

Guest Voting

This is a positive change in my eyes as well. One of the underlying issues of the site was that there was not enough vote participation. Several times, I've encountered a build/guide that only had 1 vote (sometimes 0 votes), which is not enough for the system to know where to place it.

Guest voting will allow more data input and hopefully encourage more site members to vote so that they can voice their opinion over guest votes.




Also, I feel that there could be a stronger enforcement of preventing off-topic conversation on certain guide discussion boards. I see a lot of hijacking and bickering between members that I believe is bad for not only the guide creator and their guide, but also for the overall reputation of the site.

Overall, I appreciate these changes and the work that went into the implementation. I also look forward to future updates you all have in store.

@boogiebass of course! I totally understand the concerns, this is a big change, and I hope I was of help!

@DV-8 really glad you're digging the changes! Thanks for the feedback. Putting the god icon on the profile pages should be relatively easy to fix - I'll look into that. The off topic discussion issue I think Wayne will have to investigate what can be done there.

One other thing that was suggested before was to get some of my main guides featured permanently somewhere on the front page of the site. This may sound narcissistic, but I DO keep the Conquest and Items guides updated regularly, and they contain massive amounts of helpful information for newer players.

If you don't feel it's a good idea to do that, that's okay, but general guides like these don't get the same recognition on the site as god guides.

Coming from anyone else I might think so :P But I do agree considering how long you've kept them up to date and how well acclaimed they are they are worth featuring (also, because of what you mentioned with general guides being harder to find)

I'm not against it, but it'll require some thinking on how it could be worked in to pages and possibly how to extend this to other authors of high-rated general guides.

Keep Bran’s conquest/items/arena etc.. guides and Smooth homies conquest guides on the front page of smitefire would be a suggestion I would make.

Wow, SF looks stunning. You guys did a great job.

A post on reddit would allow SF to get some feedback from another perspective, which IMO would be great. If you're too busy, I can help with it if needed.

Perhaps a mod-level flexible box that includes key guides would be great. Allow me and the managers to pick/choose specific guides that are featured in that box. SmoothHomie's guides are great and provide more in-depth strategy in some cases compared to general Conquest guide, but he's new, and I'm not sure he's going to continually maintain. If those start getting outdated, allowing me/managers to add/drop guides as needed (maybe a rotating list of up to 10 guides) seems like it'd be very functional.