SMITEFire Season 7 Guide Contest Winners!

How about... don't start the guide contest so soon? The season barely started and you want people to churn out guides for a contest. Just chill, let people get used to the main meta changes and then think of holding the contest. By starting it so early this season you surely have noticed the lack of high quality entries (especially looking at the numerous ones which just copy past ability descriptions).

It is not only ok, it is one of the core items that give Anubis a stupid power boost, hell they could rename that item after him, considering he is the only god that benefits from it. Maybe a Ares jungle can also pull that item off tho. On A Kuku I see it not as often anymore tbh.

Don't wanna start a discussion about itemization in this thread tho.

Congrats to all winners!!!!
I'm really surprised that I won, I think I'm kinda new at this game

Hey Kriega,

That's a good point, thank you for your feedback. :)

We have initially thought about starting the contest at a later date, but we thought that having the contest for 3 - 4 weeks would be enough for people to get used to the new season.

We will be keeping this in mind and we will be more considerate with the timing of the next guide contest.

Thank you once again and we hope to see you participating as well! :D

Hi everyone,

For a bit of transparency, let me talk a bit about the scoring sheet I created and which has been used by others for the past few contests.

The scoring and categories have been adjusted over time, but the original was created based on an old contest's post regarding what content will be considered and what is suggested to be discussed. I then added some weight based on importance of the category.

Here's an example.


To help judges out, I also added notes within the categories to remind of what should be considered. Here's an example.


One thing to keep in mind, I stress to users of this sheet that the scores generated should be used mainly as reference when considering all guides scored. Comments can be added and you can compare scores in specific categories, and make scoring adjustments if needed.

And of course, sometimes you may just have a feeling about one guide over another. In one case, a guide may have a higher end score, but the scorer feels the content of one guide is superior to another, who barely beat out another's score due to something less important like fancier BB coding.

In the end, it's a tool, but people should keep in mind that we are trying to do our best with the guides available.

I'm happy to be apart of this contest and to win surprisingly. I mainly focus on keeping the guide updated with feedback from the community. Congratulations to all!

I counted around 12-14 eligible mage guides just now (keep in mind that this is from contest start to now which is almost 2 weeks after closing date, so can include some new guides that why the estimate is there.
Remove the 2 that won the revival category and 1 from someone that won in another category (technically 4 more if the author was not a double winner, however I am to lazy to look at the hunter entries)
This leaves us with 9-11 guides (or technically 5-7 which is quite low) assuming I did not count wrong or count any "big build" that reached 2000+ characters (by explaining items or something. they will get reviewed but if you look at bran's scoring thingy they will lose lots of points over real guides quite easily). Knowing the quality of the site certain guides drop off quite hard scoringwise

Yeah there were probably some guides that could have been good runnerups and were probably close to it too. However that would require some clarification from Prism. Looking at the descriptions why they won gives slightly limited information. Looking at it they mostly won from the body of the text.

Well hi dev you just made my life easier.

Anyway, I meant to write a reply to this yesterday but I got caught up by university. So I'm sorry to everyone that had to jump up and defend my choices, and I'm also thankful for you all.

So I'll explain why I chose to nominate both Foot's Isis guide and Doom's Kukul guide. While I did take points away from Foot by not having the best build paths, situationals, and a confusing "top" in general, he did overachieve incredibly in Formatting, scoring 16.5 out of 18, the highest I graded any mage guide (second closest is (disconsidering his other guides) WolfWitch, at 11/18), which sure did help him grade higher then expected. Also, I do believe that the information he provides offsets his error in not building Charon's Coin, which is something that I'm sure Foot will add some time, as he add suggestions all the time in his guides.

Now, for Doom's Kukul guide, I had a dilemma. His total score ended up being a draw with WolfWitch (72.5/100), and while WolfWitch's builds and situationals are better then Doom's, his information and explanation was the tiebreaker for me. WolfWitch didn't make paragraphs to explain her items, and her skill explanations were short. I feel that awarding her (because her guide did meet eligibility) without some "crucial" information would bring more outrage then giving the win to a guide that has a lot of useful information.

I did prioritize information over build, which is something Bran did advise me against, and I recognized he did try to aid me in picking the best builds, knowing a situation like this would happen, but I didn't feel right reevaluating my results to prioritize BEST META BUILDS over Ok builds but A LOT OF INFORMATION (I'm using caps to describe size/importance and not to scream)

Also, in order to let this thread be what it was supposed to be: A place to congratulate the winners and have light jokes here and there, if anyone has a problem with any of my decisions or explanations that I've written above, please feel more then welcome to shoot me a DM.

In my opinion information should be more valuable then the build itself.

as i said multiple time in my guide itself (Raijin's Guide), there are multiple playstyle and viable items: there cant be a single 6 items build... all games / persons are different. BUT information stays there for any god out of there.

for example... i talked in the comment section with Bran and Kriega about items... that helped me clarifying the overall guide but i didnt agree on everything (like i didnt agree about charon's being better than shards or phytagoream being viable ... or non-late game ethereal staff) but i tried to explain my reasons ever better in the information i put in the guide. (and again... i still made changes based to those discussion in the comments with them... like item orders to make it less personal and other things i was agreeing with!... so it was definitely useful)

...and, ofc, i think adding items you think are viable is a good thing in a guide tho(i still added the charon coin as long as some more items in the guide)!

it also happened to talk about Typhoon Fang and a build based on that... we were agreeing that ppl kinda sleep on that item but is it "meta" ? no ofc... but still build-able.
I didnt add it to the guide cause, in my opinion, having it in the comment was enough. Lifesteal build was more like a "fun" build... but someone with a sustain-poke playstyle should definitely personally prefer it over other "meta" builds.

in conclusion: you cant really narrow down the PERFECT build... so, for me, prioritizing information over build is correct!

Hey Pris, I wouldn't say I specifically advised you against prioritizing info over build...I mostly pointed out some things potentially lacking in the build (specifically missing Charon's and including Magus in the Isis case, funny enough), just to make sure the build scoring was being considered with that in mind.

That said, this not being a build contest but rather a guide contest, the content of HOW to play a god - and providing tips and other gameplay information - can be just as, if not more helpful, in teaching people how to be a better player with that god, and that's a lot of what this contest is trying to facilitate.

The guide contest 100% laid out the different types of things that should be discussed, and this has been the case for all contests we've hosted. This gives everyone equal opportunity to participate and write a good, comprehensive guide. We absolutely need to keep builds and item options in mind, as those are key factors to providing a strong base for a strong match, and those are the things most readers will hone in on. But that is not our only focus, and although in this example case Charon's isn't included, it's not like % pen is ignored...both Ob Shard and Reaver are included in the example build, so while perhaps not 100% optimal, it's absolutely functional.

We have to choose from the guides that are available, and while nothing is perfect, we had some great guides and solid content. So in this, I support the choices that the judges made.