Patch 5.13: the Mid-Season Update brought the timed queue system back to SMITE. The change has been debated in the community: is matchmaking worse? Is it better? Or is it the same? SMITE publisher Hi-Rez Studios’ survey investigated how players really feel, and the results have been released.

The survey finds that the majority of players feel both their matchmaking and overall SMITE experience is better, but the lead isn’t commanding; 55.1% of players found their overall SMITE experience improved, and 52.9% of players feel their matches are better.

Other questions examine if players prefer shorter wait times or higher quality matches with 68.9% of players preferring higher quality games. A majority of players, 69.3%, also prefer knowing when their queue will pop. 66.3% of players also said the much-increased wait for the 12-minute Ranked Conquest queue is worth the increased waiting.

These results tell the story that the majority of players prefer the features of the new timed queues, such as knowing when queues will pop, and do not mind longer waiting times to play a better game, but that SMITE’s matchmaking is not quite yet to where it should be, evidenced by lower amounts of players feeling their experience has improved despite the preferred features.

Hi-Rez also had interesting data to share not from the matchmaking survey, but from data from matches themselves. The publisher found big improvements to matchmaking in Arena, Casual Conquest and Ranked Conquest. “Players are more often fighting opponents with similar skill sets to themselves, resulting in statistically closer matches,” Hi-Rez’s post reads.

Hi-Rez also saw “major drops” in red flags of bad matches, such as early surrenders.

However, it was not all good news: “In other lower population queues like Ranked Joust we did not see an improvement,” said Hi-Rez. “We have already tackled quite the list of issues and we have more long term plans for queues like Ranked Joust to help improve matchmaking for those players.”

Other questions examined players’ regions, what time of the day they normally queue and gathered other types of data. See the full results of SMITE’s matchmaking survey here.

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