Michael Heiss · @PBMsmite
19th Apr 2016 from TwitLonger
and you though the twitlongers were over...
So I'll put the TL;DR at the top for those of you who don't care/need an explanation: I am stepping down as support player for the Randozos. I'll leave it to them to announce their replacement and what their plans are moving forward etc.
Warning: I type a LOT...
I also would like to preface this by saying that nothing I mention is in any way meant to be disrespectful to any of my teammates on Randozos.
I don't normally get too personal with these types of updates but I figured I'd do it this time to let people know a little more about where I'm at if they are curious at all.
To begin explaining, the things I care about most in SMITE are learning and improving personally as a player as well as helping my teammates do the same. No feeling is more satisfying in this game to me than seeing long term improvement in myself and the people around me; and getting to a point in a team environment where you felt like you could be at the top. This was something I loved on Resist in Challenger's and of course during my time with Eager.
Going into rosterpocalypse, I really did not want to play on a team that I didn't feel had the potential to compete at the very top of the SPL; and it was my intention that if I was faced with the choice between a bottom SPL team that didn't have potential or simply not playing the split and focusing on improving personally in other ways, I would choose the latter. The guaranteed SPL money of course is nice, but that isn't what I'm after. Realizing that I probably wouldn't have a main roster spot for the split, I was pretty content with not playing if I felt that it wouldn't be the best environment for me to keep getting better. That was true until Meerkat was replaced by Baskin on what is now Soar.
Meerkat was a friend of mine and of course a very good player, which made me feel a team with him would have potential to be at the top. The two of us decided that we'd like to keep playing and try to make/join a team together and see what happens, and once we also got ScaryD I thought I would have a lot of fun playing this split. Both of them are talented players and they each work very hard to get better and it really did make it easy to have fun with friends while still learning and having that feeling that we were all able to improve together. The feeling I hate most in this game is not being able to learn through scrims, and a lot of silly mistakes can prevent this such as getting caught on rotations, dying in lane, or whatever the case may be. Obviously with a new team these sort of things are more common while you're developing synergy and learning to play with one another, but eventually we started cutting down on these and we were seeing some improvement, especially during our time with Eonic.
The problem is we kept having to develop synergy and changing teammates makes these issues come back again and again, and I felt personally that we kept getting into a cycle where we'd make improvements, then a roster change would occur and we'd have to fix them all over again. I'm not sure how the rest of my teammates felt about this, but I would get noticeably irritated/tilted in scrims when we would just lose to mistakes that we know better than to make. It wasn't even the losses that frustrated me, it was the way we were losing because I didn't feel that I was learning. I felt like my attitude was becoming noticeably worse and it was hindering my own play as well as my teammates around me. This is the main reason that I am deciding to step down because with Eonic joining Envy I see it as a necessary point where I have to reset myself and work on my own problems to get better as both a player and teammate, and allow the rest of them to move on.
Just to wrap this book up and make it clear, I am not blaming Eonic for ruining the team by leaving, he got a great opportunity and I wish him nothing but success with Envy, it is just unfortunate that we have played with 3 different junglers since the team's inception and now are faced with potentially finding another.
There were times and moments with the team where I really did feel like we had a chance to get a lot better and potentially work into the top 4, if not this split then definitely future splits to come. It was a pleasure to play with ScaryD, Meerkat, and Aduro as well as our junglers and I really do think they all are/have potential to be top players if they keep working as hard as they have been. Unfortunately this situation is more of "it's not you, it's me" and I am looking forward to correcting my problems and ultimately getting better as a player and enjoying SMITE much more. I might have an announcement within a few days about my plans for the rest of the split, and no it will not be a twitlonger (thank god!).
If you've read this far you're a nutjob and I love you, PEACE.