Create-A-God Process Step 1: Concept Submissions

Hello there everybody, it's Swampy here with a little something for y'all: A cohesive, controlled process for communally creating a god. This does NOT mean that we will have 20-odd people posting god ideas at once, but that we will meticulously work to create a single god that we can, in general, all be happy with. I have working with me many of the great SF minds when it comes to this part of the forums, and they shall be the final judges for all the stages of the project. In the case of this stage, HifromBuddha shall be the one you all look to for guidance, moderation and the final verdict on who's concept will be polled for the choice of how the rest of this project will go. Now, without further adieu, let's get it started!

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This is where we discuss the general goal of the First Create-A-God -- CAG 1. The Concept will be a guiding force throughout the ensuing project, to ensure the the final result is a cohesive competitive God. Any discussions, suggestions, or submissions in later topics, that do not support the spirit of the Concept, will be moderated by the Topic Leader.

Concepts must be presented as high-level descriptions of a general idea. They cannot be detailed God designs. Since we have polls to determine each aspect of the God (or most atleast,) we cannot allow any specific features of the God to be determined by the details of the Concept.

We intentionally have many rules regarding Concept submissions. If you are not prepared to read and understand all the rules, then don't bother making a submission. These rules are made to help narrow the field of concepts down to those that have been carefully designed. This is not meant to be easy for everyone -- a good, legal Concept requires a lot of thought and careful wording.

The following rules must be followed when submitting a Concept:

One submission per person. You may edit your Concept, but you may not change the fundamental premise after it has been posted. If editing your concept, please edit the original post instead of posting a new revision. Do not bump your Concept after you have posted it. If people do not comment on it, so be it.

Do not duplicate or closely-resemble Concepts already posted by others. It is your responsibility to read through all previous submissions in this thread to ensure you are complying with this rule. Ignorance or laziness is not an excuse.

Specific God Roles, Abilities, Stats, Pantheon, ect. cannot be included or excluded in a Concept. Nor can other characteristics of the Concept specifically result in in the inclusion or exclusion of any of the above. However, the concept may state within which game mode the God does best in assuming that it is relevant to the topic. For example, the following phrases would be illegal:

"This God is a tank"
"This God has a big nuke"
"This God's Passive is\should be..."
"This God should be ____ God of ____ From ___ Pantheon"

Kits\ Specific Abilities are not to be discussed. A General theme for the abilties can be mentioned if it is the basis for the entire concept. For example, the Concept "Mage Denier" would probably have some kind of magical defence buff.

Specific stat bias, base stats, or general stat trends are not allowed. It is acceptable to use basic descriptors assuming that it does not hinder\help later stages of the process. for example, stating that the God is "Able to chase effectively" as that could be done in a multitude of ways.

Indications of Physical/Magical bias are discouraged, but acceptable if it is essential to the Concept.

Do not refer to any part of the God's artistic design. For example, the following phrases would be illegal:

"This is a bright blue God..."
"The God is modeled after a..."
"The God uses its long chain to..."

A Concept Submission must be submitted in the proper format. The format is described below. If the proper format is not used, the moderators will not evaluate the submission, regardless of content.

Concept Submission Format

Use this format for all concept submissions:

Name: (short name)
General Description: (See rules below. No more than a sentence or two here.)
Justification: (See rules below.)
Questions To Be Answered: (See rules below.)
Explanation: (Whatever you want to say here.)
Name - Don't get too clever with the name. If the essence of the concept is not intuitively obvious in the name, then you are hurting your chances of people understanding it. If the essence of your concept cannot be expressed in a few words, then you need to seriously re-evaluate your concept.

Description

- This is the official description of the concept, and must follow ALL the content rules listed above. Do not make this a long description. Long descriptions are invariably too specific or too convoluted. Keep it short. Any more than a sentence or two is TOO MUCH. Do NOT include your Explanation of the concept in the Description. See "Explanation" below.

Justification

- A few sentences describing how the concept satisfies one or more of the following:

Has a positive effect on the metagame (e.g Allows ofr 2-1-2 to be viable again)
Allows us to learn more about the metagame (e.g Why have some gods kept their place of high honor despte power creep?)
Introduces a new niche in the metagame (such as Geb taking less crit damage)

Do not make up your own categories for justification. If you cannot justify your concept against at least one of the three requirements above, then your concept is illegal for the CAG project.

Questions To Be Answered

- The purpose of the CAG project is to learn new things about the metagame, and to make a God that can reliably be played and enjoyed. Each concept submission is a proposed "experiment". List out a few interesting competitive questions that should be answered after properly implementing your concept. At the conclusion of the CAG project, these questions will be revisited to see how well we implemented the concept. If your questions are not significant, relevant to your Justification, and well-written -- then your concept will be rejected.

Explanation

- This can contain just about anything. This is where you can explain your concept without restraint. You may make suggestions, even specific suggestions, regarding the possible implementation of the Concept. This explanation should help facilitate discussion of the Concept -- but the Explanation is NOT part of the Concept and will be omitted from the polls and any future use of the Concept. Since your explanation is non-binding, regarding future polls and threads, it will not be evaluated for purposes of determining if your concept is legal or illegal. Despite this, don't go posting a full god idea here as you would on other parts of the forum. Do that on the other parts of the forum.

It is the submitter's responsibility to figure out how to make a legal submission within the rules listed above. Do not complain about the difficulty of making a submission in this thread. There are many, many legal concepts that can be presented within the rules.

Here's a sample of a legal Concept post. This is not an actual submission. It's just being used to illustrate the format and legal content:

Concept: "The Anti-Burst"

Description: A god who can make burst mages less optimal in just about every team comp, allowing for more variation in the roles.

Justification: In just about every game you play, you see a bust mage being picked early and going either mid or solo. This stringency is one of the reasons that the metagame is so immovable, so it would be nice to see how we could try to move Magical ADCs\Mage Carries back into a more active role.

Questions To Be Answered:

Are Burst Mages less viable with "Anti-Burst" on the enemy team?
Which Team Comps would be most and least effective without the crutch of a burst mage?
Which God(s) could best use the lack of a burst mage to their advantage?
Which lesser-used Gods become more relevant with "Anti-Burst"?
Would "Anti-Burst" be viable against anything other than a burst mage?
Would a Team with an "Anti-Burst" rather have a more active\passive teammate?

Explanation: A look at the game without a burst mage would be a breath of fresh air. There are quite a few gods, a few of the assasins come to mind, thta would love to see the path to 1v1s clear up to them. Through use of a large amount of magical defence and a mana burn sheild or soemthing similar, we could effectively make a lot of these Gods viable again by making magesd a less safe play.

Note that all the "illegal stuff" is in the Explanation. The Description is short, and very carefully worded to follow all the rules. It does not specifically dictate anything in later polls.

Please try to remember that we are simply pointing the project in a general direction, we are not trying to decide anything right now. We have several weeks of polls ahead of us where EVERYTHING about this God will be dissected, discussed, voted, and decided. The Concept is a very basic guide for the creation process. It is hard to provide solid concept descriptions without basically designing the entire God right off the bat. Submissions should be written and chosen very carefully, to avoid these problems.

Also, if anyone has questions, or an early version of your concept, don't be scared to ask\post it. WIP concepts are totally ok, and if you want to simply make a place to hold your spot then fell free to do so!

EDIT: Just as it seems to have been unclear, posts with actual idea should still follow the above format, although they do not need to be entirely completed.

Name: Sustained-Fight-based Bruiser God.

Description: Warrior that's designed to thrive in sustained fights. No burst damage (so no jungling) at all, but a decent amount of sustainable damage.

Justification: Smite is all about burst. Even so-called sustained-damage Hunters or Warriors or Mages revolve around their burst damage. This is intended to be the anti-burst god. Not just a god who relies on burst damage, but a god that actively punishes burst damage.

Questions: Can Smite handle a god with literally zero burst?
Do gods require burst damage to be effective?
Can one god designed to counter burst survive in a meta dominated by burst gods?

Explanation: Bellona has a "shield" mechanic that recharges every few seconds, granting damage reduction from abilities and minions for a few seconds after taking damage. Her attacks deal very little damage, and are meant for repositioning and support instead. Lastly, basic attacks are very important.

Sub, I have the feeling that you did in fact read the OP, so I'll explain:\
The Name is the name of the IDEA, not the specific god. That is chosen at a later stage, as is the role. But, it seems to me that you were adapting my example (although maybe not on purpose) and I feel like you may have thought that you were supposed to come up with the stuff for my example. But no, it's an example of what you should be putting down (Although adapting it is perfectly fine :P)

all i can say is, there's no reason for him NOT to use the god name.
What harm is it doing?
You seem to be against people actually knowing what they're going to be doing.
It's kinda dumb.
I mean, it's just kinda weird that you'd make a sticky like this that is literally a badly structured version of this entire forum.

Ok, did you actually read the POINT of this?! It's NOT to create a God as the rest of the forum does, but to do ti IN STEPS, allowing the community to create EVERY ASPECT, TOGETHER in a well structured format. He can, in the Explanation, say what god he envisioned and what their role would be, but that is not the point of the Concept. The Concept is the basic goal that the process hopes to achieve, not a normal frikin god idea like you would post otherwise. Seriously, this is the second time you have posted here without actually reading the OP to learn what we're doing. It's really quite irritating.

the only problem with this is that the people who are going to be posting here (not me) probably aren't going to read through the OP as well as you'd hope, and there is no way for you to enforce these strict rules you put out. Also, there's no conceivable way to get everyone to work together on a god without decent communication. Doing it over a forum isn't going to work.
I'd hate to rain on your parade, but keeping things the way they are is fine.
Concept and feedback is good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

There's a vast difference between extremely complicated, lore attuned, number intensive gods and pokemon.
Also, there is nothing here telling me I have to be positive. It's called criticism for a reason.
TL;DR I'm allowed to speak the truth.

Well this has been a lovely conversation with much civility, cooperation, understanding, and negotiation on both sides. Well done, good chaps!

That's the problem. It IS broke. Haven't you noticed the God Concept forum has been completely dead lately?