As a low level comp player, whats the best way you and your team to improve?

[WIP Riley]

I've tried new weaponds, made my gear more meta, and trained for a while, and yet I feel like I'm every tournament everyone is rolling me over lol

 

[guster-animations]

honestly just get consistent practice, ask for advice/coaching, and scrim others
it takes a while to “get good” as the kids say. while i’ve improved a lot in comp and individually over the last 6 months or so, i still have a LOT further to go. it’s ok to take time

 

[WIP Riley]

honestly just get consistent practice, ask for advice/coaching, and scrim others
it takes a while to “get good” as the kids say. while i’ve improved a lot in comp and individually over the last 6 months or so, i still have a LOT further to go. it’s ok to take time

Thanks for the advice!

 

[guster-animations]

my team could play against yours sometime and give some advice if you wanted— i’ve seen some of your posts on scrimboard. when do you usually scrim?

 

[WIP Riley]

my team could play against yours sometime and give some advice if you wanted— i’ve seen some of your posts on scrimboard. when do you usually scrim?

We are a European based team so because of that we haven't yet had the chance to do a scrim

 

[Pinkie Pie Puffle]

Do you have a coach? If not, having one could help you recognize from an outside perspective what things need improvement.
Aside from that, doing vod reviews as a team and individually can also help, you don't need a capture card thanks to the wonderful feature added in S3.
You can also try to scrim higher level opponents and participate in more open tournaments. Even if you lose early, there's learning that only comes from tournament experience. And if you have a close set during a tourney, try and ask the other team to become scrim partners.

 

[WIP Riley]

Do you have a coach? If not, having one could help you recognize from an outside perspective what things need improvement.
Aside from that, doing vod reviews as a team and individually can also help, you don't need a capture card thanks to the wonderful feature added in S3.
You can also try to scrim higher level opponents and participate in more open tournaments. Even if you lose early, there's learning that only comes from tournament experience. And if you have a close set during a tourney, try and ask the other team to become scrim partners.

Honestly no we don't have a coach because most of us think we know our problems (I dont) but I suggest one

We haven't done any scrims sadly due to Timezone issues

Thank you!!

 

[Pinkie Pie Puffle]

If you're interested, I can share with you some discord servers to look for scrims and the like. SendouQ is also a nice way of getting practice quick, regardless of timezone

 

[DzNutsKong]

If there's ever a close set you've played...

• Ask the opposing team if they want to scrimmage at some point
• Review a replay or two to see what plays you or you team could have been done better (although this can be hard for some people, so don't be afraid to ask others for help here)
• Consider if your comp lacks something, like if it has any especially hard matchups or doesn't have certain specials

Otherwise, make sure your team is playing together a decent amount and practicing in open at least a little bit outside of when you play together just to keep mechanics sharp. Practice is mandatory in order to get anywhere. If you aren't already, make sure you're joining tournaments like Little Squid League and Low Ink. I'd join those before anything else since those are going to get you more matches against similarly-skilled teams. Some tournaments that only allow people who "aren't LSL banned" or "aren't LI banned" that are for a similar skill level to those two.

 

[WIP Riley]

If there's ever a close set you've played...

• Ask the opposing team if they want to scrimmage at some point
• Review a replay or two to see what plays you or you team could have been done better (although this can be hard for some people, so don't be afraid to ask others for help here)
• Consider if your comp lacks something, like if it has any especially hard matchups or doesn't have certain specials

Otherwise, make sure your team is playing together a decent amount and practicing in open at least a little bit outside of when you play together just to keep mechanics sharp. Practice is mandatory in order to get anywhere. If you aren't already, make sure you're joining tournaments like Little Squid League and Low Ink I'd join before anything else since those are going to get you more matches against similarly-skilled teams. Some tournaments that only allow people who "aren't LSL banned" or "aren't LI banned" that are for a similar skill level to those two.

Thank you!

 

[guster-animations]

comps need a lot of factors (like damage, range, paint, bombs, pushing power) and i’m not sure i understand all of them yet… i would love it if someone made a guide on it but idk those are all things to consider

 

[Abyss]

Try to establish a weekly schedule to play with your team. Set some actionable goals before each scrim. E.g. if you want to get better at comms, a goal could be like "callout over vc everytime I use my special". Try to keep track of this and evaluate after the scrim if you have achieved your goal.

Overall, you need to play more with your team with an improvement mindset. Gem (squid school) has a few videos on this. I also recommend Kale's youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@KaleDaWail/videos) they have a few videos about improving as a team.

 

[DzNutsKong]

comps need a lot of factors (like damage, range, paint, bombs, pushing power) and i’m not sure i understand all of them yet… i would love it if someone made a guide on it but idk those are all things to consider

Actually I guess I'll make a second bulleted list for this lmao. Take this one with a lot more grain of salt since this is purely coming from my experience as a Splatoon player where I'm much newer and still just alright as opposed to general improvement stuff I've picked up from playing other competitive games that I talked about in my last post in this thread.

• I don't think damage specifically is important if you mean like object damage. The one thing you'd need to consider with that is that if your comp doesn't have good object damage then you should be painting for special at the start of a Rainmaker game instead of trying to pop the shield at the start. However, you can't have too many weapons with a slow kill time or that can't fight up close. I normally like to have at least two weapons that fight up close.
• I think if you're able to cover everything else here then it you could theoretically work with multiple mid/long range weapons on the same comp but that kind of goes against the point I just made above. It's difficult to have too many longer-range weapons without it seriously cutting into your paint output and/or your team's overall up close fighting. Overall though, having a backline is not mandatory as long as you maybe have a midline or two and have specials that work as counterplay to opposing backlines. Things like Tenta Missiles or Trizooka are great for that.
• For painting, kind of similar except you CANNOT go without good paint. Normally my brain just splits weapons into good, mediocre, or terrible paint, and at the absolute worst I'd say you should run two weapons with good paint + two with mediocre paint or three with good paint + one with terrible paint. I'm sorry it's kind of a vague explanation but I don't think I'd be the best to explain how good every weapon's paint output is.
• Bombs I've heard some people say you should have at least three but truthfully I have no idea. That div 6 team has run comps with only two bombs before though, neither of which are lethal, and have seen alright success with those. Maybe you should just think of there being a minimum of two?
• I think the biggest thing with pushing power is just what kind of specials your team has, and what's important tends to change depending on what meta you're in. Right now, you NEED a Tacticooler on your team. In general you also should have at least one special that works well to get you back into mid when you're at a disadvantage, and it should be on a weapon that can paint at least well enough to get it when you're in a losing spot. Right now Crab Tank and Inkjet are both great for this for example. They can control a lot of space for a pretty good amount of time for your teammates to push with.

If someone who knows better than I do can call me out for being wrong on any of this I'd be glad to hear it. Like I said before, take this with a grain of salt. I do think that lower-level comps can be a bit more lenient with all of these as long as they follow each of them to some degree, although better be safe than sorry if at all possible.

 

[joe???]

Number one thing to improve is to recognize mistakes you make a lot. You want the mistakes you focus on to be specific stuff, like wanting to jump out more or calling out who you are going to fight before you fight them as examples. If you recognize mistakes and try to do them less one step at a time you will get better. Worst thing to do is to play without thinking about what you are doing.

Besides that play lots of tournaments, and analyze sets where you lost but felt like you had similar or better mechanical skill than your opponents, since those are the sets that will expose the mistakes in your strategies the hardest.

 

[Hinichii.ez.™]

Do a lot of scrims, try to figure out the reasons y’all lose, then figure out how to either stop doing those things or how to do the things you need to do, consider getting a coach and rinse and repeat for a bit.

 

[Whale with Ginger Ale]

I've tried new weaponds, made my gear more meta, and trained for a while, and yet I feel like I'm every tournament everyone is rolling me over lol

Play literally every tournament you can. Doesn't matter if you go 0-3 first round and get dqed just keep playing them. Losing is probably better so you can vod review and look back at what mistakes you're making and address them in practice.

 

[antyytna]

honestly just get consistent practice, ask for advice/coaching, and scrim others
it takes a while to “get good” as the kids say. while i’ve improved a lot in comp and individually over the last 6 months or so, i still have a LOT further to go. it’s ok to take time

one thing I'd add to this is get lots of perspectives

one thing that you realize if you stick with one team at a certain level of play for too long is that you stagnate, and a lot of that IMO is to do with not getting fresh perspectives. a way to supplement this is coaches as said, but also videos of top level play (ie. I watch melon as a shooter main), do pickups, and talk to others even at your skill level to see their approach with weps/strategies

 

[aloevera]

there is no faster way to improve than to find a group of like-minded people, all in terms of playstyle, mentality and goals overall. id say that should be your main priority as once that happens, communication, connections and building competitive game sense will come naturally with grinding with the same people

 

[Alphine_Agnitio]

honestly just get consistent practice, ask for advice/coaching, and scrim others
it takes a while to “get good” as the kids say. while i’ve improved a lot in comp and individually over the last 6 months or so, i still have a LOT further to go. it’s ok to take time

This

Having friends in higher divs then you or just talking to ppl in general can be helpful as well, theres a lot of good advice to be found.

I know someone who tried out for my team who has 4k hours in Splat 2 and 2k in Splat 3 + was managing a college team, and while they didn't join my team(understandable given the skill gap) I did do a vod review with them and their perspective led my improvement to spike and general game awareness to increase.

 

[Deleted member]

How do I find people to help me out? I can't find a team for the life of me and I have no clue where I can find people to really discuss the game with on a more personal level to help me get over my skill roadblock. I feel like I'm playing at the same level I was in 2017 and haven't improved whatsoever and its really frustrating that I can't get better or find a team.