Hello, I'm JolTz (JOLTZ). I love this game, and I know many of you do as well because you're on this website and looking at the forums.
Right now I want to extend a discussion to Squidboards about how hard it is for people who like Splatoon to find recent content surrounding Splatoon 2 or simply friends to play with. Alternately I want to encourage more people to view or participate in various Splatoon events in whatever way possible. Most events will be online given the current state of the world, though that will change soon enough.
For anyone who doesn't know about Splatoon Discord communities, below is a discord server called "Inkopolis Crosswalk" promoted by several respected Splatoon figure-heads which provides links to a boatload of servers that could be catered to your way of loving the game. I still encourage using Squidboards and other places to find information, but this is a resource I used to find a lot of the discords I frequent for competitive discussion.
https://discord.com/invite/Pg5fwTX
I want to make this thread to cover 3 things:
==== 1: THE PAST OF SPLATOON ====
Everything before the advent of discord was communicated or interacted via Squidboards or Reddit. At the moment, Reddit has probably the highest active userbase of Splatoon fans with 207k members as of 2020 and existed since 2014. Events were communicated mainly here or on reddit, so any small scale local event or large-scale event was visible to everyone from the artists and the casual fans to the old STDX and similar teams.
NOTE: I didn't look to play with other Splatoon players until Splatoon 2, I was a solo queue warrior and did nothing else. If someone has context for the past of Splatoon 1, please give some context as to how that looked. I could look at old archived forum posts, but I'll probably lose focus of this post
==== 2: THE PRESENT OF SPLATOON ====
For Splatoon 2, I'm going to consider it's entire lifetime "the present", because a lot of the things that have developed in our online communities in terms of division have existed since the game started.
==== 3: THE FUTURE OF SPLATOON ====
I strongly believe that every event for a tournament or otherwise should be posted here on Squidboards. Inkstorm 8 being the most recent was NOT promoted in several key locations such as Squidboards or Reddit, so the likelihood that you follow EndgameTV on twitter and saw that it existed, or the likelihood that you knew about the two Nintendo Inkling Opens that happened recently are quite slim if you didn't already follow those accounts for their posts. There is so much missed opportunity for people to know that events exist, since the people on Discord who tend to run them don't promote them in every place that exists for the Splatoon community as a whole.
People who are inclined to play Splatoon with other groups should be able to find such a group that fits them, or if a group doesn't exist it should be made and promoted widely in the open for a large audience to join. This could be a discord community that posts their "Who we're looking for" things on both Reddit and here in Squidboards, but operates primarily on another site. This is totally fine. Are you a clan looking to find a bunch of people to join your suffering in Ranked Mode? Make it and promote it everywhere. Are you looking for a team of the best players? Make it and promote it in all places. Are you looking for a weekly or monthly Turf War or Private Battle get-together? Make it and promote it.... you get the idea.
Those are what I can think about for right now... If you have any thoughts, or if this resonates with you in any way, feel free to speak up.
If you're interested in some of the top Splatoon Content Creators that I know about, in the first reply I'll link a bunch of the big names I know like Dude, Wadsm, Octoboy, Shinexx, Mellana, Vicvillion, Sendou, and some of the larger event organizers like EndgameTV, Splatoon Amateur Circuit, and Low Ink. If you want to support those people, click the Spoiler to view their socials. If you want to let me know about someone in specific and promote their socials, I can add that to the thread and make it easier for people in the future to find.
Thanks for reading, Squids (and Octos). Hope you all continue loving the game.
Right now I want to extend a discussion to Squidboards about how hard it is for people who like Splatoon to find recent content surrounding Splatoon 2 or simply friends to play with. Alternately I want to encourage more people to view or participate in various Splatoon events in whatever way possible. Most events will be online given the current state of the world, though that will change soon enough.
For anyone who doesn't know about Splatoon Discord communities, below is a discord server called "Inkopolis Crosswalk" promoted by several respected Splatoon figure-heads which provides links to a boatload of servers that could be catered to your way of loving the game. I still encourage using Squidboards and other places to find information, but this is a resource I used to find a lot of the discords I frequent for competitive discussion.
https://discord.com/invite/Pg5fwTX
I want to make this thread to cover 3 things:
- The past of Splatoon and how people got to know others online or in person to become part of the Splatoon community,
- The current state of various subsets of Splatoon fans or sub-communities (including the CLEARLY divisive and exclusionary competitive groups), and
- How people who love this game can express it and close the division that exists between various groups like Salmon Run fans, Old fans from Splat 1, people who pick the game up every once in a while for fun, people who are hardcore competitive players, etc...
I picked up Splatoon 1 several years ago some months after it came out, I played it every once in a while at night while I was studying for my degree and working a job. Nothing super serious. I had a lot of trouble reaching ranks like A in that game, and when I put it down was barely holding on to S rank. I also have a past of playing smash competitively, so I have a different aspiration for "what I want to get out of a game".
For Splatoon 2, I picked it up as soon as it came out, grinded up, watched Twitch Streams, and got so inspired to play with others online. I found Inkademy and Squidboards through that streamer, and eventually joined up with a group of players in a clan team of players between ranks A and S+ at the time (before X rank became a thing). That was an inviting group, and they all made me want to play the game and felt like the best of friends for that period in time. Over time, I stuck to Discord and Twitter, avoiding Squidboards entirely and managed to stick with the competitive splatoon community through competitive only Discord servers.
For Splatoon 2, I picked it up as soon as it came out, grinded up, watched Twitch Streams, and got so inspired to play with others online. I found Inkademy and Squidboards through that streamer, and eventually joined up with a group of players in a clan team of players between ranks A and S+ at the time (before X rank became a thing). That was an inviting group, and they all made me want to play the game and felt like the best of friends for that period in time. Over time, I stuck to Discord and Twitter, avoiding Squidboards entirely and managed to stick with the competitive splatoon community through competitive only Discord servers.
==== 1: THE PAST OF SPLATOON ====
Everything before the advent of discord was communicated or interacted via Squidboards or Reddit. At the moment, Reddit has probably the highest active userbase of Splatoon fans with 207k members as of 2020 and existed since 2014. Events were communicated mainly here or on reddit, so any small scale local event or large-scale event was visible to everyone from the artists and the casual fans to the old STDX and similar teams.
NOTE: I didn't look to play with other Splatoon players until Splatoon 2, I was a solo queue warrior and did nothing else. If someone has context for the past of Splatoon 1, please give some context as to how that looked. I could look at old archived forum posts, but I'll probably lose focus of this post
==== 2: THE PRESENT OF SPLATOON ====
For Splatoon 2, I'm going to consider it's entire lifetime "the present", because a lot of the things that have developed in our online communities in terms of division have existed since the game started.
- Discord had already become a major platform, and people created servers for the purpose of competitive discussion as a transition from Squidboards, as it's more focused on your own clan or team or some specific sets of tournaments or groups for artists, Salmon run, or competitive groups. Looking through discord archives without a pin is MISERABLE, but this isn't so important because it's about active discussion with groups for day-to-day things or event organization weeks or months in advance. This includes finding some active groups, though you need to know "which ones" for the purpose of your desired interaction and "how to get the discord link". This add some minor but IMPORTANT complexity to finding people to play with.
- Twitter became a giant platform, and Twitter is a space where unless you follow certain people or groups, you only stay within your own circle of friends or similar-minded people. This is also terrible for archiving purposes, but that's not super important. It can be great for finding an active group GIVEN that you follow the right person and look on the right day.
- Reddit is mostly about posting moments or fun things. This can be clips, cosplay images, some memes, the OCCASIONAL discussion, and that's about it. This environment is almost entirely a casual and relatable environment, yet very little toward the "group-finding" aspect. This can be useful for the announcement of Events or other things given the correct Flair. The success of the Reddit is almost entirely on the Moderators to create proper Flair or posts for an important announcement being promoted or stickied in some fashion. A quick look, almost all the "competitive" or "event" posts are sporadic or just don't exist.
- Squidboards is the beginning. Forums are a great place to find everyone if they're structured correctly and used frequently by all sorts of people. Posts about group finding will be seen, people can sort by date or views, people who run the site can sticky or highlight things and put them in front of everyone's eyes. There are categories here to look for other players, tournaments, clans, etc. HOWEVER, these things aren't actively used because people prefer Discord or Twitter instead. I think this is a big mistake because it loses the archive-ability, and anyone who wants to view specific posts or otherwise has a much better time keeping track or quoting replies within a forum as opposed to something with fleeting viewability as a discord or twitter post. I think this site could use something like a "Popular Streams" section that displays the current top viewed stream on various sites like twitch, openrec, or other places, but that's asking a bit of the platform.
==== 3: THE FUTURE OF SPLATOON ====
I strongly believe that every event for a tournament or otherwise should be posted here on Squidboards. Inkstorm 8 being the most recent was NOT promoted in several key locations such as Squidboards or Reddit, so the likelihood that you follow EndgameTV on twitter and saw that it existed, or the likelihood that you knew about the two Nintendo Inkling Opens that happened recently are quite slim if you didn't already follow those accounts for their posts. There is so much missed opportunity for people to know that events exist, since the people on Discord who tend to run them don't promote them in every place that exists for the Splatoon community as a whole.
People who are inclined to play Splatoon with other groups should be able to find such a group that fits them, or if a group doesn't exist it should be made and promoted widely in the open for a large audience to join. This could be a discord community that posts their "Who we're looking for" things on both Reddit and here in Squidboards, but operates primarily on another site. This is totally fine. Are you a clan looking to find a bunch of people to join your suffering in Ranked Mode? Make it and promote it everywhere. Are you looking for a team of the best players? Make it and promote it in all places. Are you looking for a weekly or monthly Turf War or Private Battle get-together? Make it and promote it.... you get the idea.
Those are what I can think about for right now... If you have any thoughts, or if this resonates with you in any way, feel free to speak up.
If you're interested in some of the top Splatoon Content Creators that I know about, in the first reply I'll link a bunch of the big names I know like Dude, Wadsm, Octoboy, Shinexx, Mellana, Vicvillion, Sendou, and some of the larger event organizers like EndgameTV, Splatoon Amateur Circuit, and Low Ink. If you want to support those people, click the Spoiler to view their socials. If you want to let me know about someone in specific and promote their socials, I can add that to the thread and make it easier for people in the future to find.
Thanks for reading, Squids (and Octos). Hope you all continue loving the game.