Importance of practice before matches

[AMICADO]

Before you play, if it’s been more than a few hours since last match, you NEED to practice. Or if you’re switching weapons. And I don’t mean go into recon mode and play out every possible encounter. All I mean is spend a minute in the training room with your weapon, and then play a practice match or two of Anarchy Open so you can get into the groove. This is INCREDIBLY important so that you will A, be able to get used to that specific weapon, and B, get used to reacting and playing and aiming and that jam. And then you can shred all the nerds in Series who didn’t practice.

 

[solz]

That's what the lobby's for

 

[McSquid82]

Practice all you want. As for me I'm going straight into the deep end. Also, don't tell people what to do or how to play.

 

[AMICADO]

It’s a tip, dude. It’s a recommendation, advice for improvement. At least I find that when I play a few practice matches before a series I do much better.

 

[Mp3]

nah
I’m just gonna play lol

 

[Mx_Diva]

I just follow the saying. "You gotta touch it up, before you [CENSORED] 'em up".

 

[sevenleaf]

i practice a bit before playing but i need a better routine. i think part of it is i need to be more intentional about setting aside time to warm up, but i know my aim drills are getting stale and not helping me much. anyone have any tips? (still a dualiebot but i'm learning wiper and, begrudgingly(/j), splash)

 

[DzNutsKong]

i practice a bit before playing but i need a better routine. i think part of it is i need to be more intentional about setting aside time to warm up, but i know my aim drills are getting stale and not helping me much. anyone have any tips? (still a dualiebot but i'm learning wiper and, begrudgingly(/j), splash)

I don't really do practice drills at this point but when I did I would make sure I'd do them consistently for some amount of time every day / at least every time I'd play for a little while. How much time should depend on how long you think you want to do them before it becomes boring or starts feeling tedious. This should still be fun to some degree.

Something that I know helps a lot of people is standing in the middle of all those training dummies, closing your eyes, holding left or right on your right stick for a bit, opening your eyes, and trying to aim at and kill the closest training dummy to your reticle without missing. For other people I've heard choosing a Shooter, locking your reticle on the faster-moving dummy in the lobby, and trying to keep your reticle marked on the dummy as they move back and forth. In both cases try standing in slightly different spots every time you do this so it doesn't turn into muscle memory.

 

[solz]

I mostly play anarchy, so sometimes I warm up with a turf war or side order

 

[Lisku]

It’s a tip, dude. It’s a recommendation, advice for improvement. At least I find that when I play a few practice matches before a series I do much better.

its a tip that should be followed if you want to get better

 

[tazmily menace]

i never practice before a match because i know damn well that no matter what i do me and my team’ll get absolutely destroyed in said match. i don’t see a point in practicing anymore

 

[sevenleaf]

i never practice before a match because i know damn well that no matter what i do me and my team’ll get absolutely destroyed in said match. i don’t see a point in practicing anymore

i hate to say it but this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. if you’re going into every match not warmed up and telling yourself you’re going to lose no matter what you do… you’re probably going to lose, because you’re neither physically nor mentally setting yourself up for success in the first place

splatoon is a difficult game. no one comes in naturally good; the top players have, like, thousands of hours in splatoon 3 and likely in previous games as well. it feels bad to feel like you’re starting from rock bottom but the only way to improve is to try, and to allow yourself to try without convincing yourself you’ll never improve

 

[AMICADO]

i never practice before a match because i know damn well that no matter what i do me and my team’ll get absolutely destroyed in said match. i don’t see a point in practicing anymore

Dude, I’m sorry, but that’s such a sad mindset. I hope you can still enjoy the game besides losing so often. Or maybe you have to look beyond losing, y’know, everyone loses sometimes. And I don’t just mean that, because obviously everyone loses sometimes. I mean that losing half the time, or even more, is normal. Why do you think you get more points for winning an Anarchy Open match than deducted for losing? You can lose more matches than win and still rank up, just don’t sweat it man. Good luck, have fun.

 

[tazmily menace]

the amount of agonizingly long losestreaks ive been on has made me just not care anymore

 

[SAMICOM]

the amount of agonizingly long losestreaks ive been on has made me just not care anymore

why not play some anarchy open on vc with some people? That always gets me going again

 

[Cephalobro]

It depends, sometimes the player is having off days where they might not be playing their best, I know I had some off days even with the weapon I do best with. Then a practice is a good idea.

Other times, if the player is skilled enough to hold their own, then they could be great for the team.

 

[Aiko.Octo]

i practice a bit before playing but i need a better routine. i think part of it is i need to be more intentional about setting aside time to warm up, but i know my aim drills are getting stale and not helping me much. anyone have any tips? (still a dualiebot but i'm learning wiper and, begrudgingly(/j), splash)

I also fall in and out of drilling routinely but I recently started doing it more consistently again and I feel like it's helping. My problem in the past has been that if I'm apprehensive about going into play (especially series), sometimes I will drill for way too long as a means of unconsciously procrastinating playing, lol. So to try to break this particular anxiety I started to force myself to hop in with little to no warm-up just to try to desensitize myself to that (and frankly also to save me time, because it feels like sometimes I'll 'warm up' for so long I'll barely get any actual games in). But that eventually led me into a habit of not warming up at all, so now that I'm putting a focus on it again and actually seeing a difference I'm feeling a bit more motivated to do it more.

YMMV, but for me I found doing drills to good music makes them feel really nice to do. If a static ritual helps you get in the headspace you need to be in it can help to have a set drill playlist and then do the same drill sets to the same songs in the same order (occasionally tweaking as your needs change but more or less sticking to the same schedule) (if efficiency is your goal it can be fun to try to cram as many of your drills as you can into one song, like some kind of choreography routine). If you're the opposite and routine is too boring to engage you, it's still nice to have an upbeat playlist on shuffle and a list of drills on hand and just feeling out whatever feels good to do. The warm-up process is as mental as it is physical so I feel like it's important to take that into account; it doesn't have to be about training you in expert precision all the time (and we all know the actual battlefield will be better at that anyway), it can just be about doing whatever it takes to get you into a groove where you feel like you're moving and landing shots confidently and generally feeling in the flow of things.

Most of the drills on my list come from copying People On YouTube Who Know More Than Me but probably my favorite dualie exercise is to start with a full ink tank, dodge once into the intersection between the four stationary targets to go into turret mode and then, while staying in turret mode, firing continuously, and not moving anything but your camera, rotate through each target within range and see how many total targets you can pop before your ink runs out. It's fun because you get a 'score' to try to beat and I find I can sort of use the exercise as a test to see how alert and ready I'm feeling. It does suffer the same pitfalls as any drill on stationary targets does (it eventually becomes more muscle memory than aim) especially since there are a limited number of places that you can stand and still reach enough targets to be able to continuously pop them without having to wait for any to reflate, so it's more of a "part of this complete breakfast warm-up routine" than anything, but I think it holds a lot of value to me specifically because the results are quantifiable without too much effort.

To add another level re: the above drill, lately to curb overshooting/wave aiming I made a rule for myself that if at any point during the exercise I overshoot a target (as in, I move the camera too far in one direction and need to correct in the other direction) I stop the whole thing and start again so that round doesn't count. It was kind of harsh at first but it really felt satisfying as it got easier. There's probably a variety of ways to modify the exercise to keep it challenging, I think. And it's just... really nice to have those measurable metrics of improvement when game-results-related morale is hard to come by sometimes.

Speaking of, if anyone else has any other easily-results-quantifiable drills to suggest I would love to hear them-- I'd like to do speed-related ones but starting and stopping a timer/stopwatch while holding a controller is sure annoying, hah.