One good measure of any competitive game is how well it holds up in ultra-competitive play, irrespective of how fun in can be in casual play.
Nintendo are fantastic game makers; even though they try to make games that are super fun in casual situations, they end up working quite well in ultra-competitive situations too, even though that aspect is not what they give importance to.
Case Splatoon and Smash Bros. The latter has an obviously thriving competitive scene which takes the metagame pretty far. Sakurai's feelings on all this has been revealed in interviews. He makes the game to work very well in casual play, and laments the fact that people focus so heavily on 1v1 no items. But the game is so good that it actually works quite well even in this ultra-competitive environment, despite not having been designed to.
Splatoon is an interesting case. It's new and it's unique. It stands to reason that, although the devs are clearly geniuses, even they cannot be so smart as to know how every paramater and every design in the game should be to make it all work perfectly. This doesn't matter in low-to-mid level play. It's perfect in those situations. But now that the game has been out for a year, as gamers and hardcore Nintendo fans do, they get really really good at it, and take it very seriously, ultimately playing it probably a lot more competitively than Nintendo really built the game for. As a result, flaws become more apparent.
Of course, when it comes to video games, we all wanna be really good at them, so to suggest "it'd be better if we all didn't take Splatoon so seriously" seems maybe strange. But then you realize that Splatoon wasn't really designed to be played so cutthroat like it is. So it's good to keep in mind whilst playing, "is this tactic in line with how the game was intended or designed to be played?" and if you can always answer "yes" to this question, it would probably help the game to be better in the long run.
Anyway, there are games (none of which are developed by Nintendo) which cater to ultra-competitive play. As Sakurai has said, if ultra-competitive is what you want, maybe those games would be a better fit?
(This post ended up being too long methinks... it's a little ramble-y so I'm sorry about that ^^;; .)
A very good post, and a very true one. So many of the "problems" we currently experience in splatoon are effectively the result of the fact that everyone is "playing it wrong" - not that finding every exploit and way to get ahead isn't the way competitive games work, but it feels like, particularly in upper ranks ALL play is play outside the way the game was intended to be played and while it can be fun in its own way it almost feels like you're playing a ROM hack more than an actual polished game. Things don't work the way we should.
Mostly, though, I still feel like a point Momo (uggh, can't tag her since her name here is in Kana), but credit to her for pointing this out all the same, the main problem is that the game's fatal (and unsolvable) design flaw from the start was that it plays too fast. Specifically it plays so fast that most weapons have a time to kill that's faster than the average latency of the internet connections it's being played on, resulting in nearly every weapon being ohko on the receiving end ,and so many unpredictable lag issues. The problem for the future is the Splatoon "brand" is how about hyper fact action, yet the reality is the game is designed for LAN conditions and didn't take real world internet (let alone global internet) into consideration and will never work properly at its current speed on real internet. And instead of slowing it down the patches keep speeding it up! I'm sure it plays very well in Japan...
That's more than likely lag/latency than cheaters/hackers. Lag can do a lot of crazy things. There have been moments where i filled my opponent with shots, but he stayed alive simply because of lag. I'd suggest you try to get a lan adapter. That way your connections are more stable and won't disconnect as often. I honestly don't use lan because so far my online experience with splatoon has been nearly flawless. I almost never exprience lag and diand even less when playing against nothing but japanese players (which is like 90% of my matches) and disconnect happen like once every month. Not sure if it's my router or my internet provider.
Yeah, I've definitely seen things that aren't quite right that might be hacks, but due to the above speed issue, lag does a lot of really weird things in this game. As a matter of fact it's rare to the point of being impossible that in a trade situation that I did not kill my opponent long before they killed me. It's rare a dynamo hit doesn't kill me from the far fringe and increasingly so, most weapons that kill me aren't even pointing at me. You can't flank people if you don't know what direction they're actually shooting! I've seen many instances where I shoot, then I explode, THEN my opponent turns around and fires at me.
And I'm not sure I've ever once seen a bubbler/kraken activate BEFORE I land a kill shot and hear the sound. It's always after while I'm standing there useless not understanding my dead opponent is not dead. And it's VERY rare that the kraken that kills me actually jumped at me. I leap over them or go around them and thing I avoided it, then I explode with no attack animation. I'd say it's my internet, and it surely could be, but my pings to the normal tests (speed test, google, etc) are all fine. I haven't gone wired yet, but my WiiU is like 3 feet from an enterprise grade wifi AP
Time of day probably plays into it.
Oh yeah, as a level 50 player that recently climbed his way to S+, the playerbase's average skill level has increased noticeably over time; which, well, is something to be expected on games like these.
Personally I've always prefered Turf Wars over Ranked (I'm not too fond of the looming menace of lost rank points (DUN DUN DUUUUUN!)), so I've always played with a "give it your all" focus (save the occasional Squid Party :p), meaning stuff like discovering and making use of new strategies and flanking routes.
It's weird though, despite the overall increase in skill, I've had occasional losing streaks where I swear I'm being constantly teamed up with incompetent squids. I mean, an usual thing you can expect is to have players that are better at taking turf, and that by doing so are helping out those players that are better at dealing with enemies. But I've had several streaks where I've ended up carrying a losing team with both the best coverage (like, sometimes over than double that of the second player) and the best KDR, even in lobbies full with people at or around level 50. That's not something you'd expect from an overall increase in player skill.
...Eh. Anyways, I don't let that get to me. Still have lots of fun playing this game. These really quick and oftentimes aggresive matches are the best experience I've ever had with a shooter.
Way OT, but I think you're the first (ok, second) S+ I've seen that admits noticing the losing streaks where your team is incompetent. Any time that discussion comes up, there's the usual parade of S+ players that will declare they've never seen that, and when it happens it's their own fault, and only people not good enough blame their teammates
Which never addresses the very point you bring up: If the problem is the skill base is improving - why is it only the OTHER team's skillbase that seems to be improving when this happens? :D
