I'm fine with being scored as a team. That seems more real life and is good for us spoiled and self-entitled Americans to experience :) It is a virtue to be able to graciously be valued with those who potentially ruin things for us.
Interesting idea with resetting the ranks periodically. Maybe for casual gamers that would be upsetting. I'm not sure how I feel about it. There's got to be a better way. Whatever is there is ridiculous...
LOL! Well in my idea win/loss would still be team based, but player value would be individual for matchmaking purposes and point distribution (if the rank points are to be taken seriously for matchmaking purposes) would be based on performance. That's actually more like real life. An All-Star pitcher on a losing baseball team still trades for high value contract prices even though his team sucks, and a player with a poor batting average on a winning team still gets traded quick to a lesser team at a good rate. They don't say "oh, you played with [insert all-star pitcher here]" so we'll give you a LOT of money! It's based on their own track record.
More importantly it cuts off the self feeding problem of players that were carried/dropped by mismatches then start causing new mismatches in their new position which then causes MORE players to carry/lose due to these new mismatches which then they will cause NEW mismatches and before you know it you have what we have where every rank is littered with every skill level just in varying proportions.
Ladder resets are common. The vast majority of ranked games have latter resets. Some do it per "season" (i.e. the "season pass paid DLC" timespan) Some do it monthly, or whatever. It's actually bizarre and uncommon to not reset the ladders. I think Nintendo thought they were being slick and "beating the system" with the floating ladder system (i.e. it required no maintenance on their part, it would groom itself.) But the meta of any online game is constantly changing, and with the scoring system, the imbalances need resetting in the changing meta. The floating system theoretically handles that (by frustratingly having violent mood swings) but there's a reason that pretty much EVERY ladder resets. No doubt people would be upset by it, though the devs were clear that ranked is not casual, it's competitive (though I'd argue their idea that TW IS casual has gone out the window.) With the floating system it's kind of personally resetting individuals anyway via losing streaks. But what's frustrating about that is that the player pools are already polluted. A clean wipe puts everyone on equal footing again - no tainted pools to start with, so the ladder builds out cleanly again rather than having it filled with "dropped S+'s in B" and "carried C+'s" in S. Lots of S & S+ players are confident in their skill and the ability to get to that easily if you deserve it. If they're right, it should be a simple matter for them to climb back up. And with a reset, it's more likely they'd be right since it would be on pure skill again (briefly, thus the need for recurring resets.) It's the middle of the road players that know they got where they are with a lucky streak that are most upset. That's not the highly skilled crowd, and that's not the casual crowd (who's probably not getting past B- anyway.) It's the competitive crowed who wants to win but tends not to.
There's also a fun "splatfest" element to it. The reset can be a big festive party, Callie & Marie can announce the new start, etc. etc. Everyone gets the thrill of running out as a "noob C-" again. It makes the ranks a cyclical schedule and contest. Like at the start of the season in real sports. Imagine if sports teams just kept a running score since 1937 instead of resetting every few months of play (it's an annual season but most sports play only a few months a year)? :p
About the disconnecting things, you can just unplug your Ethernet wire if you're using it, there is not only the power off option. So it's not that easy to know if it's rage quit or pure problem.
About ratio, I agree with Award, this can't be used as a metric. Right, if your ratio is awesome, you have more chance to have done well, but when I look at the game, lots of players are aiming at the ratio and not doing well even when they do get it. I remembr having played with a Tentatek who had the best ratio of my team two times in a row, and we were all negative. He was probably thinking "what a bad team I had these two last games" or something, but he was totally responsible for our losses from my point of view, as we were in facts playing a 3v3 RM while he was away, picking up some players that had no weight on the action. Of course, Tentatek kinda have this role of killing people, playing hero and so on. But he had each time a whole 4 minutes to realise this wasn't what we needed at all.
On the other side, I won with a 0-7 N-ZAP with a KO on Bridge TC. It was quite fast, the N-ZAP took the tower very well, I took this opportunity to kill and we won easily. He was first on our team, showing he was winning a lot. Another time I lost a game mainly because a Dynamo was taking the zones everytime he approached it on Mahi. He ended at 2-9, first on his team, because we couldn't prevent it well enough. These are two examples but I saw many more too.
It would be wrong to reward the best ratio, as it's not always the best thing to go after: it would push the players to play this way. By the way, it's a good decision to put the players with more wins in the upper list, than the one with the most kills. It goes in this direction, showing the players there is more than just a team death match going on.
I always forget about the ethernet adapter. You're right, I'd guess the type of person who RQ's probably is the type using a wired connector. Though I've heard of issues with the WiiU's USB ethernet adapter is sometimes worse off than the wifi connection (and I always use enterprise grade wifi...so assuming WiiU's wifi adapter isn't awful (and being a first run Miracast device, I'd presume it's not) the wireless might actually be better.
TECHNICALLY it would still be possible to detect that - ethernet knows when it's a physical cable disconnect versus a service disconnect when the GND & signal pins are lost. At a hardware/driver level it actually could detect that. Not saying they should patch splatoon that way, but speaking purely of theory, it would be possible if they wanted to.
Great examples of the scoring issue. There are times when I wish they didn't display k/d at all on the stat screen. I do like using it as a guide to how well or poorly I did and/or how the team did in contrast. But it's often more telling if you lose than if you win. If you lose you can look at who did really awful at least to see if you were the problem or not. And looking at my own score, I sometimes get surprised. Some matches we lose, and I had a feeling that all match I was getting killed over and over again and that I did horrible, and then I see my K/d and realize it's positive, and I did better than I felt like I was doing. And after seeing, very frequently, the team with the worse k/d's being the winning team I'm not sure I value it as much as I used to (unless I was the only one on the objective...then I study those k/ds! ;) )
But the problem so many of us complain about with our teammates running out for "team deathmatch" and ignoring the objective, not painting anything etc, is probably at least 40% attributed to the presence of k/d on the stat screen as the only real numeric representation of you well you do, plus the fact that every single shooter in the past 20 years featured that as the only metric that mattered (TF aside, maybe.) It's a subtle balance because sometimes the "team deathmatch" guys really do keep you boxed in and prevent you from playing the objective. It's hard to quantify when that's the right strategy and when it's not. But that score makes people strive for that to prove they did well. I do it too, but I do it coupled with a sense of knowing what's typical for me and what situations arose (risky solo RM trips, etc.) Translating that to scoring however would be a massive undertaking. Very doable. But more in a "splatoon 2" sort of way. For Splatoon 1 I'd be content with band-aids that mitigate the problem and could easily understand a full and proper fix is not possible.
I have mixed feelings about stacking the player with the most wins at the top. I agree it's better than "most kills" but I wish they'd tally "controlled the zone the most times" or "held the tower/RM the most seconds" or something like that instead. The wins/losses can be so arbitrary, and I've seen too many players who clearly got where they were by getting lucky streaks that were atrocious in gameplay and on the k/d screen, never touched the objective, but they're at the top because apparently they've been winning while I have not.
In a typical Zones round, I'd say I reclaim the zone at minimum twice as often as anyone else on my team in MOST rounds. Regardless of weapon, even with the horrendous at inking range blaster, splat charger, and SSPro. Even excluding when I play "built for zone control" weapons like hydra and now dynamo. When it falls apart is when the enemy finally gains a solid push, it can be all but impossible to reclaim it when the rest of the team dies every time they try. It's always frustrating to see them up high on the list when it's clear it wasn't their zone claiming OR their fighting skill that won them those prior rounds. :(
Agreed. K/D only tells one part of your team contribution. It's a very easy thing to fixate on so maybe that's why it's common to do so. Though we certainly should do our best in that area—K/D ratio is something I've been working to improve over the past month or so.
It can be, and IS important....BUT I've been watching so many matches with the opposite effect.... it's not just a few outliers but fairly common now. The team that gets slaughtered wins, because they were slaughtered while RELENTLESSLY controlling the objective with a single mindedness. It's not that they didn't kill at all. But they kill about half as much as they get killed. It doesn't SOUND like it should work. But it does. I'm seriously thinking of that as a solid 4 player strategy. Doesn't work so much for snipers since that's the constant pressure, but for ground play... I've always played Zones that way and coincidentally zones has typically been my best mode. The weird meta of the past few weeks seems to be shifting that to TC though. I beat myself up if I don't get a positive k/d but I'm also keeping in mind the sheer volume of times that that negative k/ds, often deeply double digit negative k/ds, were the winning strategy. I mean matches where one team is 10/3, 14/7, 9/9/, 5/6 and loses and the team that's 9/14, 5/11, 3/12, 4/4 (I know the numbers don't add up, I'm just taking a general concept from various team overall totals ;)) wins. By knockout.
And even knowing that, it's still hard to get myself to accept negative k/d, and not look at "who did badly" by k/d. I think someone with a good k/d probably DID do well and contribute to the team. If they got rid of the enemy the enemy wasn't controlling the objective (unless they were racing out to kill but allowing the enemy to still inch the ojbective forward and/or allowing the enemy to let their turf creep out while they were not advancing their own turf at all.) But someone with a bad k/d may also have done the same.
