Ok, everyone, so after some extensive research, here's the results of my findings.
First off, I got the chance to play Splatoon in Japan last month, on a couple different Japanese Wii U's at a local gaming bar in Osaka, and I can say that the game-play was drastically different over there. Apart from very-little-to-no-noticeable lag (as I expected), everything also seemed more "crisp" and responsive: no frame-rate drops or slowing down of the action, you could see everything (like other people's ripples when they were in squid form, the shots which were hitting you and where they were coming from, other squids subtle movements (like, no one teleporting or even mini-teleporting, jittering, or frame-skipping, and people's movements around boxes, up walls, or when dropping over ledges, etc.)), weapons took the proper number of hits to splat, and I could even dodge around inkzooka shots with ease instead of having to take cover far away. One of the most noticeable differences, along these lines, was how every time I was splatted, I could see how and why it happened and what I could've done differently or better to avoid it next time -- in other words, every death made sense in the moment, and I could say, "Ah, good play," rather than having that "WHAAAT?!?!" feeling that accompanies almost every death here at home. And no insta-splats. In short, everything just seemed to happen as you would it expect to. The only cases of noticeable lag that I encountered was when facing off with the occasional one or two western names in the lobby, but, unlike at home, even that lag was only marginal and easily compensated for by playing just a little more conservatively against that opponent.
In addition to this, I was very curious to find out how my Ranked gameplay might compare when playing in Japan -- and, sure enough, I quickly climbed from S to S+ 48 before leveling out at that spot for the final hour of my play session. So, yes, as I suspected, connection probably makes a huge difference (though obviously not the only difference) in your rank, especially when you get higher into the more competitive and more skilled ranks, where even the smallest differences in skill-level or connection-quality are magnified. By comparison, when I came home, I was very curious to play Splatoon again at home to see what I might notice in comparison. I could tell that it was a "bad-connection day," but curious, I decided to see where my rank would level out -- and sure enough, I dropped all the way to A 42 on my alt account. So that's a difference in rank from S+ 48 to A 42 in just two play sessions, with the only significant difference being the location. So, yeah, with all respect to the truly great SPlatoon players out there, and with all due respect for the skills such folks do have (and which I do not -- I have not yet myself managed to rise to their level of skill with respect to positioning, movement, awareness, team coordination, and map knowledge, etc), I think we can probably nonetheless say that, if you're a serious player, then the number one determinant of your letter rank in Splatoon (including all the way into S+) is most likely probably going to be your connection, which is largely determined by your geographic location, and perhaps your country of origin, and perhaps whatever TCP protocols might also be in play. Or, if this is too controversial, then, at the very least, I think it's safe to say that you probably need both skill and a bit of geographic luck to be a truly great SPlatoon player -- i.e,. that both skill and geography are, together, the two biggest factors, and you need some measure of both, if you want to consistently hang out in S+ lobbies. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this, of course. One way to disconfirm this hypothesis would be to have some of the high skill players play on the average U.S. Wii U owner's console and see where they level out; but that seems unlikely to happen. Another interesting comparison would be to see what sorts of connection speeds different regions of the world have with Japan -- does Europe, for example, have better than 3/1 speed tests to Japan?)
So, basically, yes, there is something drastically different between the gameplay in Japan and here in North America, and presumably the same applies in other parts of the world. But what is it that is making the difference? Here are the five possibilities that I can see: poor personal internet connection or wifi connectivity, local/national internet infrastructure, Nintendo's own matchmaking algorithms, the Wii U's hardware/software itself, one's own router settings. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm gonna skip over an analysis of all the things which can contribute to the first possibility listed here, not because they are not important, but since most of us here have already checked or taken measures to address the various causes associated with this aspect of the problem (and if you haven't, do those first before anything else). I'm also gonna skip over the router settings question, as I just don't want to make this comment longer than it already is.
Now, with respect to two of these other factors, I do have some data on the potential effects that both my own local internet infrastructure and my own Wii U are having on my connection speeds. First off, after running several weeks worth of speed tests, at various times of the day each day and to many different servers around the country and the world, I have been able to determine two things: first, that the area of the country you not only live in, but also are connecting to, can have a HUGE impact on your connection speeds and, second, that, yes, the Wii U is throttling our speeds. After running speed tests on testmy.net on various devices in my home, and after even changing my internet speeds several times in the process, I found that my Wii U maxed out at significantly lower speeds than any other device in the house. In fact, it consistently maxed out at 21 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up, regardless of how fast my internet speeds were above that. Even with speeds as fast as 240 down / 12 up on my 5.0 channel and 120/6 on my 2.4 channel, this was the Wii U's max speed, whereas all the other devices in the house tested at the higher speeds. Now, two things to note here: both the Wii LAN adapter and the 3rd party LAN adapter that I tested both are capable of around 50 Mbps, and so, even on the 2.4 channel (which my ethernet connection uses) I should be capable of 50 down and 6 up on the Wii U, but I'm not getting that, and so I think that we really have to be talking about something downstream of both my modem/router and the LAN adapter which is slowing down the connection speeds even slower than the bottleneck that either the 2.4 channel on the modem/router or the LAN adapter introduces, and I think it pretty much has to be the Wii U itself.
To explain why, I first have to show you the results of my various speed tests. What I did was run speed tests three times a day for the last two weeks, not only to see if the time of day made any difference, but I also pinged different servers at different locations to see if that made any difference. (I'm talking download/upload speeds here, not merely the obvious differences in latency or ping.) For the most part, I found that local speed tests (to servers in my home city and state) performed the best (got the highest download/upload speeds), with tests to servers in more distant parts of the country doing not so well, and with international speed tests performing horribly. Local speed tests performed on the Wii U resulted in pretty consistent speeds, regardless of time of day: around 21 down / 6 up. Tests to Dallas were consistently around 13/4, tests to NYC and MIA were around 7/2, tests to SF and LA varied from 1/2 to 8/2 (depending on the time of day), and then tests to Tokyo, London, and Germany were usually between .5/.5 to 3/1 at best. All the same speed tests performed on the other devices in my home immediately following each test on the Wii U were much higher (with local speed tests reaching the 240 down / 12 up on the 5.0 channel and 95-120 down / 6 up on the 2.4 channel, close to what I contracted for with my ISP), but interestingly, they all had roughly the same plot curve on a graph: local speed tests performed best (95-120 down / 6 up on the 2.4 channel), other U.S. cities performed less well (80-100 down / 5 up), California was all over the map and abysmal in the evenings (0/0 - 100/6), and international speeds hovered around 45/4.
So, there's two things we can take from this. First, it's not just the speed you get locally when connecting over your ISP's local infrastructure that matters, and it's not even the local speeds of the folks you are connecting to (places like Maine, for example, are really bad); it's also the infrastructure that exists between you and wherever it is the you are connecting to. If you have poor infrastructure in between, you'll get a degradation in your internet speeds. This reality could account for part of why our connections to Japan feel so bad -- not just because of the latency between here and there, but because the actual infrastructure itself creates a speed bottleneck that even further reduces our ability to overcome the inherent latency of distance. But this isn't the only thing going on here which I noticed. Second, if you look closely, you'll see that we can say that the Wii U itself is at least capable of speeds of 21 down / 6 up, since that is what it does when connected locally; and yet, even though the other devices in my house can connect to Japan with speeds of 45/4, the Wii U itself doesn't just throttle that speed to 21/4 (as we might suspect if that was its top speed), but, no, it throttles it even further -- all the way down to 3/1!
And, that's really telling, I think. Even with the LAN Adapter and even with the Wii U's hardware limitations, we know that it can perform much faster than what it does when it matches us with international players and particularly with those in Japan. And yet, for some reason, it's throttling our (or at least my) international speeds all the way down to 3/1. I can't really imagine what this would be other than either a) something that Nintendo has programed into each Wii U, or perhaps to just North American Wii Us -- perhaps some sort of TCP in the Wii U software itself that throttles speeds and/or requires more error-checking or requires more buffering for Wii Us in certain countries which Nintendo determines have sub-par internet infrastructure -- or b) some same sort of thing that Nintendo has incorporated into it's match-making servers or the Splatoon software itself. So, perhaps, the answer is: some of us, depending upon our country, are just screwed.
I'd love to hear any alternative ideas or proposed solutions. For now, I suspect that maybe the only thing that many of us North American players can do is try to connect with other North American players who we share a good connection with and with whom we have good infrastructure between us. For my part, I seem to enjoy pretty good connection speeds between Denver, Colorado Springs, Dallas, and Seattle (though NYC and MIA do alright too), so if there are any squids in these areas with good local connections to these hub cities who want to friend me and do a little experimentation, I'd be happy to do that.
Also, maybe it's time that we form a thread or a message board here on Squidboards that seeks to connect North American squids with other North American squids who live in cities/areas which share good internet connections and infrastructure -- our own ad hoc local matchmaking. I'll do some more speed tests to different cities in the U.S. to see which other cities share good connections at least with Denver, in the hopes of maybe determining a local network of cities which share good speeds with each other, so that all the squids therein (or which have a good connection to those node cities), if they friend each other, could enjoy good connections with each other when they play. If I can, I'll start a new thread and link to it here, and maybe others could do the same on that thread too. If the Switch doesn't fix these problems, we might end up needing these ad hoc semi-local networks if we want to have a better game-play experience than what we're having.
