When it's Kana alone, I don't think much of it. There are plenty of Japanese immigrants, descendants, students, visitors; etc in America that might use those characters, and there are plenty of any other background who might use it as well. But when it's Kana and extreme lag, that's enough for me to say, "Yup. They're from a different region alright."
We came across several of these teams (or maybe just a few that we played several times), and I don't think we won any of them. It was hard to even say if they out-skilled us because they were teleporting around like Nightcrawler and were impossible to keep track of.
I said something like, "I wonder if I can report them for this."
And another guy in my crew said, "You're going to report Japanese players for being Japanese... to a Japanese company?"
Which, yeah... That certainly makes it sound racist, but it's just that their other-region...ness is more easily identifiable than if, say, a European team of Gregs and Adams and Franks and Joshes all region-swapped and were laggy. When I'm getting lag f...screwed, my prejudice is 100% against lag.
I'd love to be able to play world wide all the time with next to no lag, but as it is, it's maddening to get in a game and have next to no shot at beating a team that's supposedly (based on power level) the same skill level as my team.
And that is because, for whatever reason, Australia and New Zealand and a few other regions are considered part of NA for matchmaking.
I hadn't realized that you still need to by a regional copy for it to recognize splatfests on the "region free" console. I thought it was just tied to the account region and/or geolocation of the IP. That makes me doubt more that any of the kana names I've seen in regular play are really Japanese.
But yeah, the one thing NoA territory has to keep in mind is that our experience in general in the game is going to be the worst among all the regions in terms of lag problems. Aus, NZ, S. America, Caribbean, and most of Asia Pacific is "NoA'. I.E. we don't really have our own region, we have worldwide play with the EXCLUSION of EU/UK/ME/Afr. So EU gets their own region that includes ME and Africa, but geographically that's not far away so it won't really have crippling lag. They should get a pretty smooth experience (barring some of what may qualify as "internet" in parts of ME/Afr getting in the way that makes American internet look great...) Japan gets a region 100% to itself. And NoA consists of every hemisphere on the globe except Europe all at once just like it was worldwide play anyway. And we're the only territory that has time zone issues that the game will play different at different times of day depending on which time zones are likely playing. It's an infuriating (and at times game ruining) experience that's rooted not in game design but in 30-year old business organizational arrangements within Nintendo that says NCL handles only Japan, and the rest of APac can fend for itself, meaning they generally buy a mix of NoE and NoA versions but mostly NoA because it's for some reason more available there (while NoE is actually geographically closer to them for internet play purposes...) Basically with this setup, it's clear that the new "region matching" system wasn't designed to keep Japanese players from lagging lobbies worldwide. It was to keep Japanese players from ever having to put up with lag from the world and enjoy their LAN-like internet. It's Japan's game. We're just allowed to play it. So long as we don't bother them. :p Kinda can't blame them, the real problem is Nintendo's 1980's approach to global distribution is designed for handling physical supply chain management, not for handling internet traffic. And honestly, is more about 1980's Japanese arrogance at the height of their industrial power snubbing every other nearby country and ignoring them completely and never even setting up an official distribution channel for them based on them being perceived as unimportant backwater wastelands, which back then, may have been true....but Nintendo does what Nintendoes and turns like a battleship on a beach with policy changes and now we have Melbourne, Rio, Kuala Lampur, Seoul, Manilla, and Bejing that are somehow all considered to be somewhere near NYC in Nintendoland's network matchmaking. Meanwhile in Japan Tokyo to Osaka are the longest distances they will ever have for matchmaing. Actually that's not true. They officially released Splatoon late in Taiwan and S. Korea. I believe they released the Japanese version in Taiwan with no native language support (because Japanese is such a common language there?) and I think they released the US version in Korea (yes, folks, we're considered the same "local" player base to Korea....because heaven forbid Koreans and Japanese were to actually mingle in any way orshare the same language version of the game, even as anonymous squids.....unthinkable! ) Meanwhile half of Taiwan that wanted to play already bought the US version (or Australian version which is NoA) when it released. And don't forget China which has zero official distribution, but consoles are more popular there than you might think. They're not illegal (which is astonishing actually), they're just not officially distributed so everybody buys the Aus/US versions imported with their local eBay like variant.
(Edit: There's actually some translation confusion as to if Korea actually got the NoA version, or if they got a Japan region version that has NoA's English localization applied over the Japanese (can't share anything Japanese with Korea after all! :P) So they get a version that LOOKS like ours but it's not certain if they're actually matchmade with JP or US.....would have to find someone in Korea that knows which Splatfests they get.)
TL;DR: Internet matchmaking for NoA is exceedingly messed up and will never actually be close to decent and will always be the worst of the 3 official regions, at least without dedicated servers. They probably have mild IP filtering for TW to try to sub-region the matchmaking, and MAYBE for solo, but it would be based on how many players are really available.
I'm hoping that rumor is true that they really ARE working on dedicated servers secretly for the paid service. That would fix SO much of this. Unless they just keep all the servers in Japan in which case actual NA would once again get the worst experience (while being Switch's #2 market.....) It would still be better though.
r, or bullets flying from a splatted foe.
That's basically EVERY foe. I can't remember the last foe that was NOT shooting after me after I splatted them.
Usually I have to play the lag
Has anyone run into the same person multiple times during different Turf War sessions? There is this one guy I will occasionally run into. His name is unique enough to make me pretty sure it's the same guy. He always equips different weapons, which I guess is the point of Turf War. The only thing is that he's usually my opponent. I finally ally with him, and I try to be chums. I "Booyah!" him and squid flop for a bit, but he didn't even respond! How cold! We were also both using Chargers, which should have deepened the bond.
I think it's pretty common to see the same people extremely often. I've definitely seen repeated players often. Some of them I recognized from Arms as well.
The funniest was an annoying laggy sploosh that was driving me nuts. Map change finally got rid of him....and then I went into a different lobby later....and there he was again!
