So this chaotic, imprecise, unintuitive mess is our fault? :p
Nah we Designed the matchmaking, then Nintendo stepped in and did....well Nintendo things and bam Splatoon 2 matches
LOL...sort of ! It's what we designed more or less in terms of a stepped ladder. The Nintendo-ification of it is the "we won't tell you how many losses crack the glass so it's a total guess based on IDK Special Sauce" and the "for some random reason you skip ranks because WTF not". :p But other than that, the rest is what we designed. It's better. Really, it is!
OTOH the matchmaking is the exact same broken mess it always was, so in the low ranks you either win so big you could have stayed on spawn and still won or lose so big that 20+ splats on a regular basis is just not good enough when the team has 1 each otherwise. :p I played a C+ TC the other day where, I squid you not, one of my team mates spent the entire match inking the enemy ramps of Moray while my other 2 stayed near our spawn, so I kept rushing out to the tower. They were C-'s and total noobs, clearly, so I couldn't hate them but I couldn't not think "whyyyy??" I can't stomach too much solo ranked, I have no patience! I just play Salmon instead when it's up! First time around was all about getting the letter....this time, who cares, I'm just doing it to open leagues, and get all 3 up to the B- just because. XP Once I get my net sorted out and can play without disconnecting every 3rd patch, anyway! I'm still level 20 thanks to that....scoped eliter...someday you will be mine!
The ranked improvements, though, unpredictable as the random glass is, are STILL better than they used to be. We didn't do THAT bad a job, right?
Personally, I'm not feeling a great fondness for the region preference matchmaking. And already I keep running into some of the same players while in the B ranks of every mode.
Goo Tuber... uh... shorter range than splat charger with an e-liter charge time... I don't even know... just... whuh?!
Once the bamboozlers and squiffers finally take the stage, they could become something of a terror. Mid-range quicktime chargers with stored charges and chargerolling? That's practically an anti-dualie.
I think they do the same in Arms. When I was playing Arms last month I'd see the same player or two almost every day since back in the Testpunch! I do wonder how much non-Japan play Splatoon gets though. Splatfest, I suppose would give better numbers on that. Shouldn't be so bad in the US. EU, though....clearly not nearly as many Switches have sold there yet!
Of course without reading Kanji, would we really notice if we got the same Japanese players over and over? :p I'm going to be running through a VPN...I should try picking a Japan server and seeing what my rosters look like.
My revelation with S+ that I detailed in the Salt thread has really taken the wind out of my sails at the moment for ranked. I'm facing a bit of an internal crisis where I wonder what kind of player I want to be in Splatoon 2. Do I buckle down and go full competitive, constantly practicing in ranked, or do I just be content with being a great, but overall casual player? I'm currently A+ in the other two modes, and I intend to climb up the ranks, but I wonder what will come after I feel like I can't go any higher.
I definitely sympathize with all the mixed feelings everyone is having with the game. At its core, Splatoon 2 is a blast to play that gives me so much joy. But then all the many issues and frustrations rear their ugly head, and I start to feel discouraged or annoyed with the game. At this point I am desperate for a balance update to get things running smoother, and I need new maps badly.
But I also think a lot of this has to do with how the player base is right now. Not only has the game incentivized more confrontation, but players are so bloodthirsty in turf. And you can tell new players have taken this new format as law, making everything about splatting first, inkling later. I know it's a lot to ask that people chill out and just have fun when playing as hard as you can to win is perfectly reasonable, but turf war took a long time to get super competitive and serious in the first game. I was hoping to wacky, casual, honeymoon period with this game would have lasted longer.
That's probably the time I MOST enjoyed the first game was when it was new and TW was just a sort of carefree crazy game about inking stuff. I kind of started getting fed up with it when TW became competitive ranked training grounds, and at that point was playing friend battles almost entirely. I was hoping S2 would reintroduce that fun free TW period with noobs all around, but, alas it feels like the old competitive TW I knew. OTOH, wait for Christmas. Right now, who's bought a Switch? Mostly people that bought a WiiU and preordered. Mostly people that played S1 to death. So of course they carried it right over to S2. We'll get a dose of Christmas noobs and then we'll see if the game kind of relaxes a bit for a while!
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