Hey on the bright side, this means we could get any alt kit even before all the ones available from the get go in Splatoon 1 return. I guess it's safe to start hoping for the Slosher Deco every week!
Lag is the delay before your actions register to other players, it does not somehow make your shots go everywhere, deal more damage, have more range, or anything else. The system doesn't change your aim beyond where it thinks the opponent is, but you still have to actually hit the opponent as your weapon normally would to get the splat no matter how much lag there is. So as continually said, the Aerospray gains no further benefits from lag than other shooters.
As for it dominating ranked, I thought you said you don't play ranked? Regardless, in my experience the opposite is true. In S+ atleast the Aerospray is pretty uncommon and for good reason, as 90% of the time they contribute towards 5 splats at best. And it's not just because it's noobs using the weapon, I've seen strong players struggle with it aswell.
I think my assessment of the weapon is pretty fair. It's inferior to every other short range shooter as they can do everything the Aerospray can but more and better, especially now that it's one niche of turfing slightly faster is no more. Again, doesn't mean you can't do well with the weapon, just that it'll be harder to do well with than other shooters.
Sorry, I missed your post the other day and didn't notice until now. Sorry for the late reply!
Based on the fact that I've seen you use "lel" in posts from time to time, am I guessing correctly you're located in Europe? The much better quality of internet there might not show you some of the crazy stuff that gets seen on a regular basis in the US. If you're in the US or other NA territory, then I think you might be underestimating the effects of lag (or interpreting my descriptions to literally.) We've disagreed on the effect of lag with regard to range/damage of weapons since the infamous Dynamo :P Again at your (extreme) skill level you're not going to be as hindered by such things but I'm sure you can still see the effects. Yes your shots don't ACTUALLY go everywhere. You shots hit based on where your system thinks the opponent is. BUT the catch is if the opponent is somewhere else, they will receive damage from a player/weapon where their system shows that opponent well out of range and/or not even shooting in their direction. To the laggy player no, they won't see themselves hitting enemies across the map. But the recipient WILL see themselves hit by an aerospray across the map. (or any other weapon, including and especially splattershot, but aero seems to be the current favorite among such laggy players. There's evidence they're switching to rollers now though after the patch based on the uptick of laggy rollers I'm seeing.
I say "ranked" referring to both solo and league, I just meant the 3 ranked modes. you may be right at high S+, I haven't seen the metas there, and that may be more an issue relating to the overall meta that formed at the top than the overall viability. (again talking pre-1.4) Heck the quartet of Nerfballers are great evidence of what it's been doing at the top. But my bigger concern is what it's doing with the laggy bottom.
To be fair the 1.4 patch and it's reduction of the number of plyaers willing to use it has eliminated the problem largely, not by fixing it, but by pushing people to use something else anyway. Anecdotally I've been plagued by a few specific players. one was a duelie, one was a sploosh, one was a flingza lagging like crazy.
Playing squad in splatfest there was a duelie that I hit several times with a bambi, he was fine. Then on the kill cam I watched a teammate shoot directly at his face a while with a splattershot and he was fine, and then another teammate hit him twice with a sloshing machine and he was fine.....and he killed all 3 of us (he continued lagging the rest of the match and of course had like 12+ kills. Invincibility tends to do that.)
Yesterday a particularly annoying roller was plaguing me. He ONLY rolled. I had sploosh. He kept crushing me. Even when I was mid-splashdown jump. Crushed, not splatted. Finally the last straw was when I was hiding on the wall below on the right lower side of shipyard. He did a vertical fling over the ledge. I was splatted. It reported I was CRUSHED by the roller.....he wasn't even rolling at the time. The first time he wasn't! And I was on a wall the whole time.
Later a sploosh was laggy as all getup (I had a tuber) and he kept splatting me nicely outside sploosh range, and absorbing hits, travelling through exploding suction bombs a-ok, and splatting me mid-air in a splashdown where it was clear even with Dude-like aim nobody can react to that. The final indicator was when I activated splashdown, then he activated splashdown (which normally results in the first one winning.) No, he won, I lost. Obviously on his end he activated first.....but when the opponent can't react to an attack because they can't see the attack the "effect" is magic kills from shots going "everywhere." And the wider the spray pattern the more "everywhere" the random hit can go (I.el. walking into the side shot not knowing it's happening.)
I don't disagree post 1.4, though. Without the turfing niche, it's defintely not qhat it was.
I played team games (Team Werewolf) for all but maybe a half dozen games, so I can only comment on what I saw there... In most matches, the lag was minimal to nonexistent. What annoyed me (I think I complained about this in the Salt thread) was we ran into Japanese teams wayyy too many times, and the lag in those games was out of control. I can't say what, exactly, goes into Japanese players jumping into North American splatfests, but I can say the result was most often that my team lost while their teams teleported around us.
Interesting, we didn't really see Japanese teams, or maybe we did but didn't know it. I saw some kana, but not full teams of it, so I assumed it was non-Japan players, though it doesn't mean the phonetic names weren't Japanese. I see enough kana regularly that I'm never sure who was really Japanese. I think they probably need to hold splatfests at the same time if we're to avoid that. Though actually I kind of miss the worldwide splatfest (and the Japanese players in general....they added so much more creativity to the meta). I just don't miss the 300-800ms pings....
I'll agree: this was the worst lag I've ever seen in this game. What was interesting is that I saw only one d/c the whole time, so I'm wondering if they refactored their netcode in 1.4 to be more tolerant of errors. I saw a couple of teleports, which I've only ever seen once before (the night 1.4 dropped), and received quite a number of one-shot kills and deaths from outside the area of explosions.
I felt like team Werewolf was kicking my butt, too--I lost far more than I won for most of the night, barely bringing it back to about 50/50 by the end. Ran into a huge number of amazing players that just ran circles around my teams, and got spawn-camped several times.
I liked the idea of this Shifty Station, but it's far too swingy. Way too many games where one team was solidly winning at the 10-second mark but wiped and ended up losing 50/30.
In TW I've seen no less disconnects (and actually more disconnects right at spawn rather than partway through.) so I don't think that's it. But it's definitely likely they refactored netcode. I'm seeing a lot more teleportation than I've been. More like S1 where people jump off the same ledge 3 times in a row then kill you from above. Teleports did happen sometimes (or at least jitter) but not to the "triple jump" level I've seen in S1. That seems to be back. Maybe they're reducing the region restrictions due to insufficient players and we're getting more trans-oceanic play in a lobby. Though even when I play with friends in EU, I see them lag/jitter somewhat, but not to the extent of some of these players.
One thing about the lag now is it's just much more pronounced. It used to be that when I'd just get crushed I'd think I was doing badly. But it's SO pronounced how I can tell it's lag....being "crushed" by rollers that aren't rolling and watching people stand on suction bombs with no effect is a little obvious. Splooshes that splat youAFTER they go by, rollers that splat you before they reach you, and kill takes that show up a full second after you splat someone..... well of course you're gonna' lose!
Yeah the result is a shock. I always knew vampire would be the popularity winner, that's no surprise. But the battles, solo, I was winning most matches on werewolf, and I haven't heard many vampire players that weren't losing a lot (and haven't met too many warewolves that did lose a lot...) The one meta I did think of is that it seems the REALLY low rank players on wolf were getting decimated while mid-top was dominating. If we assume there's a lot more players with a 1000-14000 power rating than there are with an 1800-2200 rating, then maybe the experience was a mirror image from ours at the bottom, and they made up most of the matches? (I was 1820-2043 during the solo fest.) Team play was a little different we had a hard time, but that was late at night when fest ALWAYS gets inexplicably difficult.
IMO that shifty was really tilted toward whoever had beacons on their team. I brought the beacons and rarely lost a match there. Getting into the choke points early meant the team never had to use the choke points again. Worked both in solo and team (surprisingly.)