After that nightmare debacle in my last post, I didn't play ranked again at all. I ended on a win/loss series and just couldn't motivate myself to go into ranked again. I finally did it again when I saw SZ was on yesterday. I more or less had a wildly better experience at first. I had one series, starting with 1L/1W from last time, where i won 2 more in a row with a really good team, then lost 2 with total KO shutout messes by overwhelming teams. Started another series, and this time won the whole series with only 1 loss. For most of the games I had a fantastic team that actually worked as a team. Opponents weren't overwhelming. This time I was not the splat lead, with a splashomatic player going 11/2 or so, and me with dynamo like 2/1 to 5/2, however I was getting the medals for zone inker or zone-defender. Imagine that, being able to play the objective while using a weapon that's mostly good at playing the objective! And the matches were tight and played well with close calls. This time we even got a last minute OT win when they only had 4p away from a KO and we had 60. The game played as it's meant to with close calls and back and forth roller coaster action instead of lopsided steamrolls.
But of course the happy train couldn't last. The next series, every round but one was wildly imbalanced with 2 of them ending in KO in the first minute. We never even got to the zone. It seems like the "Zerg Rush" strategy is now the dominant strategy in this game (for non-Starcraft vets, Zerg Rush was the strategy that was dominant for Zerg faction players where you just crank out tons of cheap units fast and rush the enemy bases that are slower to build and wipe them out basically before the match even begins. Pretty much an exploit Blizzard never fixed and it became formal strategy.) Both in TW and ranked I'm seeing more and more the strategy is just rush the enemy base immediately. If the players doing it are good/superior/team heroes enough, it works, the enemy never really even gets out of spawn and the objective is yours. It leads to miserable experiences.
I started another series. One win, 2 horrible imbalanced matches. Then, finally the last one we start, we're playing then I get the yellow "Connection unstable" message I haven't seen since WiiU, 6 out of 8 players show as dropped, then "communication error".....and the game counts it against me as a disconnect and the whole series is a loss. I'm still up in points overall, but I though I may have had a clear run back to S, only to be greeted by that....I was done again.
I've seen a few TW matches where the game disconnects me than bans me for 10 minutes for "disconnecting" during a match. I had a period of time the servers seemed down (couldn't connect to internet - eShop was fine) for a while. Yesterday I had a period it "couldn't connect to internet" but it was Splatoon itself. I closed and restarted the game and it worked. Comm errors were really frequent yesterday, often trying to get into a game 4 or more times before it finally connected to one without an error.
LAAAAAAAAAAG:
I'm realizing, in TW, IDK about ranked, but I'm sure it's the same, more and more how big an issue lag is in this game. I've seen the teleporting players and invincible players a lot when playing rollers. You tend to know if an enemy is invincible to your roller over the head, is suddenly behind you instead of in front of you, sifts to the side 2 feet, and I've seen many times where I'm splatted by an enemy that was never shooting at me, or even shooting at all. Plenty of times they splat me after I splat them (from their main weapon), or I splat them some period of time after I showed them being splatted. But I've been playing eliter more (TW, I wouldn't take eliter in to solo ranked except for SZ painting if dynamo doesn't work, too slow, can't carry, can't rely on being able to be rear-guard/not getting rushed from behind.) The more you play the long chargers, the more youstart seeing the lag effects because you're watching player pinpoint positions. Do you know how often players shift JUST to the side? Makes charger use kinda hard when it's 100% dependent on hitting precisely where they WILL be rather than where they are. So many missed shots. I started really taking notice after I saw the most obvious example. I was aiming in Wahoo at a player from center, they were heading toward our base. I saw them try to swim up one of the walls, but fail as I was taking shots in their direction. They backed away from the wall and started swimming away. Suddenly they disappeared from that spot and were up on TOP of the wall they'd just failed to climb. I was far out of their range and did end up getting the kill on them anway. This wasn't a sudden 3 inch shift. They were literally in a completely different place. If they were up on the wall that means they NEVER failed to swim up the wall and swim away, they were up on the wall the whole time and the whole display of them failing/falling and swimming away was an AI guessing where they were, that was completely wrong.
Let me restate that: The game shows squids in places they are not, doing things they are not doing, basically showing random/guess animations, if it doesn't know where the are!!!!!! If you are wondering when a team is "really good" how squids may be invincible, or "everywhere all at once" like there's more than 4 of them, there's a good chance it's because there actually ARE more than 4 of them. More specifically, the one you're chasing may not actually exist, it may be a ghost created by the computer "guessing" while the real player is coming from behind to splat you once it updates. You may really see 5 or 6 sqids in different placces over a few seconds because the game is showing the same squid in two different places at different times.
This also means the game does "smoothing" - action is interpolated and not necessarily real-time. And it corrects itself suddenly.
Remember I described the laggy ultra stamp last week that was frozen in place with the stamp looking around, and then suddenly rocketed at Sonic speed across the map taking out everyone in their path? That happens often in small scale. Take a look, a close look, at squid movements. Their speeds under lag are NOT CONSTANT. The game rubber bands. I said it for S1 but it's becoming more obvious with 3's issues, I'm pretty sure they borrowed Mario Kart netcode for this game back on WiiU, and it's still there. Racing games rubberband. FPS games should not rubberband. But Splatoon does and always has. In short, the speed of a squid's movement changes based on the update data from the client. A walking, or swimming, OR SHOOTING squid does not necessarily move across the screen at the fixed speed a walking/swimming squid moves. The game suddenly speeds up their movement dynamically to match where they really are vs when they had them. It basically rushes the missed frames. So a squid walking horizontally across your screen may suddenly be moving 5, 10, 15 even 100% faster than normal speed as the client "rushes" their position to their latest update, "smoothly." This is especially bad when playing a charger because of the distance involved, and the need for muscle-memory reactions based on projected destination based on rate of speed. If the speed is not constant, every shot will miss.
Most of the time this speed change is very subtle. So subtle I blame myself for being inconsistent with a charger and suddenly missing "almost every shot" inexplicably. But sometimes the speed change is very visible and I'm reminded what's really going on. I was feeling that acutely in some TW rounds the other day. I didn't do much eliter in S2. Mained it in S1. But I picked it up again and was feeling the old mojo back, sniping away, landing all the trick shots. Then suddenly it just fell apart, round after round, I missed literally almost ever single shot, hitting nothing but air the whole match, being mostly useless, and just taking to assisting other players by inking for them or hindering opponents by inking. I could hit nothing. I always assume it's just me sucking. Then suddenly, new players inserted, and I'm landing ever snap shot, trick shot, and jump shot, bam, bam, bam....i'm a skilled charger again. I checked the stats...of course....one player's name was a give away. "kiwisheep". New Zealand. It was night and I was playing Oceania. Lag was off the charts, and I could hit nothing with the variable position squids. Think EU to JP is laggy? Try US-East to Oceania. Many times the "superior" other team may not be superior. They're just laggier. If you can't hit them, and they can hit you from behind, they're going to win a lot, and you're going to respawn a lot.
I've also realized a lot of "good" players are exploiting the lag. I dont think they're necessarily knowingly causing the lag to interfere with gameplay to exploit the glitch and win. But I think their frantic movements are not, on their own, making them as hard to hit as they are. The "good" players move chaotically and rapidly. That does make them harder to hit, but, for example, a roller to the head should take them out either way. But I've noticed what it DOES do is abuses the lag with so many inputs and changes so that they effectively gain many "invincibility frames" (to use the fighting genre terminology, except there it's intentional for counters.) They apply so many inputs, which triggers the lag to make many bad predictions and position changes, which effectively grants invincibility frames during which an attack on them does not connect but their attacks on others do connect. They may or may not be abusing the bad netcode to their advantage on purpose, but the result is they learn that when they do that they die less and win more. Even if the cause is not that opponents are THAT much unable to hit them, but that the game not keeping up with the inputs basically makes them unable to be hit.
None of this is necessarily new to Splatoon 3. Shades of this have been visible since 1. But the pace of the game and the weapon dynamics have sped up even more than before, and it becomes that much more apparent. The claustrophobic maps of 2 served to hide and obscure these effects and make it harder to see, while the more wide open maps of 3 make it more visible like in 1. And there's less RAW teleporting (though it still does happen often) and more of the subtle speed changes, invincibility, etc occurring than in 1. A laggy other team or laggy lobby can easily make it seem like the "other team" is "sooo superior" when in reality the other team is simply "sooo laggy/invincible/multiple places at once/shoots you without attacking or looking in your direction so you're dying from all directions at once when no one is even attacking while you hit air."
Getting the lead back it totally possible at any point in the game. Spl
I said I had not see that happen even once. It finally happend once, for our team with a countdown of 4 on their side. Amazing what happens when you have a good/op team. I seldom see that :P
Helping your teammates doesn't always mean following them into potentially dangerous situations either.
Yeah, someone, probably you had talked about that years ago with S2, and I often do keep that in mind, though usually I catch on too late in a match what the team is really lacking with and try to work around that to help. And some rounds it's really just not possible. When they keep SJ'ing into danger, spreading 1 at a time around the map, leaving the objective not controlled while they spread around, and 3 opponents keep chasing you...there's only so much you can do. But I do TRY to play with that in mind, especially when using a good support weapon like dynamo, chargers, hydra. Even flingza. Of course when you have a dynamo and splatting opponents is the team's weakness.....using dynamo like a carbon to make up for it has mixed, comical results.
You are too kind. I am, at best, a mid-level comp player. There are hundreds of players that are much, much better than me. I am very flattered though.
Eric Clapton says he's not really that good at guitar, either.... ;)
Also, why do I have to wait through the defeat screen to see my medals?
That annoys me, too, and I wish they'd change it, BUT I'd assume that screen is actually masking loading the lobby in the background and/or crunching numbers/syncing stats to the windows 95 servers, or compiling the stored replay data. Like the "slowly squeezing through cracks and doors" trick to hide the load screens in modern AAA games. So they probably can't get rid of it, it's probably just a prettied up loading/"syncing data, please wait" screen. It probably hasn't tallied/synchronized the medal data yet.
(I bought the game twice due to dealing with a ****ty store delaying my pre-ordered physical copy, so I ended up getting a digital copy on launch) for a train wreck of a game.
It's broken, but at least it's not Battlefield 2042 broken!
ts. Part of the strategy is to distract the opposing team so the members who respawn can go right on ahead and ink the battlefield with little to no opposition at all.
I've been adopting that strategy often. I am become the laser pointer for the cats. If I distract them my team may be able to control the objective. Either that or my team will go try to find something to kill and leave the zone uncontrolled or in enemy control. :P Generally though I've been happy with generally quality teams. Just...not as high quality as the other team, or two decent teammates and one really bad one that goes 2/12 and basically makes the match a 3v4.
