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Splatoon 3 general issues

The Salamander King

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Hmm, that IS pretty OP. I may have to try it to see how it behaves, though IDK, because I'm kind of reflex-dependent on my additional ink supply through the whole match and it may mess me up totally if I don't have it at all times, refill timing and everything will be off. OTOH I'm losing most of the time, so, net gain? :p That's pretty broken.

Intensify is the weirdest power up. It basically only boosts certain weapons and makes squid rolls "easier" which makes no sense because they're not very difficult to begin with (and accidentally doing it can be deadly. Especially on Mahi. Ask me how I know :) ) Does intensify help explosher during jumps? I experimented with the dummies and decided it doesn't, but I wasn't positive.

Maybe next time I'm in TW, I'll have to give tentabrella another try. I tried it a few weeks ago, along with splat brella and absolutely could do nothing with it other than get myself splatted. I have gained affinity for the undercover brella but not the tent at all. Maybe I'll give it another swing. Sorry in advance, @Ansible! :) If I ever get in with connection errors, anyway :)
Intensify Action does 3 things:
1. Makes performing squid rolls easier. All it does is make the timing less strict on when you can and can't squid roll. I believe it also decreases how much momentum is lost after each concurrent roll.
2. Makes squid surge charge faster.
3. Increases jump accuracy. This doesn't have any effect on weapons that already have perfect jump accuracy, such as sloshers, rollers, chargers, stringers, Brellas, H3 nozzlenose, and Squeezer. Shooters and (especially) blasters benefit a lot from the jump accuracy buff that Intensify Action provides.
 

Saber

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@The Salamander King
Oh yeah about the dive meta, what is going on is if a team sees you have 2 anchors at certain times they've developed a tendency to just blitz in and try and get a wipeout asap
It isn't common niche scenarios like CB, TC and RM on x map
Essentially on a map like mahi mahi in most every mode, and hammerhead bridge on SZ or TC , they just zerg rush and you are so far behind or get wiped again and you lose even with eliter
 
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Award

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Yesterday, the matchmaker did another turn about and my new problem (in the Bs on my alt) is that I'm back to not just B-level matches, but calling them C- would be generous. Honest to goodness noobs that really don't seem to have a clue what they're doing some seemingly playing with a roller in place for the first time, and the classic "I hate my team" profile I haven't seen much of at all in S3. We went from C+/B- being sets of S+ matches, to B+ being C- matches. No joke, I won 3 in a row that I did next to nothing, the team was ok, but the other teams were just incredibly bad, standing still at platform edges to shoot, etc, single file, we won by ko in a minute and didn't even score team wipes, not even sure where the enemies were in multiple lobbies, they just inked the base or something and occasionally straggled out to zone. And then the shoe was on the other foot the remaining matches of the night where my team was that team. There are WILD swings in the difficulty the matchmaker puts together, X rank matches loaded with S+ badge wearers on Fri/Sat/Sun dropping to "noobs that ink the base" by Wednesday. I can only assume means it's either fully broken, or simply nobody plays and that's what it's got to work with.

There is so much to unpack here. I'm going to try and make a video on some of this stuff because I would rather just do that than spend hours writing an essay here (as much fun as that would be). That also allows me to demonstrate some of this in-game.
A few things right off the bat:
Arrowanna Mall never got a big mid-game rework. It changed from S1 to S2 but it wasn't taken out of the rotation and worked on post launch like the other maps were. Speaking of that, quite a few maps have had major reworks after release. Urchin Underpass, The Reef, Shellendorf Institute, Starfish Mainstage, Blackbelly Skatepark, and Moray Towers have all had substantial reworks in the past. I guarantee Nintendo will pull some of the current maps out of rotation for a while and rework them in this game too. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Mahi Mahi is going to get reworked soon.

Dualies don't really benefit much from Intensify Action. I don't know where you heard that it gives them an extra dodge roll but it does not. Maybe you're seeing Tetra Dualies roll 4 times and mixing it up with other dualies? To add to that, dodge rolling is really not difficult to deal with because the dualie player is locked into one spot and their roll distance and direction are predetermined. Long range weapons should have an especially easy time dealing with this because they can take advantage of the predetermined rolls and the crippling endlag after rolling to get easy kills from a safe distance away. Dualies as a whole have always been seen as "lesser shooters" because of this. Without dodge rolling, the dualie is painfully inaccurate and weak, but using a dodge roll to fix this makes your movement predictable. Shooters don't have this problem.

Also, we aren't in a rush down or "dive" meta right now. In fact, Eliter is probably the best weapon in the game right now. This is mostly due to the maps, many of which need some sort of rework. I think a lot of the issues you are having with snowballing and spanwcamping are compounded by a couple of poorly designed maps that allow that sort of play to work better than it should. Mahi, Hamerhead, Mincemeat, and Wahoo are probably the worst maps in the game right now and I do desperately hope that they are updated in the coming patches.

That being said, I'm going to work on that video to address the rest of this.

I haven't watched the video yet (that....may take some days...)

But a few things. Are you POSITIVE Arowanna did not get pulled and remade? I'm 99% positive I explicitly remember it dropping from rotation for a prolonged time and returning as no longer a sniper's paradise, and was the first such map to experience that. Arowanna has been synonymous with that process as a result. While there's a slim chance I'm misremembering that, it was years ago after all, and I don't have time to check, I'm petty sure searching here (if the archives aren't lost) will turn up multiple threads about "what happened to arrowanna" from the time where a lot of us noticed we hadn't seen it in ages. Technically Urchin was first, but it hadn't vanished for a long period unannounced like that.

Intensify action: You're right, for some reason I was thinking it gave an extra roll to duelies, or faster ability to enter the next roll. I don't really use duelies, or intensify other than for RnB, though, so I don't have much knowledge on those items. Though I strongly disagree on the dodgerolling (we may have disagreed on that once with S2 conversation as well :) ), I assume what you meant was that the DISTANCE is predetermined, but the direction is player input, as is the number of rolls, there's not really a good way to predict where exactly they'll lag.

No rushdown and eliter is best? Wow, you really ARE playing a different game! :) That's just not the solo experience at all. Right now in solo rushdown is king, and eliter and to an extent hydra and other slow weapons are just sitting ducks. No doubt the maps are a big contributor to the spawncamp/snowball ,but it's not confined to those, even classic maps, museum, academy, suffer from it. I can't off the top of my head think of a map it doesn't happen regularly with, so it's more than just a map issue.


I'll have to get around to the video in the next day or two.

@Saber I tried some tentabrella....it's not as bad a session as the last time I tried to like it, I did "ok", and it has a lot of potential tactics, but I definitely suck at at it and launching the umbrella mostly just ended with shooters swimming around it and killing me :) Beacons were fun though. I just haven't figured out a way to use it well at all. :)
 

Saber

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@Award
Arrowana wasn't remade but was patch, did some research and remembered why basically dualies used to dodge roll in certain area and either crash the game or instantly poof out of exsistence (like they roll on grates and for some reason poof like when you hit water) due to a bug in the code for arrowana mall

Yeah so most times I start off by lauch the tenta brella using it to the extent you use a curling bomb, because by the time it reaches one end it is back up, I only really use it to shield if I an protecting an objective or someone superjumping in

Firing is weird for tenta, you have to aim facing the bottom half of the player model cuz otherwise the shotgun like inkblast will cuz over their heads, but most times play it mid range using it to trap people in your in

Here is the second video. I IMPLORE you to watch this at a faster speed.
So watched the video and loved it
*also sorry if this is a bit sporadic my thought process was all over the place as I listen and wrote

-Ink vac I do agree with the points on better supporting and need to learn its mechanics more

Zerg rush is 100 bad maps, and probably bad matchmaking, I see alot of players being terrible like there are players who have almost 20 plus death counts... in the lower tiers of S+ which in 5 mins games is outstanding and my team is usually in a 3v4 or 2v4
It reminds me of a YT recently said ranked right now is just how long have you been playing splatoon 3 rather than a testiment to one's skill and kinda have to agree with that, a lot of this game can most certainly be vets carrying new players to S+ and then Rank debt keeping them inflated to S+ even though they should have dropped back to A (cuz apparently that is how it works each season idk why)

I do agree that eliter and hydra is definately meta....I even notcing an increase of the tri slinger in tower control (because it is so good if you know how to arc shots)

I also will be honest I usually only see scorch gorge SZ looks so much better I seen it hoenstly twice since launch I mainly on Clam Blitz and occasionally Rainmaker, but the CB version sucks so so much....
Again all my notes for TC and CB being changed are all for the maps I mentioned in the patch and the ones you brough (basically a mimial change needed if not a full map rework) cuz those modes on those maps are all pretty one sided in nature
Also thank you Mako is overhyped

For dualies what the issue is even with my good internet there is some lag to be compensating to a degree (like the end shots of their dodge roll still hitting and trading despite them being splatted a half a second earlier) consider what you said Award could be experience this moreso that I do, also alot of dualies do a squid roll into dodge roll to increase their dodge range which make snapping the shot a little more tricky

Lastly bait and punish again I do agree this does work wonders the main issue again is just other players feeding, I can shut it down to a degree but the main issue is one player dying immediate keeping it even or at disadvantage which again is more the matchmaking, but I have had sucess just require alot....alot of outplaying the enenmy team but I do need to keep this in mind more, might even work on my kiting if a slayer is focused on me isn't on objective

Also I can send a reply of me intitiating blitz /zerg rush tatic on TC mincemeat via a replay code and that idea of never let the enemy anchor set up position
*note this gameplay isn't great, and but I did have tons of fun
 
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Award

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@Award
Arrowana wasn't remade but was patch, did some research and remembered why basically dualies used to dodge roll in certain area and either crash the game or instantly poof out of exsistence (like they roll on grates and for some reason poof like when you hit water) due to a bug in the code for arrowana mall

Yeah so most times I start off by lauch the tenta brella using it to the extent you use a curling bomb, because by the time it reaches one end it is back up, I only really use it to shield if I an protecting an objective or someone superjumping in

Firing is weird for tenta, you have to aim facing the bottom half of the player model cuz otherwise the shotgun like inkblast will cuz over their heads, but most times play it mid range using it to trap people in your in



So watched the video and loved it
*also sorry if this is a bit sporadic my thought process was all over the place as I listen and wrote

-Ink vac I do agree with the points on better supporting and need to learn its mechanics more

Zerg rush is 100 bad maps, and probably bad matchmaking, I see alot of players being terrible like there are players who have almost 20 plus death counts... in the lower tiers of S+ which in 5 mins games is outstanding and my team is usually in a 3v4 or 2v4
It reminds me of a YT recently said ranked right now is just how long have you been playing splatoon 3 rather than a testiment to one's skill and kinda have to agree with that, a lot of this game can most certainly be vets carrying new players to S+ and then Rank debt keeping them inflated to S+ even though they should have dropped back to A (cuz apparently that is how it works each season idk why)

I do agree that eliter and hydra is definately meta....I even notcing an increase of the tri slinger in tower control (because it is so good if you know how to arc shots)

I also will be honest I usually only see scorch gorge SZ looks so much better I seen it hoenstly twice since launch I mainly on Clam Blitz and occasionally Rainmaker, but the CB version sucks so so much....
Again all my notes for TC and CB being changed are all for the maps I mentioned in the patch and the ones you brough (basically a mimial change needed if not a full map rework) cuz those modes on those maps are all pretty one sided in nature
Also thank you Mako is overhyped

For dualies what the issue is even with my good internet there is some lag to be compensating to a degree (like the end shots of their dodge roll still hitting and trading despite them being splatted a half a second earlier) consider what you said Award could be experience this moreso that I do, also alot of dualies do a squid roll into dodge roll to increase their dodge range which make snapping the shot a little more tricky

Lastly bait and punish again I do agree this does work wonders the main issue again is just other players feeding, I can shut it down to a degree but the main issue is one player dying immediate keeping it even or at disadvantage which again is more the matchmaking, but I have had sucess just require alot....alot of outplaying the enenmy team but I do need to keep this in mind more, might even work on my kiting if a slayer is focused on me isn't on objective

Also I can send a reply of me intitiating blitz /zerg rush tatic on TC mincemeat via a replay code and that idea of never let the enemy anchor set up position
*note this gameplay isn't great, and but I did have tons of fun
Ahh, Arowanna was bugged....I knew there was a thing with arowanna gone a while, and I knew they redesigned it, but I must have been mixing the bug with the S2 remodel? I mostly remember "what happened to Arrowanna" conversations :)

I'll still have to mess with tenta. IDK if I'll ever quite get used to it, but it's at least interesting. I've never been good with the brellas though. I love the strange weapons, but brellas never quite clicked.


Matchmaking: Haven't watched the vid yet, so I can't dip into the specifics from it, but yeah, there's the one thing that it's impossible to talk about the game mechanics without talking about matchmaking, it's just not. It's just so bad, it creates a lot of situations that.....either they need to make matchmaking work RIGHT, or if they can't/won't do that (and it's kind of clear by now they won't, 3 games later), they need to start making the game IMBALANCED in order to kind of balance their bad matchmaker. My experiement on my alt is trying to figure out a pattern to the matchmaking. In S2 I thought matchmaking was maybe dirty to manage player population where they want it (rigging the game for the house), but it's so random, I'm not even sure it's rigged. I really think it's totally broken, or there really are not a lot of Splatoon players in ranked at any one time and it's just a jumble of what's available. Totally agree about it being a measure of time rather than skill. That's kind of what I've been saying as well. If the ranks aren't how matches are made, and if you can lose 66% of your matches and still move upward, technically, just playing enough hours will move you up through luck. And worse, due to matchmaking it's really not possible to not lose 66% of your matches. In fact I seem to have a better win rate in S than C/B. Every time I'd get a 3x loss run in S+ rank up and get kicked back to S I'd have a 5 game win streak back up. In the B's now, I'm LOSING points. I have a feeling season rotation will kill m yranks before I even break S+ on the alt! right now ranked is every bit as random as TW. Total noobs in S+, elite players in C/B. It's just mixing people together randomly like TW. And even TW isn't supposed to be doing that. The alt account was seeing elite play on day 1, level 1 in mandatory TW from the start (No S2 data imported, and I never played ranked past B in S2 anyway). And now noobs that ink the base instead of the zone in ranked... Completely random.

Even if the gameplay is 100% perfectly balanced, mechanically, the REALITY of gameplay for most players is going to be an imbalanced disaster that's rarely fun to play, and the mechanics need to be altered to accommodate that even if it's deployed ONLY in solo and not for PB/comp. I didn't have a lot of play time yesterday, maybe 12 or so matches. A quarter of them were such easy wins against missing enemies we won by KO just standing around doing nothing. Not fun. Then the other 2/3 were just pure 2v4 until it becomes repeating wipeouts. Also not fun. When the game is in balance it's the most fun thing ever, but that's like a fifth of matches. At some point if the matching can't be fixed, the gameplay mechanics need to be massively reworked, even "broken" in order to accomodate the limitations of how players can be matched so the game is actually fun and fair rather than random and one sided.

Only problem with dropping ranks is, that, it's the same problem with matchmaking. You have squids that are aces dropping down to lower ranks and contaminating them in the opposite direction because they got randomly bad matches....which then puts top players in low ranks, causing unfair losses to other players that shoudl be there or moving up, and instead of artificially inflated low level play in high level ranks, you get artificially high level play in low level ranks pushing everything down. ALthough from what I'm seeing in matchmaking, I'm not convinced they're not already artificially doing that regardless of actual rank anyway. It still all comes down to the matchmaker.

I still feel like, as it is, they should just get rid of ranks entirely. Nobody sees the rank. The matchmaking doesn't use the rank. And the ranks aren't really reflective of skill, and the single rank says nothing of one's skill in a mode they may never have even played. Why do the ranks exist *at all*? It's like they realized the ranks don't work, but wanted the original "feel" of ranks, so they made ranked modes work like TW and kept the graphics for rank ups. I think the mismatching would at least be more enjoyable if it didn't pretend to be a ladder.

I'll have to see the video for map discussion.

META: Hydra is kinda meta in solo, but I feel like it's fading. Personally I used it a lot but as the zerg rush meta started taking over it became harder and harder to justify taking it. Even eliter can dance a bit better in a flanked/sharked situation. Even with splacharger I'm finding perching is becoming more and more dangerous and I'm starting to take it down low, even through the zone in sz, and take more aggro positions like with flingza to better effect. Slinger I loooove in TC. Not using it now, but I was using that a ton in my main account.

DUELIES: Lag remains paramount next to matchmaking, absolutely. I still see, so often, bombs that do not damage people, it's becoming comical. That certainly can be a big issue with the duelies. I haven't really looked at duelies through the lag lens yet, but it could be. I assumed it was the rolling itself, but if that's combining with the lag, mayb.

Bait and punish: Ihaven't watched the video yet, but based on your response, I think I assume where it's going, and yeah....that's my specialty! But, like you said....when your teammates keep dying around you leaving you both at a numbers disadvantage AND helping the enemy paint around you!! You really don't have a lot of leeway. You're either going to get splatted, or if you have range, fall back farther and farther until you're at spawn and it's over. And I don't just mean "bad teammates." But teammates that are just outmatched, at a weapons disadvantage, victims of specials spam....it's not all about not having a good team. Also the matchmaking..... There's those matches that you're the ace that's obviously carrying 3 mediocre players. But it also goes the other way. 3 really good players and that one player on your team that's so bad they probably would be better off disconnecting...... so the whole match is 3v4. Sometimes I don't realize that's happening until I see the replay and realize the one player spent the whole match dead.

I'm sure better snipers than myself can handle it, but I find as a sniper without any allies that can match the opponents, it's VERY hard to really take anyone out when you have multiple opponents all janking to avoid you without really any opposition to take their attention from drawing your attention. I can get one here and there, but with SJ, it has no meaningful impact unless I can take multiple out quickly which is a tall order.

I've become pretty good at simply staying alive, and dogfighting with enemies unless things start really turning into a spawncamp, so I can pretty much continuously put pressure on the objective, or draw squid away and/or act as an anchor. Even when riding the tower. But it only gets you so far if your team can not use that advantage, and when you're alone you have to keep just avoiding engagement and falling back.


I've seen too many zerg rushes to have to watch another....but I'm curious to see your version :)
 

Award

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Here is the second video. I IMPLORE you to watch this at a faster speed.
Because doing things out of order is fun, I skipeed to 15:00 because @Forma mentioned it, and a minute back I love how really the whole /video /thread summary is right there "the matchmaker sucks, and there's low confidence it will be fixed"....that's kind of the whole thing condensed and we're all in agreement :)

I only watched that 5 minute part so far, but I do have to correct that the story about the sploosh on hammerhead, that was a comedy story about the matchmaker. :) It was less about not knowing how to break out of the spawncamp, and more about the part where I never got back to the zone after the 10 seconds, and still was the #1 zone inker.....which....is informative about what happened to those teammates that prevented SJing to them where they spent a minute or so inking the zone less than I did in the opening 0:10 before KO. Now they weren't horrible, because they did keep the other 3 from entering the base, but mostly by repeated trades in 3v3 (while the sploosh and I were tangled up in base.) I did eventually deal with the sploosh but the match was over by KO at that point. No ally alive to anchor to, and too many unsuccesful attempts to flush a sploosh in a sea of ink 1v1. The sploosh did not go after the rest of the team as they raced to mid, she camped waiting for me each time. I'd wait for the team and then they'd blow right past me and the sploosh and run to the zone (and not ink it....) Like Saber's zerg rush description the sploosh set up with one purpose and one purpose only: Keep the charger from getting to the battle - ignore everyone else. And everyone else ignored the sploosh.... :)

That's the only part of the video I saw so far though!
 

Saber

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@Award @The Salamander King
Here's the replay code
REXU-TOUN-TEMD-52MT

So just for refernce it was mostly me the splashomatic and the splattershot implementing this strat, soI will do a little in the mindset explaination
I was playing full Attacker skirmisher keep the attention on me so that no one is on objective, and making sure the anchors had as little time to setup as possible (denying the hydra booyah bomb is also a plus)

The zerg rush aspect though is that first 20 sec it guarentee 1st checkpoint and because they were all out of position when that I came back in and since they were weakened by my teams inkstorm I was able to rush in and take them out again guaranteeing the 50 and in turn made it very hard for them to recover for the rest of the match
You even see the UCbrella try and do the same after we wiped out and was effective for a bit...in some games (with different maps or if they had a weapon other than UCbrella rushing) you can just get walled out and an get an instant win

Last point kinda my gripe about it is where I spent most of the match once you take that side platform and ramp you deny access to the an enemy's entire left side
 

Award

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I'm uncertain, and all the matchmaking is bad, but one thing that might be skewing my perception even more is rank-up battles. I didn't realize it so much before, but it seems like rank-up battles may be the most broken of all in matchmaking, and whatever it's doing seems even more broken than the rest of the matchmaker. And when that happens, you're in a cycle of playing one regular series than 1-2 rank up series and the bulk of your games are the completely broken ones.

And, yes, "broken" to commoners means "doesn't work right" and not "super-amazing-awesome" as it does in VG comp lingo ;) Though the word doesn't TECHNICALLY get used differently in both cases it's not working the way it's meant to, whether it's malfunctioning or accidentally OP, it really is just the same old meaning of "broken" in the end :)


I talked about how the main account rank up for S+ was an endless loop of retrying it in horrible matches that can't be won, then a win streak back in, then the same thing (except for that one time I was 1 win away and then got 3 losses in a row in bad matches.)

Now the same exact thing is happening on the A- rank up on my other account, and started to happen with the B- rank up previously as well! Play the B's, get up relatively easily with up to 2 rank ups on the line.....then play the rank ups and wipe across the board in ridiculous matches. I've done 4 rank up series just to get out of B and lost all of them. "Win 3, lose 2" doesn't work when the matchmaker is broken, but works even less when they seem to break it even more for those matches. The scenario is identical to the S+ version. Whatever they're doing for the rank up battles is very very bad. Again I don't think it was nearly as bad before the last patch that "sped up matchmaking." It was still imbalanced, I think B to A on that one was a streak of easy wins with the strong team much easier than the normal games. But it's much worse now.

I'd say "they intentionally make the rank up battles hard" but this is something other than that, and it also can make it "super easy" depending on which team you're on. Most of the time the OP team is the other team, but sometimes it's my team. But in rank up it's almost always even more one sided than the normal ranked battles. They definitely match differently for rank up, and it's definitely not working. Out of the lost B+/A- rank-up series, there were some that had at least 1 win, some with 0. One time I had 2 wins, and the only way we won that was because I was put on a team that had a seriously high tier elite player at least in terms of shooting, maybe not in terms of map awareness, it was basically like having Salamander on my team for a B+/A- rank up battle......and even with that, we only BARELY eeked out a win both times. This was a player in CB that went 33/5, 31/3, and our opponents were NOT pushovers. I don't think I've seen a lobby cracking 30+ kills in a long, long time. Watched the replay, it was like watching Dude.... This guy was seriously high end....but even with that, it was a very difficult, very hard fought battle, we NEARLY lost to several pushes that started snowballing, our pro was the only way we salvaged it, even with him it took time and was close, and that guy's only real flaw was that he and the team were SO focused on trying to win by KO over in the enemy base (we didn't either time), that I was alone defending our base, so when the counter push started to come in, if I missed a shot, I had to spam the "this way" callouts because it was me, myself with at least 2 footballs incoming via 2 different routes, and their support along with them while our pro was somewhere else with the team in tow and had to make their way back usually at around the point I fell all the way back and the enemy scored at least 2 footballs with more individual clams incoming in waves.... But we won those two.

Unfortunately maps then changed before the third round, SZ, which SHOULD be my best mode was up, but unfortunately it was Mahi and Undertow which are probably my worst 2 SZ maps. I should have stopped when I saw that, but A) that sucks and B) saving a rank up last win for a cold start without a map warmup rarely ends well, so I did it...and lost 3 in what was the shoe on the other foot, the OTHER team was super extreme, and it played exactly as the S+ version does. I stepped away for 15 minutes or so, came back, same rotation and did another pending rank up battle, and suddenly the play wasn't super extreme anymore...but I still lost due to the usual B-tier woes and the fact that the map was Mahi.......

It shouldn't take days to try to get out of the B's, and a B/A rank-up battle should not be playing identically to the S+ battles on the same player's other account. I'd make a complaint about these all being alt accounts, but....so am I so....fair play? But the S+ rank up and the A- rank up should not play indistinguishably from each other! That makes no sense. But neither should they play indistinguishably from S+ one series, then feel like B with a team that can't push the next series in the same rotation so you're slamming hard between dealing with different sets of problems. It seriously makes me not want to play the game anymore...I'm not QUITE there, but it's getting close. Good, fair matches are so rare, and extreme frustration is so much the norm, I keep asking why I bother. I love the gameplay, but when you're spending your time in frustration on totally imbalanced team setups just for the digital crack of that one good match you get every 25-45 minutes, you start questioning why you're spending your time on it.



I finally watched the video. One good thing is most of what you said is stuff I've already been aware of, so there wasn't, tactically a lot of new info. Which is good. I didn't take notes so I'll have to watch again for details. I think the matchmaking being the crux of it was already a known quantity, but like I said above ,the problem is, when the matchmaking being bad is a foundation of the game, the game needs to be changed to accomodate the matchmaking, if they can't make the matchmaking fix the game. I.E. the things that make it most broken when team balance is bad, need to be changed to facilitate more back and forth play between badly mismatched teams. They can't seem to control whatever is wrong with matchmaking, so they need to change what they can control (gameplay) to accommodate the matchmaker fail. At least for solo.

Also, when it comes to weapons, I play tons, of course, and rollers and brushes have been my ranked mains most of the time, even a lot in S1. Maining charger in ranked is a new one since S1 for me. Part of that is, I'm a decent sniper. Even a good sniper. In S3 I've elevated to a new level with it that I might even say I'm a very good sniper. But I'm not a GREAT sniper, pro level with godly aim. Shots will be missed. And missed shots, especially with eliter are very very dangerous when defending and holding back snowballs. I think eliter takes on a different presence up in that comp world where anyone wielding a charger has godly aim and essentially doesn't miss. They miss, but they're less likely to take 2-3 shots that miss and allow 2+ squids to advance on them, so the idea of "nobody should get past this spot with a sniper up there" doesn't apply so much outside that comp tier of crack-shots. For a "normal, very good but not necessarily top tier" charger player, you're going to get that push where you miss 2 shots, or 3 shots ,and from there HAVE to give up your position. But that's why there's layers of S+ and (at least used to be) X and comp tiers separated...or should be if matchmaking weren't broken. In an ideal matchmaker game I'd have mixed feelings about consistency with chargers or if I'd be better off with rollers, brushes, hydra, explosh, etc. With current matchmaking, I think my adeptness with charger for different situations and trying to observe everyone's status outweighs the potential inconsistency of missed shots, but that's just it, if youre not an x-rank/pro you can't be good at EVERYTHING all the time, so you have to weigh what tradeoffs you have to take.

All that having been said, I had a few zones matches where I kinda wish I had eliter instead of charger, especially in etail where every shot was JUST out of range. That account still hasn't unlocked eliter at the 1 ticket price yet... :)


Also RE feeding, in solo you do run into situations where you do have to feed. I'm probably channeling more of my roller/brush play into that topic than the charger topic, however, it's not exclusive. This probably applies MUCH more....I'd say "lower ranks" but it's not, sadly it's high rank 2, so I'll say "games where the matchmaker assigns you noobs", whether it's a B- match with actual noobs, or an S+ match where you have legit S+ players that are SJ-ing to the sharking ninja roller inside the zone 10 times in one match (true story...) In those matches where you have a team that is just not moving the objective. I don't mean trying and failing, I mean they simply are terrified of picking the objective up and moving it - the teammate with a football you're lining up to inkvac at the ramp and they won't go.... the team that leaves the popped RM sitting there uncontested with no enemies in sight. The team that leaves the zone in enemy control without an enemy in sight, the team that won't move the tower past mid and lets it reset. At some point you really have to just do it yourself. If they're not going aggro on the objective (or stopping the incoming objective) you get two options, do it yourself and probably feed, but maybe get the hail mary run, or sit back and watch the timer countdown to losing.

I think where the real problem is is the bipolar matchmaker (of course.) After you spend 2 hours playing matches where you HAVE to feed, and HAVE to do dumb things to have any chance, you adapt and get used to playing like that. Then it throws you a normal match and the result is you're just playing stupidly and dying taking a match or 3 before you catch yourself. Or the flip side after you play 2 hours where you're just getting one sided curb stomped you get used to just having to hold back and entrench and wait for the onslaught to grow closer and you don't realize you're now NOT in a lobby like that and you mess up for a few games before catching yourself again. But the game shouldn't be swinging like that.

RE: zerg rush, the zerg rush is real. I'm sure it doent hold in comps with proper weapon mix predetermined and god-aim snipers. But again, 90% of splatoon isn't that. Right now, in the real world, the zerg rush is king. Get a fast weapon take down the anchors before they set up, boom, the map is yours, objective is yours, there's no match, really. @Saber demonstrated it well, though I'd say even Saber's run isn't a truly clean version of it because he didn't stick around sharking after that and really keep them locked in base longer, and no teammates really joined in. Most of the time I see it the team is tied up even longer than that before flushing it out (and/or one teammate goes out to mid to push objective alone and keeps getting splatted (and 30% of the time they set it up again right after it's flushed out ,so you never really get control again. It's bad in tower, it's even worse in zones because once that much time ticks away on the zone, getting it back is so unlikely even with amazing recovery.

Zones: I agree. It's technically my best mode, or used to be, but I'm winning more in CB than in Zones recently and that's just WRONG. That's 100% on the maps. IDK that any of them are GOOD. Combined with the zerg rush it can be really bad. I'd say there's 10-15% of matches that my team doesn't take control of the zone ONCE, we get locked up and maybe make some pushes at the zone, maybe even halt their control, but never enough to take it. Right now weapon mix more than anything is probably determining who wins zones. It's sad, because it was my best mode, I saved rank ups for zones to be on, but right now, I'm doing worst when that's up. I find I only win it when I do the ninja roller routine. Preventing the team from ever getting to the zone....which....comes back to the whole sharking + zerg rush thing being the win button especially in zones.

I had a few more points I now forget!

Well it's splatfest this weekend, so I suppose I won't be experimenting with the alt for a few days...... kinda sad, kinda relieved. I haven't even picked a team.... :)

My bigger question is if I should screw over a team from getting their snails and spend the fest experimenting with tentabrella? :)
 

Award

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14 fest matches, 4 wins,10 losses. Spawn camped or semi camped most times.

Went to Sheldon and bought a sploosh, and started zerg rushing in fest for science...

Results were positive but not good enough, so I went all the way and equipped gambit...

24 games later I'm winning about 60%. The zerg rush is real!!

Caveats to this:
1) It's actually less effective on TW then rank because you're not moving an objective to secure permanent score, it's the equivalent of "whoever has zone at the end wins". So this should prove even better in ranked.

2) map design is a massive part of it. It's much much harder to use effectively in gorge, a lot of the losses were there. It's not just new maps though. Museum, academy, shipyard all have the problem.

3) It depends on a team that actually utilizes the window you open for them. If they're inking base or not pushing up when you open the door, you die and it was all for nothing. MOST teams do. Some do not. That's a risk. You roll the dice

4) This isn't a tactic where you stay alive. It's a true dive, you YOLO for the win. You'll be negative k/d or even more times than not, playing reckless, laughing at danger, SJ to potentially unsafe drops to keep running in. Do not fear death, it's part of the tactic because:

5) splatting anchors helps a lot but it's not actually critical, inking enemy base, trapping them in a choke they have to waste time addressing, and drawing their focus so their backs are to to your team is what matters. A decent team pushes up and controls the map behind you at that time, allowing themselves movement, denying the enemy movement and position, and allowing you to sj in at high risk with a reasonable margin of safety. It's a kamikaze sabotage tactic, but it works more times than not. You do enough damage to throw the enemey into chaos. In tw they can still turn the tide rendering it less effective. In ranked that push stays on the books. You're a silent hero. Plausible deniability. Deny all knowledge. You won't show assists, but you assisted your teams splats.

6) bad luck can shut you down. An ace opponent that you inadvertently feed to, combo specials every time you drop.... Had both. One match every time sj, I'd arrive into a special. Bad luck. One with a super pro squid splatling that kept shredding me (and everyone else) all match over and over. But I did kill him first in the zerg rush.... I'll cherish that. And its testament to the strength of it. That was the only splat against that guy the whole match. He finished 18/1 I think. If it were ranked that first takedown of him would have set the high score win or lose. One match I kept feeding an octo brush that should have been dead but never was. Lag I think. He wiped 3 of us on the tower in gorge from below it on the grate without ink splashing. But on the whole the tactic is solid.

I don't like that it's solid. I want it gone, it's a miserable game setup. I don't like doing it, and I don't like it being done. But it's meta for a reason. It works, it works reasonably consistently, and the maps currently facilitate it. Gorge tw does not with only one entry point via grate. But ranked? It'll encourage it too with the ramps.

7) and this is without ninja squid because fest shirt!

8) enemy sploosh or brush are the biggest threats that might shut it down.


A side gloat, the Zerg rush failed, but I ended up in the second half having one of those amazing super sploosh hero plays at the clutch of a 100x match with like 6 back to back against all odds splats in the back of mincemeat while my teammate squid bagged like it was his kill. That's 100x for team shiv....err... Grass...

TL;DR
Award used Zerg rush.
It's super effective!
 

Saber

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Splatfest has been fun been an even split for the most part which I am happy about
But here are a few of my takeaways
-Tenta brella is so much fun in TW
-L-3 and .96 gal with intensify action just feel so so good I love it
-Ink vac usage has been improving...I still feel it needs a tweak
-Crab tank needs a slight buff why
It cannot even break a tenta brella shield without wasting 3/4 of its special (no offense I love tenta but no basic weapon should invalidate a specialand dies to everything super quick

Also I don't know how but somehow that matchmaking is better in Turf war than ranked?!?!
I mean most times fire vs grass is can sometime be one sided but fire vs water is pretty balanced (I mena there have been some stomps, but for the most parts it is almost tied in percent with the victory only winning by 2 or 3 percent
Zerg rush is pretty popular but so is hyrda wall outs, and the tenta and booyah spam squads are a thing

I also discover something weird.....aparently you can stack taticoolers, if it is your and then you swim to a teammates, I think it just extends the duration but I do see how that can be pretty powerful in later metas form a taticooler runway for rainmaker to get MS boost all the way to tower

@Award you can change the splafest tee main ability (it only cost 6 ability points to do so....so technically you can have ninja squid tee for splatfest)
 
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Cephalobro

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The Wave Rider actually does not become invincible until it starts speeding.

Also, can they nerf the Clash Blaster's range a bit? It's simply too much range for a weapon that can splat easily.

On some positivity, this Splatfest gave me a great opportunity to farm so much money since for the time being, the only thing I'm going to spend on the Sell-Out Machine are the Conch Shells.
 
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Award

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Splatfest has been fun been an even split for the most part which I am happy about
But here are a few of my takeaways
-Tenta brella is so much fun in TW
-L-3 and .96 gal with intensify action just feel so so good I love it
-Ink vac usage has been improving...I still feel it needs a tweak
-Crab tank needs a slight buff why
It cannot even break a tenta brella shield without wasting 3/4 of its special (no offense I love tenta but no basic weapon should invalidate a specialand dies to everything super quick

Also I don't know how but somehow that matchmaking is better in Turf war than ranked?!?!
I mean most times fire vs grass is can sometime be one sided but fire vs water is pretty balanced (I mena there have been some stomps, but for the most parts it is almost tied in percent with the victory only winning by 2 or 3 percent
Zerg rush is pretty popular but so is hyrda wall outs, and the tenta and booyah spam squads are a thing

I also discover something weird.....aparently you can stack taticoolers, if it is your and then you swim to a teammates, I think it just extends the duration but I do see how that can be pretty powerful in later metas form a taticooler runway for rainmaker to get MS boost all the way to tower

@Award you can change the splafest tee main ability (it only cost 6 ability points to do so....so technically you can have ninja squid tee for splatfest)
Tbh I don't love doing the splosh Zerg thing, it was mostly an experiment. I want that meta to die in a hole :) I wouldn't waste ap on that.

But I may try tenta more. I did it a little after the splosh thing and was really reeaally bad at it. Poor teammates. Maybe I'll try again. You have me tempted by the l3 and 96 intensify though. I haven't done 96 since it was s1 ultra meta and learned to loathe it! Never really dipped into the nozzle nose fad but messed with it sometimes with dolphin in s1. Might as well give it some fest love!

Though I have moray PTSD regarding nozzle noses, I remember every time I tried one it happened always be on moray. Watch, it'll be mahi this time.
 
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Award

Squid Savior From the Future
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Dec 18, 2015
Messages
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Splatfest has been fun been an even split for the most part which I am happy about
But here are a few of my takeaways
-Tenta brella is so much fun in TW
-L-3 and .96 gal with intensify action just feel so so good I love it
-Ink vac usage has been improving...I still feel it needs a tweak
-Crab tank needs a slight buff why
It cannot even break a tenta brella shield without wasting 3/4 of its special (no offense I love tenta but no basic weapon should invalidate a specialand dies to everything super quick

Also I don't know how but somehow that matchmaking is better in Turf war than ranked?!?!
I mean most times fire vs grass is can sometime be one sided but fire vs water is pretty balanced (I mena there have been some stomps, but for the most parts it is almost tied in percent with the victory only winning by 2 or 3 percent
Zerg rush is pretty popular but so is hyrda wall outs, and the tenta and booyah spam squads are a thing

I also discover something weird.....aparently you can stack taticoolers, if it is your and then you swim to a teammates, I think it just extends the duration but I do see how that can be pretty powerful in later metas form a taticooler runway for rainmaker to get MS boost all the way to tower

@Award you can change the splafest tee main ability (it only cost 6 ability points to do so....so technically you can have ninja squid tee for splatfest)
Oh And matchmaking is definitely, I won't say better, I'll say less bad in tw. That's one reason I think it's player population based and ranked outside Japan doesn't work well and maybe the game needs to be broken or rank removed. I just don't think there's enough players of a given rank/skill to properly matchmake and never will be for Splatoon. It needs something other than a ladder. I'm sure it's fine in Japan, as the number 1 selling game of 2022...

Not quite like that here in Call of Duty war shooter world.
 

Elbowtross

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Didn't want to add much to this cuz it seems as if it spiraled out of the whole glitches and exploits to general splatoon issues but whatever.

Ahh, Arowanna was bugged....I knew there was a thing with arowanna gone a while, and I knew they redesigned it, but I must have been mixing the bug with the S2 remodel? I mostly remember "what happened to Arrowanna" conversations :)
Also yes Arowanna did get changed in 1 as it had palm trees added to block sniper sightlines, but it wasn't a drastic change like urchin so I don't think the map was ever removed from rotation. At least from what I remember

Anyways I wanted to give a few gripes about tenta missiles, y'know, everyone's favorite special. I'll at least give credit to the devs for not putting it on any sorta all-round good easy weapon e.g. Splattershot, N-Zap, shooters in general. However flingza and reef lux don't seem to have any problem spamming them at all. Imo I think that missiles should have a grace period like every other special. What do I mean by "grace period" you might ask. Well take ink storm
as an example, when you deploy ink storm the special meter starts draining and you can't build special until the special is done. Tenta missiles don't have that and if it did it would curb some of this spam that's been going around. Now due to how missiles work it's variable on it's duration so I'd say just make it a flat 5 or 6 seconds or something. I'm fine with missiles being a strong special, just have it be you actually have to use them at the right time instead of pumping them out all the time and hoping others can take advantage of them.

It's also somewhat funny how hammerhead now has the same problem as walleye with it being too easy to spawn camp. Something the original stage didn't have much of an issue with afaik. A shame they put so much work into revamping that stage just for us to end up with another walleye warehouse. And I don't even want to talk about mahi mahi. Also mincemeat being described as "just mid and no spawn" makes a lot of sense looking at it now. I'm almost starting to worry how flounder heights is going to end up. I guess all I can do is cross my fingers and hope.
 

Award

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Messages
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Lag + Ultrastamp is still a real problem. I talked about the lightning-speed stamps. Yesterday there was a stamp trapped in the corner at the right of the ramp on Inkblot. We had 3 squids shooting from above the ramp, yet hitting nothing. Then suddenly all 3 of us splat at once and the stamper is up on the main platform past us without having ever traveled there. That of course let them push the RM to win. You can't dodge an attack you can't see until after it happens!

Also getting annoyed at ranked losses due to "disconnections"/comm error, when the system KNOWS I did not disconnect, because it did not warn/ban me for disconnecting. Why is it counted as a loss when the system shows it knows it wasn't me that disconnected?

@Saber I may have to slightly take back my praise of TW matchmaking. It was pretty ok, C+, not total failure on Friday night. Then Saturday it was starting to get pretty rocky. By Sunday it was a deplorable trash heap like the worst of rank-up ranked battles. :) Which is actually not new, I remember the same pattern in S2 and late S1 after they introduced the fes power sytem. Which also highlights, IMO the idea that it's player population based, where by the end of splatfest population dwindles heavily due to everyone already having their snails, the alt accounts grinding and messing it up, people messing with weapons (mea culpa tenta), etc. I wasn't matched against many super teams or pro players, mostly I was matched with teams that could not shoot.

Granted, by the end I was playing with your recommended weaps. .96 went well. L3...IDK, I have moments it works well, moments it does not, and I just can't really get a rhythm going with it. Not bad though. .96 feels too "meta" still...maybe just memory of S1 playing a role. Tenta...OMG I can not figure out how to play that thing at all!! I have the best of luck trying to use it's 1hko (but then why not play roller?) and my tent deployment is terrible. And while I'm working on figuring that out I forget to drop beacons. I'm just so, so very bad with it. I just get myself killed over and over. Although, it's a little hard to gauge because every time I tried it it ended up on Mahi (I TOLD YOU SO!!) and I somehow also got terrible teams each time (when I'm sucking horribly with the tent, but somehow went 3/6....and got best overall splatter/best enemy splatter, and I see my teammates were 1/6, 0/10, 2/5......did I suck? Or am I a tent pro? It's very hard to tell. :) )

I then went backed to my ranked experiment on the alt for a while after fest ended. Wow. Those rank up matchmade battles..... 2 rank-up battles (B+ to A-) pending. 1 win, 6 losses.... One of the matches, the entire enemy team had "A rank" badges. You don't get the A badge until you get to A (not A-)...which means the rank up battle pitted B+ (or worse) players against a full squad of confirmed A players, 2 ranks above (or more, because they could be A+, same badge, or could be S and didn't update their badge).... B.R.O.K.E.N. ! Completely, shamelessly broken. And unfair. And just unfun.

I proceeded the loop of going back to b+ and winning 5/1 or 5/0 W/L sweeps (same as with S/S+ on the other account), then back, to 2 pending rank up battles, both wiping out again. Over the course of days I've played THIRTEEN rank-up series, plus all the forced 5/3 series to get more rank-up attempts before FINALLY getting lucky with an RM lucky match and actually escaping the B's. That is WORSE than any rank up even on the main account. This is the worst the ranking has ever been, even by S3 standards. Something went horribly wrong vs a month or so ago and it's just near impossible to win a rank up by anything by luck and attrition.

Mostly bad teams rather than OP opponents, which is new in S3. I previously didn't have a problem with my teams, it was the OP enemies I had issue with. This time enemies are normal, teammates are noobs. I legit had one match where one of my teammates had a carbon and just inked in circles near spawn. Not even base, just spawn. Either it was My First Splat Zones kids, or it was a griefer. This is a B+ to A- rank up battle....there should not be players inking circles near spawn..... it's not near elite play but it should at least be competent play.

Then I get rounds on museum where I had charger, and my team had 2 bloblobbers, and BOTH just stand on the sniping platform by the revolving doors the entire match, hogging the sniping vantage points, not being effective, and leaving nothing but a lone brush out in mid on the zone. We can't all be on the platform, so I had to take my charger and go aggro down at the zone. I still did better than them, lol, but needless to say we lost (you can't tell me those two weren't playing together in an Open battle and the matchmaker put them against a Series team... which I still believe happens often and explains the seriously coordinated OP teams. And this unfortunatley coordinated sandlot team. )

After getting close to trying to punch players through the screen, I decided to NGAF and I equipped my Zergaloosh gambit build (a little under-equipped on alt....not a lot of clothing yet.) So I rush to enemy base, and take out their tristringer. Over and over and over and over and over again, sharking up in their base on SZ Gorge. I feel really bad. It's the jerkiest thing to do in Splatoon, and I hate when anyone does it and I was the one doing it. It sucks. Sorry anonymous tristringer dude. So I left a 3v3 with no snipers/anchors for the team at the zone ,and of course sharked around taking out their other players when they came through on occasion leaving 3v1/3v2 with no snipers/anchors. And half-way through I noticed that the zone was in enemy control.....and not going back...nobody was actually claiming the zone...... So I had to drop back from sharking and go ink the zone myself. I just ran in concentric circles around the pillar inking and taking out everyone that came down (including poor tristringer dude...he couldn't get away from me anywhere...), we did win though! Played another zerg rush zones match, another win. Map change. So I try to press my luck and try to go for the rank-up. Luckily I got a good team for once and we actually won, and I actually got out of B on the alt thanks to the zerg rush and some luck.

Then into A-....oh dear. I think I'm about to go negative points for the first time ever. That didnt' even happen in S/S+ on other account where I'd win 5 straight games back to the losing series rank up battles. Losses across the board. Bad luck and Incompetent teams still against competent enemies. I decided to push my luck with the zerg rush into RM (map change), Inkblot. I rush the enemy base, with gambit (!) and nobody is there, not even the charger. 5 seconds later they win by KO....... So they counter-zerg-rushed me, except they did it all at once. It's not a big map, so my rush left a 3v4. Even their anchor was on the rush. I watched the replay and all for of them just moved in one continuous line, my 3 were wiped by the shield pop, they rushed the base all together, my 3 were wiped out again the moment the fed single file at them, I was missing trying my failed zerg rush......over in, what, 25 seconds? No enemies ever came back to their base to splat.....my team never actually killed anyone... So I went back to my charger fast. The rest of the matches were all cases of teams that just can't shoot, you watch the replay on the map, and you just see them all move forward, approach an enemy, and die instantly. So much of the games I'm playing 1v3, 1v4. If I don't die, I have to keep falling back to base. Just completely devoid of fun. Even when it was bad, fest was more fun than that.

Of course, after fest, I'm guessing there was a lack of player population in ranked. Which again goes back to: There are simply not enough Splatoon players outside Japan to fill out ranks at any one time, to make ANY ladder in this game work AT ALL. They need to acknowledge this even "secretly" and change the game to reflect reality rather than pretending there is a ladder. Ranked exists in Japan only. Which is why they don't care. It works in the only place that matters for the game. If I limitlessly grind could I get up to X (or whatever the current max S+ is?) Maybe. But it's not fun. At all. And that's sad because the modes are so much fun. They'd be more fun if they didn't play rank gatcha. As is, outside Japan, ranked is an incomplete, broken game, that I'm not sure can actually be fixed. But at least they could make it more fun by maybe "unbalancing" things to make imbalanced teams more playable.

Here's a thought, if I play on my Japan NSO account, and select Japan splatfest team, will it put me on the Japanese matchmaking, or would I need my Switch to be actually set as Japan region? It would be more fun on Japan servers, even with 800 pings, I bet. $20 says ranked matchmaking in Japan works just fine. It's the most popular retail game in the country, it's basically CoD/Destiny2/R6Siege there.


Didn't want to add much to this cuz it seems as if it spiraled out of the whole glitches and exploits to general splatoon issues but whatever.



Also yes Arowanna did get changed in 1 as it had palm trees added to block sniper sightlines, but it wasn't a drastic change like urchin so I don't think the map was ever removed from rotation. At least from what I remember

Anyways I wanted to give a few gripes about tenta missiles, y'know, everyone's favorite special. I'll at least give credit to the devs for not putting it on any sorta all-round good easy weapon e.g. Splattershot, N-Zap, shooters in general. However flingza and reef lux don't seem to have any problem spamming them at all. Imo I think that missiles should have a grace period like every other special. What do I mean by "grace period" you might ask. Well take ink storm
as an example, when you deploy ink storm the special meter starts draining and you can't build special until the special is done. Tenta missiles don't have that and if it did it would curb some of this spam that's been going around. Now due to how missiles work it's variable on it's duration so I'd say just make it a flat 5 or 6 seconds or something. I'm fine with missiles being a strong special, just have it be you actually have to use them at the right time instead of pumping them out all the time and hoping others can take advantage of them.

It's also somewhat funny how hammerhead now has the same problem as walleye with it being too easy to spawn camp. Something the original stage didn't have much of an issue with afaik. A shame they put so much work into revamping that stage just for us to end up with another walleye warehouse. And I don't even want to talk about mahi mahi. Also mincemeat being described as "just mid and no spawn" makes a lot of sense looking at it now. I'm almost starting to worry how flounder heights is going to end up. I guess all I can do is cross my fingers and hope.
The palm trees! Yeah I remember that! It was definitley missing for a month or two though.

That's a good thought on missiles. Even as a flinga semi-main, I get irritated by the missile spam. (Don't judge, I loved Flingza when it launched in S2 and everyone laughed at it!) I've played enough matches with 2 flingzas, or a flinga and reeflux, where it's literally missile spam ever 15 seconds and it's not pleasant to play.

My biggest problem with missiles actually isn't even the frequency. The worst part about is that you can be hit by missiles you don't know you're going to get hit by because it's not locked onto you, so you move through a path a teammate was previously located in that had missiles locked on them and see the rings much too late, only to be boxed into a corner, dying to it. It's the only special you can be killed by someone else being targeted and having left the area where you can't see the rings until it's too late because they camera angles aren't really going to show it until you're on it. Sometimes you know, sometimes you don't, but no other special allows you to be killed by an invisible attack until you're on it.

Spot on with Walleye, I think I mentioned some pages ago that a lot of the "new" maps seem to be reworked old ones, or a combo of 2. Hammerhead=walleye + Mackerel), Gorge = Pirhanna Pit + Skate Park, metalworks = anchov + musselforge, undertow = arrowanna, hagglefish = starfish mainstage + old mahi. There's definitely some reskinning of tweaked map designs/updates. Mahi is kind of also anchov plus something very evil.

I can't wait to see what future map is basically Moray :p This is the splatoon team. They won't let us escape that misery.
 
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Saber

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Lag + Ultrastamp is still a real problem. I talked about the lightning-speed stamps. Yesterday there was a stamp trapped in the corner at the right of the ramp on Inkblot. We had 3 squids shooting from above the ramp, yet hitting nothing. Then suddenly all 3 of us splat at once and the stamper is up on the main platform past us without having ever traveled there. That of course let them push the RM to win. You can't dodge an attack you can't see until after it happens!

Also getting annoyed at ranked losses due to "disconnections"/comm error, when the system KNOWS I did not disconnect, because it did not warn/ban me for disconnecting. Why is it counted as a loss when the system shows it knows it wasn't me that disconnected?

@Saber I may have to slightly take back my praise of TW matchmaking. It was pretty ok, C+, not total failure on Friday night. Then Saturday it was starting to get pretty rocky. By Sunday it was a deplorable trash heap like the worst of rank-up ranked battles. :) Which is actually not new, I remember the same pattern in S2 and late S1 after they introduced the fes power sytem. Which also highlights, IMO the idea that it's player population based, where by the end of splatfest population dwindles heavily due to everyone already having their snails, the alt accounts grinding and messing it up, people messing with weapons (mea culpa tenta), etc. I wasn't matched against many super teams or pro players, mostly I was matched with teams that could not shoot.

Granted, by the end I was playing with your recommended weaps. .96 went well. L3...IDK, I have moments it works well, moments it does not, and I just can't really get a rhythm going with it. Not bad though. .96 feels too "meta" still...maybe just memory of S1 playing a role. Tenta...OMG I can not figure out how to play that thing at all!! I have the best of luck trying to use it's 1hko (but then why not play roller?) and my tent deployment is terrible. And while I'm working on figuring that out I forget to drop beacons. I'm just so, so very bad with it. I just get myself killed over and over. Although, it's a little hard to gauge because every time I tried it it ended up on Mahi (I TOLD YOU SO!!) and I somehow also got terrible teams each time (when I'm sucking horribly with the tent, but somehow went 3/6....and got best overall splatter/best enemy splatter, and I see my teammates were 1/6, 0/10, 2/5......did I suck? Or am I a tent pro? It's very hard to tell. :) )

I then went backed to my ranked experiment on the alt for a while after fest ended. Wow. Those rank up matchmade battles..... 2 rank-up battles (B+ to A-) pending. 1 win, 6 losses.... One of the matches, the entire enemy team had "A rank" badges. You don't get the A badge until you get to A (not A-)...which means the rank up battle pitted B+ (or worse) players against a full squad of confirmed A players, 2 ranks above (or more, because they could be A+, same badge, or could be S and didn't update their badge).... B.R.O.K.E.N. ! Completely, shamelessly broken. And unfair. And just unfun.

I proceeded the loop of going back to b+ and winning 5/1 or 5/0 W/L sweeps (same as with S/S+ on the other account), then back, to 2 pending rank up battles, both wiping out again. Over the course of days I've played THIRTEEN rank-up series, plus all the forced 5/3 series to get more rank-up attempts before FINALLY getting lucky with an RM lucky match and actually escaping the B's. That is WORSE than any rank up even on the main account. This is the worst the ranking has ever been, even by S3 standards. Something went horribly wrong vs a month or so ago and it's just near impossible to win a rank up by anything by luck and attrition.

Mostly bad teams rather than OP opponents, which is new in S3. I previously didn't have a problem with my teams, it was the OP enemies I had issue with. This time enemies are normal, teammates are noobs. I legit had one match where one of my teammates had a carbon and just inked in circles near spawn. Not even base, just spawn. Either it was My First Splat Zones kids, or it was a griefer. This is a B+ to A- rank up battle....there should not be players inking circles near spawn..... it's not near elite play but it should at least be competent play.

Then I get rounds on museum where I had charger, and my team had 2 bloblobbers, and BOTH just stand on the sniping platform by the revolving doors the entire match, hogging the sniping vantage points, not being effective, and leaving nothing but a lone brush out in mid on the zone. We can't all be on the platform, so I had to take my charger and go aggro down at the zone. I still did better than them, lol, but needless to say we lost (you can't tell me those two weren't playing together in an Open battle and the matchmaker put them against a Series team... which I still believe happens often and explains the seriously coordinated OP teams. And this unfortunatley coordinated sandlot team. )

After getting close to trying to punch players through the screen, I decided to NGAF and I equipped my Zergaloosh gambit build (a little under-equipped on alt....not a lot of clothing yet.) So I rush to enemy base, and take out their tristringer. Over and over and over and over and over again, sharking up in their base on SZ Gorge. I feel really bad. It's the jerkiest thing to do in Splatoon, and I hate when anyone does it and I was the one doing it. It sucks. Sorry anonymous tristringer dude. So I left a 3v3 with no snipers/anchors for the team at the zone ,and of course sharked around taking out their other players when they came through on occasion leaving 3v1/3v2 with no snipers/anchors. And half-way through I noticed that the zone was in enemy control.....and not going back...nobody was actually claiming the zone...... So I had to drop back from sharking and go ink the zone myself. I just ran in concentric circles around the pillar inking and taking out everyone that came down (including poor tristringer dude...he couldn't get away from me anywhere...), we did win though! Played another zerg rush zones match, another win. Map change. So I try to press my luck and try to go for the rank-up. Luckily I got a good team for once and we actually won, and I actually got out of B on the alt thanks to the zerg rush and some luck.

Then into A-....oh dear. I think I'm about to go negative points for the first time ever. That didnt' even happen in S/S+ on other account where I'd win 5 straight games back to the losing series rank up battles. Losses across the board. Bad luck and Incompetent teams still against competent enemies. I decided to push my luck with the zerg rush into RM (map change), Inkblot. I rush the enemy base, with gambit (!) and nobody is there, not even the charger. 5 seconds later they win by KO....... So they counter-zerg-rushed me, except they did it all at once. It's not a big map, so my rush left a 3v4. Even their anchor was on the rush. I watched the replay and all for of them just moved in one continuous line, my 3 were wiped by the shield pop, they rushed the base all together, my 3 were wiped out again the moment the fed single file at them, I was missing trying my failed zerg rush......over in, what, 25 seconds? No enemies ever came back to their base to splat.....my team never actually killed anyone... So I went back to my charger fast. The rest of the matches were all cases of teams that just can't shoot, you watch the replay on the map, and you just see them all move forward, approach an enemy, and die instantly. So much of the games I'm playing 1v3, 1v4. If I don't die, I have to keep falling back to base. Just completely devoid of fun. Even when it was bad, fest was more fun than that.

Of course, after fest, I'm guessing there was a lack of player population in ranked. Which again goes back to: There are simply not enough Splatoon players outside Japan to fill out ranks at any one time, to make ANY ladder in this game work AT ALL. They need to acknowledge this even "secretly" and change the game to reflect reality rather than pretending there is a ladder. Ranked exists in Japan only. Which is why they don't care. It works in the only place that matters for the game. If I limitlessly grind could I get up to X (or whatever the current max S+ is?) Maybe. But it's not fun. At all. And that's sad because the modes are so much fun. They'd be more fun if they didn't play rank gatcha. As is, outside Japan, ranked is an incomplete, broken game, that I'm not sure can actually be fixed. But at least they could make it more fun by maybe "unbalancing" things to make imbalanced teams more playable.

Here's a thought, if I play on my Japan NSO account, and select Japan splatfest team, will it put me on the Japanese matchmaking, or would I need my Switch to be actually set as Japan region? It would be more fun on Japan servers, even with 800 pings, I bet. $20 says ranked matchmaking in Japan works just fine. It's the most popular retail game in the country, it's basically CoD/Destiny2/R6Siege there.




The palm trees! Yeah I remember that! It was definitley missing for a month or two though.

That's a good thought on missiles. Even as a flinga semi-main, I get irritated by the missile spam. (Don't judge, I loved Flingza when it launched in S2 and everyone laughed at it!) I've played enough matches with 2 flingzas, or a flinga and reeflux, where it's literally missile spam ever 15 seconds and it's not pleasant to play.

My biggest problem with missiles actually isn't even the frequency. The worst part about is that you can be hit by missiles you don't know you're going to get hit by because it's not locked onto you, so you move through a path a teammate was previously located in that had missiles locked on them and see the rings much too late, only to be boxed into a corner, dying to it. It's the only special you can be killed by someone else being targeted and having left the area where you can't see the rings until it's too late because they camera angles aren't really going to show it until you're on it. Sometimes you know, sometimes you don't, but no other special allows you to be killed by an invisible attack until you're on it.

Spot on with Walleye, I think I mentioned some pages ago that a lot of the "new" maps seem to be reworked old ones, or a combo of 2. Hammerhead=walleye + Mackerel), Gorge = Pirhanna Pit + Skate Park, metalworks = anchov + musselforge, undertow = arrowanna, hagglefish = starfish mainstage + old mahi. There's definitely some reskinning of tweaked map designs/updates. Mahi is kind of also anchov plus something very evil.

I can't wait to see what future map is basically Moray :p This is the splatoon team. They won't let us escape that misery.

I will admit I was team fire and was experience decent game but I realized it was partially due to me carrying teams, when I played a weapon I did not know, welp let just say it went down hill quick
On the plus side got a lot of either pure gear or rerolled into semi pures (1 main 1 sub and 2 sub of their usual typing) so the splatfest was kind in that reguards....but I really want my anchor LS t-shirt
As for .96 gal Yeah I grown to enjoy using it even taken it to ranked a few time, L-3 too I taken into ranked, it is very good if you have the room to move it can easily wall out a zone with its fast painting power and crab tank, it can flank pretty decent too but you just have to get used to the idea of not jumping.
It ground aim is great and even with IA keeping ground, tbh it is better to squid roll than to jump...I won't say it doesn't require courage but your a charger main looking death in the eye and holding still is the norm :cool:
Tenta I am actually jealous I can spam shield and block my teammates well (I basically turn into Reinhardt in S3 with it) but I have to admit my ohko are always off and end up two shotting cuz I play it back like a splattershot pro, but the feeling of denying a shot of a trizooka or invalidating the entirety of crab tank special
(WHICH BTW Crab NEEDS a object shredder buff at least to tenta shield cuz that isn't fair)
though even despite my litte aside it is super super satsifying to just deny special and other weapons, one of these day we will just have to team up, and see the mayhem our off meta picks will cause (@The Salamander King your welcome to join in on the chaos too 😁)

Yeah stupid teammates have been the norm this week, had a group superjumping to each other.....and museum to the ledge.......IT IS legit 2 second swim but they superjumping into bombs and sniper fire!!!!!
Also yeah LDE really really REALLY need a nerf in this Decemeber patch, just the number of games where the tide is changed and you just get walled out because an enemy team can WM1 and bomb spam is upsetting to say the least, it is better than having no momentum in the fight whatsoever but equally as frustrating to know you lost simply cuz the enemy team was basically waiting for you to reach 30 before they decided to play

On the PLUS SIDe I did have a legendary moment this week a once in a lifetime experience,
Me using squiffer and an eliter ended up in a 1v1 on mincemeat after everyone else in the lobby got DC'd, but we got to play out the rest of the match...so instead of being tryhards we decided chill and squid party (the eliter was winning by 3 pts and the idea of being in a 1v1 ranked match was funny so I let them have the W and friended them)
I saved that replay, just 2 sniper squidbagging in defiance of a connection error, best moment of my S3 playthrough
 

Award

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I will admit I was team fire and was experience decent game but I realized it was partially due to me carrying teams, when I played a weapon I did not know, welp let just say it went down hill quick
On the plus side got a lot of either pure gear or rerolled into semi pures (1 main 1 sub and 2 sub of their usual typing) so the splatfest was kind in that reguards....but I really want my anchor LS t-shirt
As for .96 gal Yeah I grown to enjoy using it even taken it to ranked a few time, L-3 too I taken into ranked, it is very good if you have the room to move it can easily wall out a zone with its fast painting power and crab tank, it can flank pretty decent too but you just have to get used to the idea of not jumping.
It ground aim is great and even with IA keeping ground, tbh it is better to squid roll than to jump...I won't say it doesn't require courage but your a charger main looking death in the eye and holding still is the norm :cool:
Tenta I am actually jealous I can spam shield and block my teammates well (I basically turn into Reinhardt in S3 with it) but I have to admit my ohko are always off and end up two shotting cuz I play it back like a splattershot pro, but the feeling of denying a shot of a trizooka or invalidating the entirety of crab tank special
(WHICH BTW Crab NEEDS a object shredder buff at least to tenta shield cuz that isn't fair)
though even despite my litte aside it is super super satsifying to just deny special and other weapons, one of these day we will just have to team up, and see the mayhem our off meta picks will cause (@The Salamander King your welcome to join in on the chaos too 😁)

Yeah stupid teammates have been the norm this week, had a group superjumping to each other.....and museum to the ledge.......IT IS legit 2 second swim but they superjumping into bombs and sniper fire!!!!!
Also yeah LDE really really REALLY need a nerf in this Decemeber patch, just the number of games where the tide is changed and you just get walled out because an enemy team can WM1 and bomb spam is upsetting to say the least, it is better than having no momentum in the fight whatsoever but equally as frustrating to know you lost simply cuz the enemy team was basically waiting for you to reach 30 before they decided to play

On the PLUS SIDe I did have a legendary moment this week a once in a lifetime experience,
Me using squiffer and an eliter ended up in a 1v1 on mincemeat after everyone else in the lobby got DC'd, but we got to play out the rest of the match...so instead of being tryhards we decided chill and squid party (the eliter was winning by 3 pts and the idea of being in a 1v1 ranked match was funny so I let them have the W and friended them)
I saved that replay, just 2 sniper squidbagging in defiance of a connection error, best moment of my S3 playthrough

I still can't believe Big Man won every single category. So much for the Fuka meta. :) I'll forever wear that 100x battle win with pride, even if the team lost. I still can't figure out the purpose of "pro" battles. The battles seem the same, the scores in the end don't seem too important, and the play doesn't seem that different. IDK why they have them or who plays them. I played some last time, but didn't bother this time.

LOL on carrying, yeah, that's the thing. When I did the spolooh thing, or brought out dynamo, even tried splash to see what meta is like for a while, things went much better. Even with 96 (though it was variable.) But yeah, L3 and especially Tenta...where I sucked, if I wasn't carrying, things were not great. Still better than ranked though because in ranked even carrying seldom helps :rolleyes: Tenta was continuous suckage. L3 I had moments of brilliance followed by moments of walking into rolling rollers repeatedly . I'd go back and forth between "aww yeah, this thing is awesome, and I'm unstoppable!" to "how do u woomy?"

I'd be tempted to take .96 into ranked when things are just not working. L3....definitely not there yet. 96 can get REALLY bogged down when the action is hyper-speed and your putt putt pace can't keep up with the action (double if you're 1v3/1v4.) H3 can keep up....but....it does involve sucking less than I do. That's my one complaint with 96 is it's an amazing compliment weapon but it's hard to carry hard soloing for the team with it based purely on it's limited splat rate against multisquids. I did secure an attacking tricolor with it, and I'm the one that grabbed the signal and kept the base covered with sprinkler, so it has serious merit but I'd be a little fearful of ranked where I have 3 squids incoming, one with a tank, one dapple duelie zipping all over, and some octoshot and it's just me going "putt, putt, putt, putt, putt" the whole time...

What does IA do for H3 if not jumping? I was trying to jump, actually specifically because of IA. Which with nozzle is like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. It may be easier without it, but then I'm not sure what IA helped with?

Haha, I can't do much with tenta, but the ohko is the one thing I'm decent with on it....after roller, charger, blaster mains, it feels normal. My only problem with it is it's a worse blaster, a slower roller, and a less overwhelming dynamo, so I can't quite work out it's niche. But it absolutely IS satisfying to take down a crab-tank from a mid-air drop, with a single double-barreled umbrella blast like some mission impossible stunt :cool: Technically it's not different from doing it with a roller or blaster, but somehow it just feels so much more satisfying :) My problem is pretty much ALL my kills with it are ohko's and if you miss......you're doomed. I can't land ranged shots in sequence fast enough to make it very deadly.

We DEFINITELY have to team up! That would be fun! Of course I probably can't quite keep up with you two so I'm sure I'd be the relative noob :)

That's the other reason superjumping needs to be removed. It's too dangerous when advantaged opponents have it. And it's too dangerous when disadvantaged teammates have it! :) Though my alt Zergaloosh build is now QSJ+SSU+Stealth jump so I can drop in to danger over and over screaming "YOLOOOOO" the whole time. But it doesn't matter. B+, S+....all I see is teammates jumping to their doom. Not that we all don't do it, but we usually learn it's unsafe after the first time it fails..... a lot of squids don't seem to know that swimming from spawn is viable.... On the matchmaker, I don't really get how there's these cycles where you either get paired with stupid teammates one week, or OP enemies another week...and then randomly one day you get OP teammates like it just stopped caring... which always feels weird because you spend a week losing while getting 3 gold badges best splatter, best objective pusher, best assister, most targeted, best SJ. Then you spend one rotation getting like 1 silver trophy and nothing else because your team somehow KO'd before you even got to mid :)


I've noticed that with LDE! It's annoing, but yeah its effect on TW is ugly with the amount of times, you're exactly right, they just don't really play at all and that at 30 suddenly the match goes from normal to just OP curbstomp because they just started up when it mattered. That's always been a TW flaw, but LDE makes it ugly. I went outside to the plaza one time and almost every squid out there had the same stupid LDE glasses on :)

That 1v1 story is fantastic! I had a similar 1v1 match weeks ago, but, sadly it went to tryhard, and he kept splatting me then I was going after him after that. The "wipeout" screen every time either of you splat each other is pretty funny though...... :)
 

The Salamander King

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I finally watched the video. One good thing is most of what you said is stuff I've already been aware of, so there wasn't, tactically a lot of new info. Which is good. I didn't take notes so I'll have to watch again for details. I think the matchmaking being the crux of it was already a known quantity, but like I said above ,the problem is, when the matchmaking being bad is a foundation of the game, the game needs to be changed to accomodate the matchmaking, if they can't make the matchmaking fix the game. I.E. the things that make it most broken when team balance is bad, need to be changed to facilitate more back and forth play between badly mismatched teams. They can't seem to control whatever is wrong with matchmaking, so they need to change what they can control (gameplay) to accommodate the matchmaker fail. At least for solo.
So I thought long and hard about what would happen if they removed superjumping from the game and I came up with two main things: Your snowballing problem does not get fixed, and an entire group of weapons become borderline useless.

The issue you're having is that you're being matched with players at a higher level than you that wipe your team right off the bat and win the game in 30 seconds, yes? What happens if they take superjumping out of the game? I don't think anything would change in the end. One team is still going to outspeed and outperform the other and that better team is still going to get an early wipe and push in immediately. The final results of the match will stay the same, it will just take 40 seconds now instead of 30. Improving the matchmaker fixes this issue. Removing superjumps does not.

But potentially more importantly; removing superjumps is a severe nerf to all long range weapons. One of the main roles of anchor weapons is to stay safe and be a beakon for their more aggressive teammates to jump to. Removing superjumps turns the anchor role into a complete liability (it already borderline was in S2, but that's a discussion for a different day). If anchors are weak they are going to get played less, and fewer anchors means the zerg rush is going to get a lot more common and more effective because there won't be any chargers/splatlings/etc. to shut them down.

What would actually help quell snowballing? New weapon kits, that's what! Specifically weapon kits with one of 4 specials, being Killer Wail, Booyah Bomb, Inkstorm, and yes, Tentamissiles. These are initiation specials and they're designed to get your team back in after you lose control. Popping initiation specials normally forces the pushing team to either retreat or scatter, making them much easier to pick off individually. If we look at the new Chill Season trailer, we can see that the new Splattershot Pro has Suction Bomb and Booyah Bomb, and the new Splatershot Nova has Point Sensor and Killer Wail. These will both be solid midrange weapons with strong initiation specials to get back in. We also have a bunch of other unknown weapon kits that will drastically alter the game. This is good for the game and I believe it will help work against the snowballing you're experiencing.

one of these day we will just have to team up, and see the mayhem our off meta picks will cause (@The Salamander King your welcome to join in on the chaos too 😁)
I would love to.
 
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Award

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So yesterday I actually took the 96 and L3 into ranked because the matchmaking was so bad, the lag results were so bad, it literally just didn't matter anymore at all. I got THIIIIS close to taking the stupid tent with me, 'cause why not? :P Ranked is more fun when you treat it as TW, and the game clearly wants me to treat it as TW at this point. I reiterate this is A-, and the A's were not NEARLY this bad a month and a half ago on my other account. IDK what happened, but I still think that it's that basically nobody plays anymore. I'm noticing the same players are in lobbies in ranked all the time now. When you start recognizing the names, you know there's a limited player pool.... When you start recognizing the Japanese names you KNOW you're in trouble!

Charger? Constant losses. Eliter? Constant losses? Zergaloosh? One big win, then constant losses, and instant OHKO's to a .52 that wasn't even looking at me repeatedly. Tristringer? Good play, bad losses. There was one series that was really good and we actually won 4 before losing 3. There were 2 matches that were curb stomps for my team. There were some "good" tight matches yet nearly all of them ended in losses. Somehow I'm still not negative yet, and I don't know how ,because that's a whole lotta losses and not many wins, and there's only so many hours you can play a game you almost never win, even if you're playing very well, if you're taking it seriously. So it's either quit, or just screw around with it. So I don't think I'm experimenting with trying to rank up on that account at all, I'll leave it A- till the reset. Now I'll just screw around with various weapons into the negatives. I'd apologize to my teammates, but who am I kidding, they'll never leave their rank anyway this season, and half of them are probably C's anyway :P

I've at least learned 96 doesn't work in ranked when you have to carry, it's just too slow, even with perfect accuracy you just can't kill and pressure fast enough . When you're carrying you need 2-3 splats at once to push them back, and 96 can't do it. It's a cool setup, but it doesn't work for the "designated carrier" in ranked. Sploosh falls flat if you're dealing with lag. It went really well once, twice I did really well but the team couldn't claim the zone behind me so despite constant enemy wipes it did no good, and then after lag started making me go splat whenever I approached enemies without ever even getiting into range, and/or hammer would go through them, I had to switch out (it should be noted the majority of enemy teams seemd to be majority Japanese, so LOL pings...and also speaks of low player population when they're dragging Japan into global battles, because Japan specifically didn't want to be in laggy global battles and Nintendo likes to please Japan which is why they ostensibly stopped global matchmaking after S1.)

By the latter part of the evening I had, I think it was 8 in a row battles that were over in under 40 seconds. Plus a few others earlier in the evening. I had one match with charger where there was an inkbrush that just kept coming to base in clam blitz to harass the charger.....on mahi..... A 1v1 charger inkbrush duel on mahi is not a good thing. Fortunatley my team saw this and tried to flush him out. Unfortunately both our rushdown shooters failed repeatedly to kill the brush while I kept dodging and trying to 2-shot the inkbrush in CQC while trying to stop incoming clam carriers because the brush controlled our basket. By the end there were 3 or 4 enemy footballs all closing in and I was the only one trying to defend. That's the point I decided to just take the meme weapons into ranked because it just doesn't matter :) I'm sort of borderline between pure rage and laughing my head off. It was never quality matchmaking, but this wasn't anwhere close to this bad a month and a half ago. It went from "bad matchmaking Nintendo needs to fix ASAP" to "this is simply a bad, broken game and people should be angry to have spent money on it." It really just isn't playable as-is for ranked. It's better than crashing on load, but only slightly.


So I thought long and hard about what would happen if they removed superjumping from the game and I came up with two main things: Your snowballing problem does not get fixed, and an entire group of weapons become borderline useless.

The issue you're having is that you're being matched with players at a higher level than you that wipe your team right off the bat and win the game in 30 seconds, yes? What happens if they take superjumping out of the game? I don't think anything would change in the end. One team is still going to outspeed and outperform the other and that better team is still going to get an early wipe and push in immediately. The final results of the match will stay the same, it will just take 40 seconds now instead of 30. Improving the matchmaker fixes this issue. Removing superjumps does not.

But potentially more importantly; removing superjumps is a severe nerf to all long range weapons. One of the main roles of anchor weapons is to stay safe and be a beakon for their more aggressive teammates to jump to. Removing superjumps turns the anchor role into a complete liability (it already borderline was in S2, but that's a discussion for a different day). If anchors are weak they are going to get played less, and fewer anchors means the zerg rush is going to get a lot more common and more effective because there won't be any chargers/splatlings/etc. to shut them down.

What would actually help quell snowballing? New weapon kits, that's what! Specifically weapon kits with one of 4 specials, being Killer Wail, Booyah Bomb, Inkstorm, and yes, Tentamissiles. These are initiation specials and they're designed to get your team back in after you lose control. Popping initiation specials normally forces the pushing team to either retreat or scatter, making them much easier to pick off individually. If we look at the new Chill Season trailer, we can see that the new Splattershot Pro has Suction Bomb and Booyah Bomb, and the new Splatershot Nova has Point Sensor and Killer Wail. These will both be solid midrange weapons with strong initiation specials to get back in. We also have a bunch of other unknown weapon kits that will drastically alter the game. This is good for the game and I believe it will help work against the snowballing you're experiencing.
There's two scenarios, but yes that's the general one. The two scenarios are:
Scenario 1: A superior team that snowballs over time, advancing by attrition, and while my team is somewhat able to hold them off, we never really push beyond maybe first checkpoint at best, while they keep advancing deeper and deeper, maybe to KO, maybe not, but we can never escape the encroaching superjump-fed onslaught of an "infinite" army.

Scenario 2: 30second KO by a team that's wiped instantly and relentlessly.

It's actually scenario 1 that I think the SJ problem exists more for. That is, a team that CAN defend and CAN push but can never get a foothold because the other team is generally superior (and/or has a superior weapon comp), but the team is never able to get a real chance to do so because they are continuously on the defenseive because SJ prevents pressure from ever letting up. Scenario 2, there's not much hope for. The team is so hopelessly outmatched that no matter what opportunity they are given it will never match up to the other team's superior ability. I don't think the existence or lack of SJ has any bearing on that one, half of the time the enemy team never even SJis in that scenario because they almost never die to begin with. As Saber pointed out, LDE is compounding that as well, if you can barely hold them off for 4:30 then in the last 30 or OD they just devastate you.

There's actually a third scenario that's invisible but @Saber has mentioned it as well, is that, and this is part of the "bad matchmaking" there seems to be a true matchmaker status for a player that is designated as the team's carrier. I.E. a higher level player that is matched with weaker teams that makes up an outsize portion of the "team power" that is expected to effectively carry the team. However a designated carrier has to be either SO far and above the rest of the lobby that they by and large truly can solo the lobby by simply outgunning opponents in the extreme, or they can only be a carrier if their team is at least somewhat effective in supporting them. If you were dropped into some of these lobbies, you possibly culd carry that team (some of them I'm not convinced even you could do it, but it would make a difference in win %) I feel like the lobby scenarios from a month a go we had compitent teams that were facing down what were very clearly elite level players and couldn't compare. More recently the trend seems to be that I'm basically going 1v4 against a competent team of average opponents, with little to no backup, or it's a 3v4 where one player on our team is completely dead weight despite the rest of us playing very well and ALMOST getting there, but never quite getting the win, and 3v4 attrition rarely pays off. That's also a scenario where SJ comes heavily into play.

You're not necessarily wrong about removing SJ being a nerf for range, as the frequent top SJ spot as a charger/stringer/hydra/explosh, that should be meaningful to me....but...as the frequent top SJ spot as a brush/roller/sploosh.........I'm weighing that opinion heavily...... ;) In these lobbies being the top SJ spot has less to do with being a solid anchor in a good position and seems to have more do with simply not being dead. :P

But you are right about how it would encourage more zerg rushes, as well, which also is a huge problem. Although, as I've now see the matchmaker to one way from bad to unplayably bad (again, maybe not really a bad matchmaker but not enough players to make meaningful matches with) I'm in favor of removing splatting entirely at this point, and just make it about painting and controlling ground by blocking access and nobody can splat anybody ever.....basically anything extreme that makes the game not completely broken anymore :)

As far as weapon kits, that would be nice if it helps, but my opinion at this point in time is that only if it revitalizes the player base to dramatically grow, or dramatically re-engage will it be better. I think a thinning of player population is the biggest problem entirely for solo q. In reality Christmas is probably the biggest thing to improve the matchmaking by getting a ton more (actual) kids into lobbies. However I have sincere doubts about how long that effect will last, how much it will affect more advanced player lobbies/matchups, and how big a boost it will really give the game. It's suffering player attrition, in terms of ranked anyway, similar to what Halo Infinite had and Destiny 1 had in the latter part, except it had a much, much, much smaller player pool outside Japan to begin with. Weapon match improvements only help if you can put 8 squids of similar skill together to begin with at any given skill level at any given hour of the day, within a sufficiently close geographical distance. And it does not appear to be that easy to do. Then they're taking that already thin player population and dividing it between salmon run and anarchy. Other than boosting the player population and maybe balancing things better, I think the other real fix is just change how modes work, either getting rid of "ranks" or changing rotations so it's not competing with salmon (like they did in S2 that slamon is not ALWAYS available), etc. Which sucks if thats what people want to play, but there's a serious population problem outside of TW I think. Like DIRE. It's harder to hide when you start seeing the same people often.

I would love to.
WOOMY!

I'mma get rekd. But woomy anyway! :)
 

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