It's funny that it took until now for me to realize that I've now technically been a Decavitator main for longer than I've mained any other weapon. It felt like my time on Wiper Deco was longer than that but maybe some part of this stems from the vanilla Wiper being like a weird tertiary that I'd play when I wanted to goof off. It stayed like this from launch all the way until Wiper Deco's release, which would combine with my time maining Wiper Deco for around 15 months, which is much longer than Decav's been out.
I guess I can use the rest of this post to talk about the ranking stuff. This kind of makes it clear exactly how little time I've spent playing X Rank, with me choosing to completely ignore it for almost a whole year and then having two points of activity. I've been playing it more as of this month specifically but my tilting has gotten much worse and my mechanics haven't been great lately either. I'm getting close, 2300 in a few modes, but haven't gotten there despite putting in more effort. It felt very easy to get to 2400 and I could've probably gone at least a little higher had I continued playing since I won like a dozen games in a row to get there and never felt super challenged.
I've spoken to a good handful of people who took a while to reach S+ or in some cases hadn't reached S+ up until I had spoken to them, and to be honest it makes me feel a little bit weird about getting there so quickly. It was quite literally within the first week of the game launching despite me being A-Rank in Splatoon 1. I didn't even play Splatoon 2 and yet apparently I was able to skip the part of the learning process getting from C to S+.
What makes me any different? Was it because I've played so much competitive Smash or is it a matter of me picking up games quickly? Were people that much worse at the game on launch or something, and in that case are a bunch of these people I'm talking to buying the game after launch? I guess it's never taken me more than a few weeks to get back to S+ whenever the season's dropped me down to S even when I was a bit worse at the game than I am now so getting the game at launch probably isn't part of the issue for me.
It hasn't really been said on here, but if you can get past S+0 with any kind of consistency, then it really doesn't matter whether you're S+1 or S+50. All it boils down to is how much you're willing to grind Series out. One of the only times I played Series left me with a 7 streak crown and the only reason that streak stopped was because my end goal was to get back to S+10, which I subsequently won the rank-up battle for. It didn't even take me very long and the difficulty of the games after reaching S+10 didn't change at all.