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The differences between S and S+ Lobbies

Sol64

The RNG God of /r/Splatoon
Joined
May 9, 2015
Messages
459
Location
London
Good evening everyone!

It's actually been a while since i've posted here, i've regressed to a worse than lurker state since my semi active posting in 2015-2016. Some may know me as SolCalibre, but anyways.

I wanted to talk about (my personal) experience with S and S+ Lobbies recently. For the longest while i've actually been struggling to keep my S+ rank and last night I finally succumbed and dropped for the first time in a while down to S, which was expected given the hardships i've had to endure but it was also very annoying and upsetting because I felt like there was nothing I could do.

I've always believed that every team is as strong as its weakest member but in a game where you're pitted totally against randoms... at random. In S+ lobbies,There's a chance, more often than not, that you could get paired against a team that feels like they've been in a team before or just 3 or 4 very strong individual players and then they proceed to wipe you out until they clench the K.O (or you could suffer 5 minutes of struggling to overtake the lead). There's been cases where i've either been on a team that has completely destroyed the other team or have been on a team then destroyed. Rarely, if at all has been a grey area where neutral ground or a mutual struggle has lasted for more than 1 minute before someone took a stronghold of the enemy side and a person or team is pushing the objective. There were also cases where I would end up getting taken out very quickly either by chance or force. The "insta kills" (not making any excuses) seemed common. Unless I was running attack up, I was expecting to hit 3 times with a .52 Gal to kill someone. There's also the cases of full respawn individuals but i'm not gonna talk about that. I just felt I had to constantly adapt to a weird and ever changing meta just to survive. I'd always end up changing skills as opposed to just keeping myself to one build and then relying on self prowess.

In S lobbies, I expected a change so I proceeded to join one and after the course of one evening (let alone a full blown week) and I immediately noticed many different changes. Initially I expected a less "plus" version of the lobby I dropped from and of course, I was right but there's a few more changes that i'm going to include in this section. First off, there were a lot less Japanese names (stay with me here) and my reaction wasn't surprising. What was surprising though was how genuine my experience was during this time. Matches felt more in tune with how I expected the game to be at any time; lots of different factors. It felt like any single one person could turn the tide of the match and everyone was fighting for their place to rank up. Matches felt more fair and a lot less laggy compared to S+; you weren't hit by "a single bullet" and got splatted by it. (Someone with the Dual Squelcher attempted to shoot me down and missed countless shots that otherwise in S+ would have sunked me dead). Don't get me wrong, there's still many Japanese people but the overall scope of players seem to be more authentic to how matches went. Games were very 50/50 and I'd never be minus after an evening session whereas in S+ i'd be lucky if I lost less than 10 points.

Now, I'm sure most of you are thinking "well that's expected, it's S rank, of course it's going to be easier". And I agree with you but I don't know why but something compelled me to just straight point it out at the expense of own self and I feel there needs to be post about this at this time because i'm sure there hasn't been a post like this in ages and/or no-one wants to because someone would probably tell them to get gud.

A lot of people care about their rank, myself included and I want to get back to S+ as soon as possible but i'd be darned if I say I didn't enjoy S rank. The lobby separation of ranks I feel has been both good and bad but it has alienated a vast variety of players (and skill?) in the same room. I would have liked for S and S+ people to play together but it won't happen (I'm not sure if anyone else agrees with me on this).

S+ is a suffering mess if I say so, S does feel like a breath of fresh air and I will miss it once I f̶o̶r̶c̶e̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶w̶a̶y̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶S̶+.

I'm in no way such a great player like some of the greats (not naming anyone), if even people think that I am, i'm constantly thinking "I could have done better". I'm hardly happy with my performance whether I win or lose, that's sort of the person I am.

Sorry if I typed a wall of text, I needed to exert my emotion and punch it to a thread lol. What are your thoughts? I'd be interested to hear your opinions (and thanks for reading!)

TLDR: S+ and S lobbies feel different and you either have to accept your rank or get gud.
 
Last edited:

Magic8Ball

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TLDR: S+ and S lobbies feel different and you either have to accept your rank or get gud.
And if that ain't the TRUTH, then I'm not sure what is!
I've had a similar experience to you. S feels like a fair fight. Before my Wii U went down the drain, I had only reached S+ very recently. I do believe I Ranked down the next night I played. I considered myself an "S+" player, but S felt like the place where I needed to hone my skills. It was the lobbies where I felt okay taking a loss and saying "what did I do wrong, and how can I change it?" It's a very interesting dynamic once the pressure of that "oh so coveted" S+ is taken off your shoulders, whereas while you're there you can only get frustrated and struggle back against a team you know is about to wipe you ten times over. And it's not like being S is bad. There has to be a player base that's lower than the best teams for there to be the best teams, which is another discussion topic for a different time, but the point is people should be content with even getting to S and shouldn't worry about holding onto S+
 

Green Waffles

Inkling Fleet Admiral
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
813
People always make stupid mistakes
in splatoon ranked, it matters naught what rank you are in.

I've had plenty of fair fights in S+ and S
I've seen a butt load of mistakes in S and S+

And what I learned from @Dessgeega is that your lobby experience, no matter how conclusive it might seem, can be the polar opposite of someone else's.
 

vanille987

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a lot of people seem to have similar experiences, and judging from LP's/streams, it seem very accurate.
mostly since S+ is super hardcore and S a tad more 'casual'?
well, i'm not one to talk in detail since the best i got was A92, but from my experience, its true that lower ranks are 'more free' (for the lack of a better explanation), but of course, you have lots of stuff like lag, 'unbalanced' matches.
well, in short i just wanted to say even though i'm only experienced in the lower ranks, i still had similar experiences. (especially in the A area)
and as others said, its best to take peace with your rank rather then forcing it, helps a lot for you in the long run, trust my i know. xD
 

ThatOneGuy

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In S+ solo queue lobbies, you won't see too much variety in weapon choice. You'll mostly see top tier weapons like: The Tentatek, Luna Neo, Zink Mini, Berry Pro, Custom Range Blaster, you know. Weapons that can carry games alone and are considered to be the best in the game. You'll see some snipers, but they're not nearly as common as those weapons. Often times support weapons, or weapons that depend on certain conditions to be good are often scrapped for a more common choice. And about half of those weapons use quick respawn stacking as well. Not to mention, pretty much everyone gear hacks for perfect rolls of qr just to be proficient.

Meanwhile, in S lobbies, you'll actually see variety in weapon picks. You'll see people trying to experiment with less common weapons that don't exactly fit the meta. And it's honestly refreshing to see some different weapons being used. Granted, I don't play the most obscure weapons in the game. But, it's honestly so rare to see a match in S+ without seeing one of those weapons being played.
 

RelicRaider

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I have never reached S+, the highest S so far I've made is 46, where it starts going up in 4s instead of 5s. There's a difference between this time I'm in S compared to last time, last time I lost most of my games in a row and never really recovered, I won a couple but never got higher than 15 and went back down soon after. This time I fell down to 2 and made my way back up to 42 the same night. I feel like I belong in the rank I'm in, at least til im good enough to get to the higher reaches of S. I will say this though, A+ is a hellhole. I couldn't move up at all, and I ended up closer to A in a lot of situations, whenever I didn't reach the 90s I never progressed til the one time I got a big winning streak. Honestl, it used to be my own fault I rarely progressed from the "one win away" stage. I'd get tense and I'd freeze up and I'd struggle to get kills and make stupid mistakes knowing it's one win away, so now I pretend it's only a regular match up. But back to A+, Not everyone in that rank knows how to play the game, and they don't know when to fall back or when to take the rainmaker or the tower, and 'it's incredibly frustrating, it can really turn the game around. I noticed I'd be better at the start of a set of games and get progressively worse, and not only that, the better I didn't at the start, it would put me with the players who performed worse to balance it all out, and thus I tended to lose a lot of Games later on, even if I lost the first few too. Admittedly it sometimes happens in S. I KO losing my personal favourite, rainmaker, despite an impressive record, mainly because I left the rainmaker alone and got the people on the other team going for it, and only when I took the rainmaker was when we took the lead and won. It's not just a case of playing well, but tactics, match making and playing to strengths, and I think I've come much further in my relatively short time in S than my long time in A+, mostly because in A+, you feel like you have to play a lot of roles, or overcompensate, even when you don't have to.

Sorry about the enormous wall of text.
 

Sol64

The RNG God of /r/Splatoon
Joined
May 9, 2015
Messages
459
Location
London
In S+ solo queue lobbies, you won't see too much variety in weapon choice. You'll mostly see top tier weapons like: The Tentatek, Luna Neo, Zink Mini, Berry Pro, Custom Range Blaster, you know. Weapons that can carry games alone and are considered to be the best in the game. You'll see some snipers, but they're not nearly as common as those weapons. Often times support weapons, or weapons that depend on certain conditions to be good are often scrapped for a more common choice. And about half of those weapons use quick respawn stacking as well. Not to mention, pretty much everyone gear hacks for perfect rolls of qr just to be proficient.

Meanwhile, in S lobbies, you'll actually see variety in weapon picks. You'll see people trying to experiment with less common weapons that don't exactly fit the meta. And it's honestly refreshing to see some different weapons being used. Granted, I don't play the most obscure weapons in the game. But, it's honestly so rare to see a match in S+ without seeing one of those weapons being played.
I have to wholeheartedly agree with this post. Upon progressing through the ranks (and bouncing back between S90 for 4 times) I managed to get my S+ back and throughout my sessions I definitely saw a lack of charger type weapons (and Dynamos) and the lack of quick respawn through the course of two rotations today; It felt like I was under reconnaissance.

I also wanted to say that all the posts so far have been really helpful and insightful (I expected to be trolled but surprisingly didn't happen)
upload_2017-4-27_19-40-56.png
Now it's just a matter of time before I sink back to S again... :(
 

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