The DzNutsKup Experience

[isaac4]

This thread will just be me talking about my experience getting ready for and competing in the DzNutsKup tournament hosted by @DzNutsKong. If anyone wants to add their personal experience as well then that'd be really cool.
Unlike most of my other threads, my thoughts might not be as well organized here so I apologize if all of this ends up being hard to read through


Despite being interested in the tournament from the first day that the idea was proposed around a couple of months ago, I didn't register until around a week after the tournament was announced.
I was just really busy at the time and forgot to do it but I'm glad I didn't take any longer than that.
There's not a lot to say about the process of signing up besides the fact that I found it funny that I could specifically ask to not be paired up with an Aerospray (thank you Deez).

I was originally hoping to pair up with someone I already had experience playing with but that didn't end up working out.
Regardless, I wasn't worried about the team comp I would end up with. I figured that Slosher would be a reliable pick if Machine wasn't going to work well with my team and then I still had the other bucket weapons like nTri and Explo.
Figuring out what my teammates used and what worked together was a much longer process though. Early on in our practice session, it was usually only two or three of us at a time. We did alright enough in Open but the maps weren't what we needed to practice.
Once we were able to practice together against other teams (shout-out to OA and slot scrubs) we had some big flaws in our gameplan that needed to be fixed.
We kept trying out different weapon comps to figure out what worked and what didn't but most of our experimenting led me to decide that the best option was to stick with what we were comfortable with except for one change that I do feel was very important for our performance.
I needed to switch off from Machine to nTri to deal with the more aggro weapons that were going to try and rush us down. It also helps that Tri-Slosher isn't as hard to be consistent with as Bucket and having Fizzy/Cooler on top of it ended up being really good for our team even with a 210p special (why isn't it 200p).

Our final comp ended up being nTri/Hydra/vFlingza/ and both RB/Wiper kits which we would switch depending on what we were fighting and the mode.
There were still some concerns I had such as not having an amazing answer for Bubble and our only two entry specials being Missiles and Booyah Bomb but that's it.
It's kind of funny that the main reason I mentioned having nTri as part of my weapon pool was in case we needed a Cooler weapon but I didn't feel too confident in it because of how expensive the special is, something that didn't end up mattering that much in a lot of the games we played where I was able to get around 4 to 6 Coolers. I have my team to thank for that since they were able to handle the enemy team long enough for me to charge my special so that we could push in as well as taking advantage of the chip damage from Fizzy.
I do hope that I'm able to play Machine in some matches for the next tournament though but that 220p special and nerfed fire rate isn't doing the weapon any favors.

The day before the tournament started was really great for practice but it was also the same day we figured out that we would need a sub. Thankfully, we would still be able to play together for the first few matches but then we would need someone else to come in. I had a few people in mind but I realized that what we needed was someone who was experienced with playing midlines since I was already playing the short ranged weapon in the comp so I ended up asking a fellow bucket player to sub for us.
Having both Slosher and nTri ended up working out so much better than I thought it would but I already knew Fox was a great player so his performance wasn't surprising lol.
I don't think our gameplan changed too much either. The biggest change I would say was from the Museum RM game where Fox decided to stall the RM in the most annoying spot possible (sorry @chaotik0).
I didn't even know about it until Fox mentioned it in VC so that was really funny to watch, only because I wasn't the one dealing with it of course.

There's actually another REALLY stupid thing that I forgot to mention. Our whole team forgot to take off our Splatfest tee for our first game LMAO
We still won that game though so maybe Ability Doubler is the new meta?

Getting back on track to where I was before, we finally made it to grands and LemonBoy was able play again so I switched out Fox to go back to our original team comp.
At this point, I didn't care too much if we lost since we made it this far and ending off the tournament with our main team was really nice.
We made some adaptations to deal with Bubbler, mainly for the Humpback RM game where I told LemonBoy to switch to CRB to force the enemy team away from their Bubble but that didn't end up playing much of a role since neither of us went very far in our pushes. Same thing applied to the Hagglefish TC game where I wanted CRB for GG Kraken and to deal with Bubble on Tower but again, both of our teams didn't get to push very far anyway lol.
By game 4, the position we were in to actually take the tournament was getting me extremely nervous and affected my decision making throughout the match. Mainly from the beginning and the end where I ran out of ink and failed to kill anyone before they were about to set up their Bubble.
It was very hard to watch that game again on stream but I will admit, it made Grand Finals a lot more interesting!
I remember very little of game 5 though but I have to say that my team did a great job at keeping track of where the Roller was and keeping control of zone.
That entire match was an insane back and forth struggle which was probably very entertaining as a viewer.

There's a few more things I want to talk about before I end this post.
I didn't actually find the name "anything big" to be that funny but I'm glad that's what my team went with because I enjoy how simple the name is looking back on it now.
Becoming team captain was also not something I planned on doing at first but since my schedule seemed to be a lot more flexible I decided to take up the role anyway. It ended up being a very familiar experience from when I used to have a Smash team around 2019-2021 so that was nice.
Lastly, taking a team picture was a very new experience that I almost completely skipped out on if Azhdarcho didn't mention it after grands which ended up being really fun.
We ended up going with Mincemeat Clams for the picture because it's our favorite map/mode (it's just funny).

Shout-out to the entire team and Fox for being sick players! @LemonBoy @Azure ST @Azhdarcho

 

[solz]

I had a lot of fun with the tournament, even though We didn't practice at all And one of our teammates couldn't make it, so we had to grab someone Random. But personally, this is my first time entering a tournament, so it was really exciting for me. At first I was going to play flingsa But switched over to OctoBrush Cause we weren't doing too well And I decided to try it Which made me do better, but we still didn't win a single match And discord was being troublesome LOL Still great time Hope to see another one in the future

 

[LemonBoy]

Huuuuge credit to Fox, so much would have been different without them. Thanks @DzNutsKong for hosting!

We still won that game though so maybe Ability Doubler is the new meta?

YES buff it, it really needs it

I'll try and give my side of it too, wont be very good tho. I thought i was gonna do like HORRIBLE and just unintentionly throw every single game and land us is dead last. But the power of semi-self-confidence go brrrrrr, and the team helped a lot with helping me get better at callouts, understanding where i should be, and just overall getting a better understanding of the game. I also thought that only being an S rank player was a flex but NO, i heard there was people who did just at good, if not better, at a lower rank. @Azhdarcho 's hydra was INSANE btw. I think one game they went like, 26:5 KD, and i was like O_o.

 

[Azhdarcho]

I really want to shout out Octo Airlines for scrimming with us so much. It really gave us the opportunity to work on our communication style, figure out our game plan, and gel as a team.

 

[Azhdarcho]

I think one game they went like, 26:5 KD, and i was like O_o.

It was 21(4):5 and we LOST

And then @isaac4 went 28(11):8 in the next game and we LOST

 

[isaac4]

It was 21(4):5 and we LOST

And then @isaac4 went 28(11):8 in the next game and we LOST

Let's just pretend that didn't happen lol

 

[chaotik0]

I don't think our gameplan changed too much either. The biggest change I would say was from the Museum RM game where Fox decided to stall the RM in the most annoying spot possible (sorry @chaotik0).

dont worry about it that was very big brain i literally never seen that before it was kinda cool literally 300iq

 

[DzNutsKong]

If anyone wants to add their personal experience as well then that'd be really cool.

Oh boy. Well this is going to take several hours now isn't it? Buckle in because I'll have a lot to say before I even get to the point when the tournament started.

EDIT: I was wrong this only took me an hour and twenty minutes


So a few months ago, someone, and I don't even remember who, brought up the idea of a Squidboards tournament. Everyone was in love but nobody really took any initiative. This was past the point where most of the other users in that January '24 user influx had left by then and I had figured most people in this community weren't super serious about competitive play so right away I had assumed that nothing would happen if I weren't the one to do it. In case you're not aware, I've held online and in-person tournaments for both Smash Ultimate and Pokemon. Nothing for Splatoon which is a very different game but I highly doubted anyone else would have a similar amount of experience.

If I were to guess, all of that was around mid-April or something? But my initial thought was to wait until the Summer to run the tournament. I know there are some people here who haven't graduated from high school yet and summer break would probably end up being an ideal time to do something like this. Less stuff to worry about, no strict curfew, and there will be some people on vacation but I'm sure I can run another later on if that ends up being an issue. I very quickly went and asked the few Splatoon tournament organizers I knew for advice, things to look out for and the like.

The only big problem I had remaining was that I didn't particularly want to run my first Splatoon tournament alone. At the absolute minimum I figured I would run into a bunch of issues I couldn't have seen coming - spoiler alert, I did - and having someone else experienced in Splatoon specifically would be a huge deal for that. None of the tournament organizers I spoke to seemed particularly enthusiastic to help me out for whatever reason they each might've had. I fully understand this though. I know one of them was super busy and struggling to run their own tournament series and mine is for a very small community that they would have no attachment to.

Weeks passed, which then turned to months, and I continued to sit on the idea. Several new threads were made about members suggesting a tournament and many people always agreed. One other user even tried to start their own tournament but it didn't end up going anywhere because they announced it a day before they planned for it to happen. Some ideas for how a Squidboards tournament should look were circling in my head but it took until only a few weeks ago for anything to change for me.

The whole time it seemed to me like a big draw to this for so many people would be as a big way to grow Squidboards. A few weeks ago one of these threads was posted and kind of made me realize that people would totally be content just having an excuse to play the game with one another. There's no need to make this an absolutely huge public deal to draw in several dozen people. If the tournament ended up being smaller then that'd lessen the amount of unexpected problems I mentioned earlier and overall make things way more manageable for just one person. I thought about it for a bit and couldn't come up with a counterargument. Heck there was no good reason to even advertise this tournament outside of Squidboards. Even like 4 teams is plenty for a tournament. The big problem for me of a tournament being difficult to manage was now gone so there was nothing really stopping me from going ahead.

Okay, first things first, finalizing the date and time. Time was obvious for me. There are people both in European time zones and in west coast US time zones. It has to be 1 or 2 PM so it's not too early or late for as many people as possible. For similar reasons it also has to be either Saturday or Sunday and I heard from one person on two teams I was hoping would join that they would not be able to do Saturday so Sunday it is. It was around October 6th or so when I had thought about all of this. I didn't want to do the 13th since that'd be too soon or the 20th because that's Low Ink and I wanted people to have a chance to join that, but I also wanted to strike while the iron was hot and there was still a recent thread asking for a tournament. October 27th would probably be perfect.

...except I would later learn that this was the day Reach was happening, the only other tournament more important to people looking to join than Low Ink. Dang. It. As much as it sucks to say I still would've chosen the 27th even with what I know now because Low Ink was still an option for everyone else and my team got to play in that too which is very rare for us nowadays. If I had to miss Low Ink then that would've sucked bigtime and I don't want to have to tie those kinds of thoughts to a tournament while I'm running it. "Why do I have to do this when I could be playing in Low Ink with my team?" Regardless I'll still be trying to avoid crossing over Low Ink AND Reach for the next one of these.

Isn't it crazy how there's all this typing I've done and I'm still not even talking about the start of the tournament itself? Yeah, this was why I felt the need to be the one to take up this job. There's a lot you have to think about and you technically could have a completely fine, probably even pretty fun tournament without all of this thought, but if we had any tournament I wanted it to be as good as possible.

The day I had made the thread I had posted both a Battlefy link and a Google Form with the intention of getting people teammates if they didn't have one. That Google Form was an extremely important part of this process to me and I knew it would be several months ago. I knew a lot of people on here wouldn't be a part of a competitive team and going around to find teammates would be very awkward and difficult if there weren't some sense of direction. It took literally 24 hours for there to be seven responses. That's quite a lot since they all had to 1. be interested in the tournament, 2. be certain they'd be available three weeks out, and 3. weren't already on a team.

The teammate finder was its own can of worms for me to think about too though. When should I consider a team comp as "good enough" to form a complete team with them? Should I be waiting for anything special that a person is putting down that might be both rarer and important to hold them back for later in case someone ends up needing what they have, like a Cooler weapon or a certain time zone? I quickly realized that literally everyone was saying weekends are completely free for them and I just focused on getting teams together as fast as possible so people can get as accustomed to playing on VC as possible. It's hard and the more time the better. I formed the first pickup team for this tournament on October 9th, which is 18 days before the tournament, and half of all teams that signed up here ended up being pickups. I was absolutely correct.

I also had to consider what would happen if there was a weird number of people signing up through the form. What if, for example, 14 people signed up? That's enough for three teams, but what about the last two? Do I just pray that two teams need a sub and let them in there? That's no fun. Imagine signing up for your first tournament and being told you'll only be able to play for part of it and that's only if you're lucky. I got kind of lucky since we had exactly 16 people who I had to assign teams but I did end up having a few other people in the Splatoon community that I'm closer to ready to sit on standby just in case there was an incomplete pickup or a sub was needed.

I figured I'd let the community help me with the maplist since this is for fun for their sake and I wanted their input over mine. Ended up with the absolute travesty of Rainmaker on Humpback Pump Track making the final cut. Blegh. Four people also wrote Mincemeat in which I'm not ever going to make anyone do. Also figured I would need a Discord server both for the sake of a helpdesk and for one place where everyone can get told of new announcements and the like so I made one. Not really much to say about either of those.

Can I just say right now that Battlefy is weird? Not necessarily bad but I'm glad I encouraged people to sign up pretty far before the deadline. Teams usually have a private group chat between them and their opponents for every match they have and so I wanted at least one person on each team to have a Battlefy account so they could utilize this. Problem is that for some unknown reason, Battlefy's UI doesn't let you add members without accounts to "pending" teams that haven't yet had four confirmed members with accounts.

I tried using their menu to import a spreadsheet of all teams and have some of them include a user and three members without accounts, and that might've worked...had it not been for the fact that you need each team captain's ID to do this, which you can only get if a full team of four signs up. This wouldn't be a problem if I could change the minimum team size to enter which I could not do. What I ended up doing was making two burner accounts and signing up for every team with those before leaving and putting users in manually afterwards. This should not be a problem next time. I'll just make the minimum team size 1 since this tournament is small enough to the point where we can talk things out if we need.

The night before the tournament I had realized that we had 8 teams signed up and I didn't think any others would be joining. Awesome! If 9 teams had joined the round robin phase would need to be 3 groups of 3 instead of 2 groups of 4. It'd take no longer to finish but each team would have one bye round. Again, that's no fun. Imagine getting to the tournament, the time's finally here...but nope you have a bye round one. Go do something else for 30 minutes. Or better yet you have a bye round 3 and have to wait through that on top of the 15 minute intermission. Have fun waiting 45 minutes instead! Plus the seeding for the elimination brackets would be a lot dicier since there's a very real chance at least one pool has all three teams go 1-1. Who advances off of that??? Doesn't seem fair.

And then, after all was said and done, tournament day. It immediately starts with panic as my capture card is not working. I wanted to stream this event very badly because I know from personal experience how fun of a memory stuff like this can be so that was a massive problem. I know Elgatos can be weird, this was a borrowed one from a friend and I don't have too much experience with these. It took me fifteen minutes of frantic, horrible troubleshooting to figure out the problem was that...I didn't plug the HDMI cable into the Switch. It was plugged in last night and I genuinely don't remember unplugging it at all. Awesome.

Even when I get it working there are horrible frame drops everywhere! I have to cut the stream's quality down by a lot and they're STILL there! I need to keep Discord and Battlefy open at all costs and even good browsers chug system memory like crazy so there was just no way to fix this. My laptop is getting upgrades soon so this shouldn't happen again but man did it make me sad in the moment. It still kinda does to be honest.

Only after all of this happens does the tournament finally start. I immediately have people asking me what to do when the tournament starts because they've never used Battlefy before, have several people asking me stuff in helpdesk, it was my first time commentating over other people's Splatoon gameplay, one team needed a sub 12 minutes beforehand that they only barely got in time and I had no more people that I could ask by then. It's a lot to happen at once while also trying to keep the stream interesting and this was by far the most stressful part of the day for me.

You might not be expecting me to say this, but after that the tournament went extremely smoothly. I had chosen ahead of time to try and keep every round lasting 30 minutes since the gameplay itself would have three games that are around 5 minutes long and that gives everyone a chance to join in even if there are 10 minutes worth of problems. Everyone got done within a minute or two of each deadline despite the problems. The big concern was that I completely forgot to tell anyone that I would tell them whether or not their matches are getting streamed beforehand so for Round 2 I had to start streaming a set midway through. Annoying, but my fault.

Other than that little hiccup there was literally nothing to worry about from there on out. This was where the stress went away and it just started to be plain fun for me. I never mind that I can't play in stuff like this because it's still just as exciting seeing how all of these teams perform and if it's better or worse than I had anticipated. The team Octo Airlines had me particularly happy because they were the only team to have not lost a single game going into the final bracket. I've spent a lot of time coaching them so this was nice. Grand finals was incredibly exciting with literally three games out of the five going down to the last 30 seconds.

I guess the last big problem I had for the tournament was that I straight up lost my voice. I don't know if game commentators usually raise their voices to ham things up or if they tend to feel genuine excitement over the game they're watching but a lot of the stuff I saw had me yelling like crazy. Got to the point where my words kept getting cut off by my body just disagreeing and telling me to try again.

After all was said and done, reception has been great. Lots of people telling me how great of a time they had, lots of people tuning in even though they couldn't play for one reason or another, and a lot of more specific things that I can't really describe under a blanket statement like the rest. I mean all of you can see for yourselves that there have still been people talking about it a day after the fact. The final tally ended up being 32 people across 8 teams and if my count was correct there were over 25 people from Squidboards who signed up. For how small this community is and how many people couldn't make it out despite wanting to that's an awesome turnout for sure.

I've already explained the rest in the main thread for this tournament between my roadmap and the other things on my mind. This was all a lot for me to handle but I really couldn't have asked for it to go much better.

 

[sevenleaf]

my experience was... for one i wasn't really sure i was gonna be able to play in it until the week before. see, my derby league had a scrimmage the same day, and if i passed the assessment to be able to play in those i was gonna be playing in that instead of nuts cup. i failed. by one point. which is sad but also freed me up for nuts cup

but i also started my new job last week, and though going forward my work schedule leaves me pretty open, i basically ended up working six days in a row between training and actually starting on-site. and i'd come home too drained from sitting around watching videos for hours (especially when the first aid training showed me a dramatization of my latent but apparently still present long-standing phobia and i... still am not sure what that reaction i had really was. i lost a bit of memory and all of a sudden i was being asked if i have a history of seizures. huh) to play splatoon

so when the tourney came around i was like. WAY out of practice. i'd squeezed in some splatfest matches throughout the days before but i hadn't touched ranked in a hot minute. and i wasn't even the only one on genesis wave out of practice! so like, needless to say we went on a massive losing streak in the groups stage and ended up in the redemption bracket. and even though i knew i shouldn't expect to be godlike after Not Playing in at least a week i still fell into my "man i'm actually just bad and i should quit" thought patterns and found myself biting my tongue not to voice that on comms because lee gets disappointed in me if i do i know that just tanks group morale further

but then redemption bracket started and. we actually won some games! we finally (after loosely discussing scrimming for ages and never doing it) faced wipip and took the set. ultimately we came 2nd against deep sea interlude but we took one match there, too. (ggs again @C-53 and teammates! yall were a lot of fun to play against.) and like, look, for the longest time winning any games at all in a tournament setting just Was Not Happening for us. so we take Ws where we can.

overall i wish i'd felt more, like. present. leading up to the tournament. like, again, i wasn't even totally sure i was playing until not too long before the event itself, so i couldn't really allow myself to get hype. hopefully whenever nuts cup 2: bofa edition rolls around i won't end up in Tournament Purgatory again, so i'll be able to be present in the ways i couldn't be this time. (or it'll be the same day as a derby scrimmage AGAIN and i'm - hopefully - scrimmage eligible by then so i'll just have to spiritually cheer on the pickup my teammates throw together.) BUT. once i was there and playing and past the post-groups-losing-streak crash i really feel like i started to regain my footing after feeling like i lost it by stepping away from the game for too long, and i'm like, newly hopeful for my & my team's future in the comp scene

 

[solz]

Beautiful read the entire thing 🥲

 

[OCTöHEAD]

Aah, it's just so fun reading about you guys experience. I'm getting pumped up!! haha really looking forward to Nuts - The second coming