Things I've Learned from my Alt Account

jsilva

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Oct 30, 2015
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I did the same thing. I wanted to practice with a charger so I made an alt to have a chance and build some confidence. Unfortunately, as soon as I hit level 4 and I bought my charger I was placed in level 30+ lobbies and was basically where I was on my main.

I thought about just grinding to level 10 then doing ranked, but then I realized I already had decent charger gear on my main, so why bother punishing myself with my alt?

Also, the splatterscope isn't even unlocked until level 13! What's the deal with that?
My son wanted to be good at sniper and charger weapons and created an alt account. I told him to just use a weapon he's good at to get to level 10 as quickly as possible and then start learning the sniper in ranked. That's what he's done and is doing really well—10 minutes ago just had a 19/3 game in a B+ match (he is an S rank on his main account, but he was really bad with sniper weapons previously).
 

jsilva

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Then it's hard to say what side of lag I'm on too. I see a lot of teleporting players, hit people in the face with a roller 3x and nothing happens (before they splat me), get a lot of trades where I attack, turn around, get splatted, then my opponent splatted, etc. And I'm most frequently playing on a Japan based host.
When I play late at night I'm often with all Japanese players and I don't notice any more lag. Not sure what the explanation is for that.

But if you're having a lot of lag you may want to see what you can do about that. Either getting a quality wifi router, setting your existing router to favour game traffic (vis QoS), or use an ethernet adapter with a quality cable.
 

SupaTim

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My son wanted to be good at sniper and charger weapons and created an alt account. I told him to just use a weapon he's good at to get to level 10 as quickly as possible and then start learning the sniper in ranked. That's what he's done and is doing really well—10 minutes ago just had a 19/3 game in a B+ match (he is an S rank on his main account, but he was really bad with sniper weapons previously).
Yeah, but I'm such a gear oriented person that not having the right gear really bothers me. :confused:

I've actually become pretty decent with it just by doing turf wars with my main. I consistently get positive K/D ratios and even have 1st or 2nd on turf inked. It took a bit of failure and reflection, but at this point I'd rather just keep going on my main.

I tend to like Turf War more than Ranked anyway...
 

Zombie Aladdin

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TW ambush isn't a bad tactic in RM, actually. One and only one player gets splatted, sacrificial lamb, 3v4 ambush wins by surprise, then advances the RM. Of course it's only a good tactic if they don't suck at it :p

RM specifically I can understand fear of the RM namely that the thing is basically an on-the-ground eliter that fires inkzooka rounds. If you suck with eliter, you'll suck with the RM. It's a little unfar and i'd argue that a player like me that's maining chargers and an aggressive close range weapon is probably ideal for running the RM. Go aggressive to reach it, but switch to your eliter mindset once you get it. TC on the other hand, there's no valid reason to not get on the tower UNLESS you have a charger. That's just people afraid of being splatted.
Well, that and the fact that the Rainmaker puts a big honking target on your head. For players who are so afraid of getting splatted that they spend Turf War going after little bits of uninked ground near the spawn point, picking up the Rainmaker is the last thing they want to do. I sure find a lot of these players. I wonder why they're so afraid of getting their Inklings hurt. Did they watch too much Yu-Gi-Oh! or something and think that getting your game characters hurt will hurt you for real?

Regarding ambushing, it's only a good tactic if you take out an opponent who's actually contributing to their team and if it clears the way to advance the goal. Ignoring the Rainmaker and just firing at any opponents who pass by is not a good tactic.
 

BlackZero

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The thing is that it's pretty clear when someone's escorting the Rainmaker holder or the people on the tower: They'll either follow closely ahead or behind, or they'll take up positions and attack opponents who come near the people they're guarding or themselves. These guys will hide inside their ink a short distance behind her and not make any attempt to attack any opponents unless they themselves are under threat or the Rainmaker holder has been splatted. They will always make sure the Rainmaker holder is between themselves and their opponents. They're basically playing Turf War ambush.

This resulted in a series of losses where if my sister was not there to get the Rainmaker (and she is a long-range automatics specialist and is good at splatting, meaning she'd be excellent support if they weren't such a dominant player type), the opponents will carry the Rainmaker to the goal, or at least close to it.
It's a shame that the game seems to group aggressive players with other aggressive players and more defensive players with other defenders. In that pairing, the aggressive players will almost always win. The game also groups people who don't do anything or people who don't know what to do with people who are defensive players, so people with "support" style gameplay will find their matches flooded with people who are simply incompetent. This has annoyed me a lot lately: I always seem to get paired up with people who don't pay attention to what the other team is doing while the other team goes straight for the jugular.

That wouldn't be such a bad thing if these people didn't keep getting into B rank. They need to stay in the kiddie pool C range. B rank is for people who actually know how to play but are too lazy to get into the metagame.
 

jsilva

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It's a shame that the game seems to group aggressive players with other aggressive players and more defensive players with other defenders. In that pairing, the aggressive players will almost always win. The game also groups people who don't do anything or people who don't know what to do with people who are defensive players, so people with "support" style gameplay will find their matches flooded with people who are simply incompetent. This has annoyed me a lot lately: I always seem to get paired up with people who don't pay attention to what the other team is doing while the other team goes straight for the jugular.

That wouldn't be such a bad thing if these people didn't keep getting into B rank. They need to stay in the kiddie pool C range. B rank is for people who actually know how to play but are too lazy to get into the metagame.
That does sound frustrating. I created two accounts after deleting my original account and when I went through the B ranks on both newer accounts I didn't see regular matchups like that. I'm kind of a mix between support and offensive so maybe my play style resulted in different matchups than you.

But I've been thinking recently that the matching system will sometimes match you on a team where you have to be offensive and create opportunities for your weaker teammates in order to win the game. I don't particularly like a win resting on my shoulders because I want to play as a team, but sometimes being part of a team means making it possible for your teammates to do what they are able to do.

So maybe you can take some small steps toward being more offensive in your play and see the result? As you get better at it maybe it'll produce some good things in your gameplay.
 

BlackZero

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That does sound frustrating. I created two accounts after deleting my original account and when I went through the B ranks on both newer accounts I didn't see regular matchups like that. I'm kind of a mix between support and offensive so maybe my play style resulted in different matchups than you.
I could have really bad luck, but I noticed the other team is far more aggressive than my teammates most of the time. It's very consistent though, which is why I think the game may intentionally group people who get similar coverage scores or use certain weapons more.

So maybe you can take some small steps toward being more offensive in your play and see the result? As you get better at it maybe it'll produce some good things in your gameplay.
I've actually taken a break from the game because I was on a weeklong losing streak in both TW and RM. My teams kept getting curb stomped and I decided it was time to walk away for a bit. It may be easier to play aggressive style now that I've been away from my norm for a little while. I played more aggressively when I used Gals, but there really is only so much one person can do. If your teammates aren't paying attention, you're not going to make up for that. It's frustrating having to play a style you don't enjoy because you keep getting paired with people who get too focused on kills or inking turf in Ranked and don't know what they should actually be doing. If it actually paid off, that would be one thing; but my team still lost most of the time.
 
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Award

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Well, that and the fact that the Rainmaker puts a big honking target on your head. For players who are so afraid of getting splatted that they spend Turf War going after little bits of uninked ground near the spawn point, picking up the Rainmaker is the last thing they want to do. I sure find a lot of these players. I wonder why they're so afraid of getting their Inklings hurt. Did they watch too much Yu-Gi-Oh! or something and think that getting your game characters hurt will hurt you for real?

Regarding ambushing, it's only a good tactic if you take out an opponent who's actually contributing to their team and if it clears the way to advance the goal. Ignoring the Rainmaker and just firing at any opponents who pass by is not a good tactic.
Well, it depends on rank. I love watching the cute noobs painting corners. It's kind of endearing. And it takes me back to the simplicity of when I first opened the game and TW was all about paining. And I've lost enough rounds by 0.1% that *I'VE* started being the one to paint around the spawn when no one else has even if I have a charger! :p But you sure find the base inkers.... in all modes. I wouldn't think that mentality would be able to survive above C- to C though! On the other hand, can I borrow one of your little inkers for TW? I have the opposite problem, nobody paints the base, and if I have loose streaks of charger paint leading a path out of base for me, plus a few tracks I create for my team, nobody will ever paint between them. or worse, they won't use my tracks to jet out of the base but will create their own trails next to me, but then nobody comes back and paints between those! :) And Triggerfish. Ohhhh Triggerfish. NO ONE stays behind to defend the gates from the inevitable flank. So I spend the first 2:00 of the round camping my charger across from the grates, just waiting. I figure if I can stall the invasion alone long enough for my team to get themselves splatted and respawn, they can clean up the 3 enemies now at their spawn ;)

It's a shame that the game seems to group aggressive players with other aggressive players and more defensive players with other defenders. In that pairing, the aggressive players will almost always win. The game also groups people who don't do anything or people who don't know what to do with people who are defensive players, so people with "support" style gameplay will find their matches flooded with people who are simply incompetent. This has annoyed me a lot lately: I always seem to get paired up with people who don't pay attention to what the other team is doing while the other team goes straight for the jugular.

That wouldn't be such a bad thing if these people didn't keep getting into B rank. They need to stay in the kiddie pool C range. B rank is for people who actually know how to play but are too lazy to get into the metagame.
Yeah, that seems to be the nature of matchmaking, I think a lot of us are starting to see some of the matchmaking patterns, and they're not very good ones. Acutally I used to go aggressive, but I've switched to becoming an aggressive defender (when I'm not playing pure support with chargers.) I don't tend to get stuck with the base inkers (I wish I did sometimes, I'm often the only one willing to actually defend the base!!) I instead get stuck with the gung-ho deathmatchers (who aren't very good at deathmatch) who will endlessly charge out of the base and superjump to the front lines, get splatted, and go out and do it again. Meanwhile while I don't know where they are, I'm stuck 1v3 defending the base. If they toss up a bubbler or kraken and I either get splatted or fall back, the match is pretty much over at that point. TC I'll go aggressive because nobody else will, but they don't seem to be defensive either. I just play front lines on the tower, and then when I get splatted take up defense to hold it too.

No, half of B rank is for people who are into the metagame. The other half of B rank is for people who want Team Deathmatch. You'll find full squads of the former on whatever team I'm not on. :p (Except for the last team I had - those guys were great for once!)

But I've been thinking recently that the matching system will sometimes match you on a team where you have to be offensive and create opportunities for your weaker teammates in order to win the game. I don't particularly like a win resting on my shoulders because I want to play as a team, but sometimes being part of a team means making it possible for your teammates to do what they are able to do..
There's no way you can make opportunities for teammates who sit behind oblivious, though. And you can't make opportunities for teammates that love charging into a 40x20' area of enemy ink and expect to take them all on alone. I guess they get credit for trying? The only way to create opportunities for them is to remove anything that can hurt t hem. :p

I have noticed with some of those teams though, that they'll avoid the tower the whole match, but at :30 to go, when I have the tower 10pts from the win, finally someone will jump on. And twice, that did save the match.
 

Award

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I've actually taken a break from the game because I was on a weeklong losing streak in both TW and RM. My teams kept getting curb stomped and I decided it was time to walk away for a bit. It may be easier to play aggressive style now that I've been away from my norm for a little while. I played more aggressively when I used Gals, but there really is only so much one person can do. If your teammates aren't paying attention, you're not going to make up for that. It's frustrating having to play a style you don't enjoy because you keep getting paired with people who get too focused on kills or inking turf in Ranked and don't know what they should actually be doing. If it actually paid off, that would be one thing; but my team still lost most of the time.
I agree very strongly with this. Not walking away from Splatoon....Splatoon is life. But the rest. It was a little easier for me to balance it because I started with an aggressive style. I hate aggressive style in gaming, but somehow Splatoon makes me just want to tear around and rip fish apart. :D But then got bored of it and went for support and enjoy that possibly more. But it's not a big deal to go back and forth because I enjoy both ways to play and mostly get bored with the mid-range stuff that everyone else seems to love. Thus somewhat deciding (finally) on carbon/charger/luna mains. But I love other weapons too.

But I agree that it's really hard for one person to carry the team, and not very fun. And ranked somehow, at least with my matchmaking DOES expect me to carry the team (it was SO nice the other day with Zones a good team where everybody contributed, I played carbon, but did NOT have the highest kill count, not by far, but had the fewest deaths. So I got to play very aggressive, stayed on the zones almost continuously, pressuring, retaking them, but didn't have to carry the team with endless splats (and got a number of assists.) That's the way Ranked should always be!

Not sure if you've seen my TC horror story in other threads but after the round where I carried the team tenfold with a k/d of 18/12 with two triple kills and the only one on the tower in TC and STILL lost almost made me give up ranked. I didn't even enjoy carrying the team, and I still lost points despite succeeding in it. I went back and got that great team. But now I'm afraid to lose my new rank, so it's back to TW for a while! :( I'll probably go back and throw my rank away at some point. But it's nice seeing it there while it lasts, knowing if I got an equally competent team next time I could easily make the A's in under an hour. But instead I'll get teams that want to to squiddy dipping at the Resort.
 

PolygonGeorge

Inkster Jr.
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I did end up making that video about my experiences with my alt in the lower ranks.

If you are stuck in C ranks I severely feel for you for these reasons in the video :).


Edit: For all the Americans out there, feel free to rip me to shreds for that horrendous accent at the start haha.
 

SupaTim

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I did end up making that video about my experiences with my alt in the lower ranks.

If you are stuck in C ranks I severely feel for you for these reasons in the video :).


Edit: For all the Americans out there, feel free to rip me to shreds for that horrendous accent at the start haha.
That was hilarious. Thank you for that.

I've been playing charger on my main but with all this conversation, and I was wildly inconsistent yesterday with my splatterscope, I've thought about going back to my alt....
 

Zombie Aladdin

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I could have really bad luck, but I noticed the other team is far more aggressive than my teammates most of the time. It's very consistent though, which is why I think the game may intentionally group people who get similar coverage scores or use certain weapons more.
Do you think people are also teamed up based on how they play too? I keep finding the same teammates over and over, and while there is the occasional placing of people on other sides, it doesn't happen as often as I would expect. If they group teams the same way over and over, you're going to get the same results over and over. Judd even says in the plaza that if something isn't working, doing it again and again idn't going to make it work. Maybe I'm supposed to switch rooms, but that doesn't really work either.

For the record, I am mainless (I have rather similar inked area with most weapons I've used), but, except for chargers, I do know how to use them all decently well, and even I get my moments with chargers. I get splatted a lot in Tower Control and Rainmaker though, but I'm sure that's because I spend a lot of my time on the tower or holding the Rainmaker.

Well, it depends on rank. I love watching the cute noobs painting corners. It's kind of endearing. And it takes me back to the simplicity of when I first opened the game and TW was all about paining. And I've lost enough rounds by 0.1% that *I'VE* started being the one to paint around the spawn when no one else has even if I have a charger! :p But you sure find the base inkers.... in all modes. I wouldn't think that mentality would be able to survive above C- to C though! On the other hand, can I borrow one of your little inkers for TW? I have the opposite problem, nobody paints the base, and if I have loose streaks of charger paint leading a path out of base for me, plus a few tracks I create for my team, nobody will ever paint between them. or worse, they won't use my tracks to jet out of the base but will create their own trails next to me, but then nobody comes back and paints between those! :) And Triggerfish. Ohhhh Triggerfish. NO ONE stays behind to defend the gates from the inevitable flank. So I spend the first 2:00 of the round camping my charger across from the grates, just waiting. I figure if I can stall the invasion alone long enough for my team to get themselves splatted and respawn, they can clean up the 3 enemies now at their spawn ;)



Yeah, that seems to be the nature of matchmaking, I think a lot of us are starting to see some of the matchmaking patterns, and they're not very good ones. Acutally I used to go aggressive, but I've switched to becoming an aggressive defender (when I'm not playing pure support with chargers.) I don't tend to get stuck with the base inkers (I wish I did sometimes, I'm often the only one willing to actually defend the base!!) I instead get stuck with the gung-ho deathmatchers (who aren't very good at deathmatch) who will endlessly charge out of the base and superjump to the front lines, get splatted, and go out and do it again. Meanwhile while I don't know where they are, I'm stuck 1v3 defending the base. If they toss up a bubbler or kraken and I either get splatted or fall back, the match is pretty much over at that point. TC I'll go aggressive because nobody else will, but they don't seem to be defensive either. I just play front lines on the tower, and then when I get splatted take up defense to hold it too.

I have noticed with some of those teams though, that they'll avoid the tower the whole match, but at :30 to go, when I have the tower 10pts from the win, finally someone will jump on. And twice, that did save the match.
Trust me, you do not want my base-inkers. They do so not because no one else will do it. They focus on little bits of uninked ground because they figure that's the safest place to be. Again, they are terrified of getting splatted. If they were focused on making sure the ink is complete, they will set out and look for uninked ground nearby regardless of the circumstances. No, these people will only venture out to ground someone else has already covered (that is, they want to be surrounded on all sides by lots of their team's ink), and if no one paints the area around the base, they will stay in the spawn point until someone has, or they will hide within whatever pathways other people have made. If they wanted to ink the ground around their base, they'd ink more than 150p per match. These same kinds of players I see often on losing Splatfest teams. When I was on Team Planes, for instance, I saw a roller who never went out into enemy ink: The moment they reach the border, they turn around, as if it was lava.

I figure these are likely the same players who, when they go to ranked, will find a corner and hide there the whole time (which, thankfully, is very rare). On the subject of Camp Triggerfish, those gates coming down on the last 60 seconds in Turf War pretty much create a massacre for these guys.

For some reason, I get a lot of deathmatch people too. I think in Turf War, I get a lot of base-inkers, but in Ranked, I get a lot of those, as we shall call it, Team Deathmatch people. My guess is that the game keeps track of my behavior in Turf War and Ranked separately, as I play very differently between them (with Splat Zones actually somewhere in between, but that's neither here nor there).

Avoiding the tower is fine, as long as you're contributing by attacking opponents who are either on the tower or attempting to stop your team from getting on the tower and you're in a good position. Avoiding the tower by ignoring it, however, is not (which is what I'm always seeing).

I did end up making that video about my experiences with my alt in the lower ranks.

If you are stuck in C ranks I severely feel for you for these reasons in the video :).


Edit: For all the Americans out there, feel free to rip me to shreds for that horrendous accent at the start haha.
How did you not find people who think the countdown over the Rainmaker holder's head is the goal? (It's not even just American players, who get the message "Make it rain!," as I last saw a Japanese player who behaved that way.)
 

PolygonGeorge

Inkster Jr.
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That was hilarious. Thank you for that.

I've been playing charger on my main but with all this conversation, and I was wildly inconsistent yesterday with my splatterscope, I've thought about going back to my alt....
Hah! Glad you enjoyed :).

Stick with it man. Everybody has their off days. Look at Dan from the video for instance... Every day is an off day for him. But he just keeps on painting ;).

How did you not find people who think the countdown over the Rainmaker holder's head is the goal? (It's not even just American players, who get the message "Make it rain!," as I last saw a Japanese player who behaved that way.)
Ahh no sorry didn't catch anyone doing that. If only! Tbh it was rare that anyone else would pick up the Rain Maker and I wanted to get through C ranks as fast as possible to save me and them some pain. So me picking it up was the most reliable way of getting it to the right place :P.
 

Award

Squid Savior From the Future
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For the record, I am mainless (I have rather similar inked area with most weapons I've used), but, except for chargers, I do know how to use them all decently well, and even I get my moments with chargers. I get splatted a lot in Tower Control and Rainmaker though, but I'm sure that's because I spend a lot of my time on the tower or holding the Rainmaker.
I'm the same way in terms of not having a true main and playing all the weapons. Recently I've committed to going eliter/splatcharger/carbon mains, just so I have a focus to come back to and something that can take any map/mode. But I still go play all the toys.

Trust me, you do not want my base-inkers. They do so not because no one else will do it. They focus on little bits of uninked ground because they figure that's the safest place to be. Again, they are terrified of getting splatted. If they were focused on making sure the ink is complete, they will set out and look for uninked ground nearby regardless of the circumstances. No, these people will only venture out to ground someone else has already covered (that is, they want to be surrounded on all sides by lots of their team's ink), and if no one paints the area around the base, they will stay in the spawn point until someone has, or they will hide within whatever pathways other people have made. If they wanted to ink the ground around their base, they'd ink more than 150p per match. These same kinds of players I see often on losing Splatfest teams. When I was on Team Planes, for instance, I saw a roller who never went out into enemy ink: The moment they reach the border, they turn around, as if it was lava.
LOL, you had my almost on the floor with this. I didn't think it was possible to get worse players than my teams, but you somehow consistently manage to. Even my courageous little level 1 bravely went out to the middle to get splatted over and over again. And the sweet little level 14 patiently practicing chargers by repeatedly shooting the floor in the middle of kelp dome next to the tower that I must apologize for mercilessly butchering with a roller. I've never see the ones that won't even enter their own base if it's not painted yet. I don't know how you got those! or maybe that's who I see lagging behind on the spawn all the time and assume they've dc'd! I see them standing there, assume they're afk or dc'd, but maybe they're your inkers! I'm usually flying past them to go recover from the inevitable collapse of the defense line after I got splatted. :p

I figure these are likely the same players who, when they go to ranked, will find a corner and hide there the whole time (which, thankfully, is very rare). On the subject of Camp Triggerfish, those gates coming down on the last 60 seconds in Turf War pretty much create a massacre for these guys.
LOL, you mean your opponents wait until the gates to come down to flank your team??? Mine charge through the gates in the first 20 seconds of the match. 2-3 of them, and if I'm not guarding the gates, the team will get slaughtered up on the bridge! If they wait a full minute I know I'm in deep doo doo, because that means they've charged up their bubblers and I can't resist the assault!

Avoiding the tower is fine, as long as you're contributing by attacking opponents who are either on the tower or attempting to stop your team from getting on the tower and you're in a good position. Avoiding the tower by ignoring it, however, is not (which is what I'm always seeing).
And sometimes you simply do not know WHERE your team is, but you know they are not doing any of that. Perhaps they were inking the spawn?

http://squidboards.com/threads/the-dead-sea-let-the-salt-go.1781/page-16#post-141360
 

BlackZero

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Do you think people are also teamed up based on how they play too? I keep finding the same teammates over and over, and while there is the occasional placing of people on other sides, it doesn't happen as often as I would expect. If they group teams the same way over and over, you're going to get the same results over and over. Judd even says in the plaza that if something isn't working, doing it again and again idn't going to make it work. Maybe I'm supposed to switch rooms, but that doesn't really work either.
Based on what I've been able to find out about Splatoon's particular algorithm, players are matched according to playstyle as defined by three main variables: number of kills, number of deaths, and "paint points" (coverage). Players with consistently high kills are more likely to be teamed up with other players with consistently high kills-per-match. Players with lower kills, but high coverage are more likely to be matched with other players that focus on covering turf. Rank and level do not have a significant impact on who you get matched up with compared to stats on your actual performance. This is why so many S Ranks still get paired with seemingly poor players: they may be borderline between coverage and kills, so their match-ups bounce back and forth between aggressive and passive players. Someone expecting their S rank team to attack will probably be ripping their hair out if they fall in with an S rank coverage-heavy team.

This means that someone who is borderline on their death count, but strong on their kill count could get paired up with both aggressive and death-prone players. People who are high in their death count and coverage will get paired up with people who ink more turf and die a lot. That could suggest the high coverage/high death tier of player is the "bottom" tier, as the game likely wouldn't differentiate between someone who is actually trying to cover turf from someone with ****ty accuracy that keeps inking the ground instead of the players they aim at.

This is actually really helpful information for someone who doesn't like the matches they get. If you're teammates don't attack enough, spend the next several matches focusing on your kill count to get paired up with more aggressive players. If you're tired of having your teammates launch a series of bonzai charges every match, let your match kill count slip and focus on inking turf. In either case, I would guess that keeping a low death count would help regardless of your preferred match ups. I'm not sure how pairing up with a lot of death-prone teammates would benefit the quality of your matches, but I could be wrong.

In looking at all this, it would seem that my kill count and coverage points are proportionally close to each other, so I get paired up with both really aggressive and really passive players, and simple bad luck has condemned me to teaming up with all the painters and no killers.
 

Anaru

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For rainmaker, I usually am the once to pick up the RM, but I usually don't if my special is over 75% full, since then I can use the special to protect the RM person, and if I take the RM, I will die and lose my special. However, if we are near the goal, i might pick it up if I think I can make it there/if the enemies are all dead.

Funny RM story: Once on Moray Towers, everyone on the enemy team just huddled around the goal, so I soloed my way there with no challenge at all (my team was just inking the middle to charge special I guess?? I don't really know what they were doing) and died instantly when I got near the goal, but I still made it 13 away so it was a really easy win.
 

Pinko

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How did you not find people who think the countdown over the Rainmaker holder's head is the goal? (It's not even just American players, who get the message "Make it rain!," as I last saw a Japanese player who behaved that way.)
No, because in our EU version it's supposedly directly translated from theirs and from Google Translate (from a video on Yt) roughly it means 'take the Rainmaker to the goal' for the general idea. They're probably screwing around.
 

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Squid Savior From the Future
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Based on what I've been able to find out about Splatoon's particular algorithm, players are matched according to playstyle as defined by three main variables: number of kills, number of deaths, and "paint points" (coverage). Players with consistently high kills are more likely to be teamed up with other players with consistently high kills-per-match. Players with lower kills, but high coverage are more likely to be matched with other players that focus on covering turf. Rank and level do not have a significant impact on who you get matched up with compared to stats on your actual performance. This is why so many S Ranks still get paired with seemingly poor players: they may be borderline between coverage and kills, so their match-ups bounce back and forth between aggressive and passive players. Someone expecting their S rank team to attack will probably be ripping their hair out if they fall in with an S rank coverage-heavy team.

This means that someone who is borderline on their death count, but strong on their kill count could get paired up with both aggressive and death-prone players. People who are high in their death count and coverage will get paired up with people who ink more turf and die a lot. That could suggest the high coverage/high death tier of player is the "bottom" tier, as the game likely wouldn't differentiate between someone who is actually trying to cover turf from someone with ****ty accuracy that keeps inking the ground instead of the players they aim at.

This is actually really helpful information for someone who doesn't like the matches they get. If you're teammates don't attack enough, spend the next several matches focusing on your kill count to get paired up with more aggressive players. If you're tired of having your teammates launch a series of bonzai charges every match, let your match kill count slip and focus on inking turf. In either case, I would guess that keeping a low death count would help regardless of your preferred match ups. I'm not sure how pairing up with a lot of death-prone teammates would benefit the quality of your matches, but I could be wrong.

In looking at all this, it would seem that my kill count and coverage points are proportionally close to each other, so I get paired up with both really aggressive and really passive players, and simple bad luck has condemned me to teaming up with all the painters and no killers.
Oh, I apparently found the longer version of the post! :oops:

You description is interesting, and is kind of in line with what I expected, however it's overly simplistic if that's the case. And the type of severe problems with it should be obvious to all. I think the most important questions about would be how it tracks different weapons, how it keeps turf war separate from ranked, and how (if?) it affects who you are matched against rather than who you are matched with.

I.E. A luna player is going to have a VERY high death count, and a fairly high kill count, because the nature of the weapon is high risk/reward, and gives them a position of being able to directly pressure and push an objective at point. That doesn't mean they should be paired with .96 gal players that just rush out and get trades all day. The dynamic they bring to the team is entirely different, and if you're getting trades on a .96, you're failing badly. If you're getting trades on a luna you may be willfully doing so to dislodge an enemy from an advantageous position. Meanwhile even a bad eliter player is going to have very low deaths and much higher liklihood of positive k/d (unless the team let them get totally overrun.) Good ones will have high kills, bad ones will have low kills. But at face value, that system would assign eliter players to teams that have good balanced stats by nature of the stats the weapon offers.

Worse, team composition, by nature of being a team, should never, ever, ever, every be a homogenous group of identical traits, it should be a mix of complimentary traits. The system ideally should be mixing 2 inkers and 2 aggressors to create a balanced, well rounded team capable of offense and defense, not assmbling polar opposite teams of all defense and all offense and pitting them against each other in game modes that require pushing an objective. I can't fathom that anyone skilled in game design enough to work at Nintendo at all could be so incompetent as to miss that concept. There must be more to it. Any school sports coach could have told them as much. Moreover their own company tells them as much with how they pitched ideas to come up wtih Splatoon and cited the very different designs people came up with which led to the variety of maps due to the very different types of people on the team. That should have been a clue for them!

I'm not saying that you're incorrect. I'm saying that either there's more to it still that you haven't figure out with yet, or that confirms that the system is majorly fundamentally broken. That description implies that the major difference between when I got bad teams and balanced teams is mostly that I've been playing chargers more frequently, offsetting my k/d and reducing my ink coverage. A.K.A. Playing the objective less in TW improves my ranked matchmaking?!? If that's really all there is, I change my vote to they need to fix it no matter how many S ranks open a salt mine in response.

That makes me wonder if the system effectively punishes players who play more TW than ranked. Those of us that play a lot of TW will have a lot more inking, and then it would pair us with all ink teams in ranked. And punishes tower riders and RM carriers more than those that don't ride the tower or carry the RM since they will have more deaths (and possibly negative k/d often.) If that's the case then @Zombie Aladdin 's little inkers that are terrified of getting splatted are actually the smart players. Avoid the tower, avoid the RM, go 0/0, and you'll get paired with better teams to soar through the ranks later.

I'd love to know how it determines what players to pair you with. In TW I get paired with/against primarily with A+ to S rank players, and recently S+. The system can't possibly be telling me my k/d/ink ratio is par with S and S+ players!

I'm really hoping there's more to it than that. I can't imagine they'd be so short sighted to miss the gigantic holes and outright disasters that system would produce. Maybe it at least tracks it by game mode? But that still doesn't explain why they'd be trying to match teams of only homogeneous skillsets, defying the very point of a team.
 
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BlackZero

Inkling Commander
Joined
Nov 3, 2015
Messages
350
You description is interesting, and is kind of in line with what I expected, however it's overly simplistic if that's the case. And the type of severe problems with it should be obvious to all. I think the most important questions about would be how it tracks different weapons, how it keeps turf war separate from ranked, and how (if?) it affects who you are matched against rather than who you are matched with.
I did a more detailed post on how TrueSkill (Microsoft's matchmaking algorithm for games like CoD & Halo) works here. It goes into more detail. Without looking at the game's source code, it's hard to tell how different weapons are weighted in assessing kill and coverage counts but I wouldn't be surprised if they were weighted differently. Still, weapon choice reflects play-style to a degree.

Worse, team composition, by nature of being a team, should never, ever, ever, every be a homogenous group of identical traits, it should be a mix of complimentary traits. The system ideally should be mixing 2 inkers and 2 aggressors to create a balanced, well rounded team capable of offense and defense, not assmbling polar opposite teams of all defense and all offense and pitting them against each other in game modes that require pushing an objective. I can't fathom that anyone skilled in game design enough to work at Nintendo at all could be so incompetent as to miss that concept. There must be more to it. Any school sports coach could have told them as much. Moreover their own company tells them as much with how they pitched ideas to come up wtih Splatoon and cited the very different designs people came up with which led to the variety of maps due to the very different types of people on the team. That should have been a clue for them!
If they are using a TrueSkill derivative, that's something the algorithm may not have been configured for. In games like CoD, Halo, etc, shooting the ground or a wall is a missed shot. That counts against a player's skill level (mu). Splatoon pretty much makes inking the ground a requirement. If they use a standardized FPS matchmaking algorithm that counts shot accuracy as a skill variable, they may still be trying to configure it to work in a game where shooting the ground is beneficial. This is why I think coverage points are a major metric in the mu variable: they have to flag it as beneficial instead of detrimental to player skill, otherwise the algorithm would penalize turf coverage (which is an essential gameplay mechanic and the actual goal of two online play modes).

The types of games TrueSkill was designed for assume a high k-low d ratio to be a goal in of itself with team deathmatches. Even in CTF or bomb defuse modes, killing other players is beneficial and shooting the ground isn't. Thus, it would make sense for the algorithm to match players with high accuracy and k/ds with other high accuracy and kill players: as far as the game is concerned, high skill players (defined by certain variables) matched against other similarly high skill players with similar uncertainty variables is fairest match up possible. In Splatoon, killing other players may not actually help but inking the ground usually does. Thus the framework that TrueSkill type matchmaking was designed for is turned on its head. Unless they overhauled the algorithm, they would have to simply modify a cookie cutter FPS matchmaker to work in Splatoon. I imagine this "likes attract likes" matching is part of that.

It's also important to note that TrueSkill can only assess factors that can be quantified and placed in its formulas. It can't factor in player effort, strategy, or team synergy (playing with a squad where you can coordinate your efforts). It can only use "hard" data. So, if you rack up a ton of kills playing with a squad where everyone works hand in hand, the matchmaking algorithm isn't going to say "well, this guy got a ton of kills, but he was playing with friends he practiced with so that's different from playing with randoms." It's only going to assess your kills and other quantifiable data.

I'm saying that either there's more to it still that you haven't figure out with yet, or that confirms that the system is majorly fundamentally broken. That description implies that the major difference between when I got bad teams and balanced teams is mostly that I've been playing chargers more frequently, offsetting my k/d and reducing my ink coverage. A.K.A. Playing the objective less in TW improves my ranked matchmaking?!? If that's really all there is, I change my vote to they need to fix it no matter how many S ranks open a salt mine in response.
I'm sure there is, but I simplified it to those three variables because a) these things are horrendously complex and we'd be here all day listing out everything that could factor in to skill, and b) these three stats are key indicators of play style and factor heavily into all the online play modes. I'm sure the game records how many times you play Rain Maker and carry the RM yourself vs letting someone else carry it and factors that into your player skill in Rain Maker. It probably also records how close you get to the goal with it and factors that in. That may be why some RM teams are full of people who don't want to carry the RM while others aren't. I would imagine that Tower Control matchmaking does something similar with how often you ride the tower.

But those are specific cases. A player's skill value is updated with every match they play regardless of mode. The three universal variables are kill, death, and coverage, which is why I think they are the major deciders. Coincidentally, they are also the three major statistics in Turf Wars. Bear in mind that players have to reach level 10 before they can play Ranked. I suspect this is so the game has a chance to collect enough data on the player's play style to establish a solid baseline player skill value for Ranked matchmaking where evenly matched teams (at least in skill value) are arguably more important than the "casual" TW mode. This also could explain why TW has gotten so competitive. I'm sure players are getting better, but TW and Ranked probably share K/D/C stats. Specific variables for TC or RM wouldn't factor into TW since those stats are irrelevant to that and SZ.

That makes me wonder if the system effectively punishes players who play more TW than ranked. Those of us that play a lot of TW will have a lot more inking, and then it would pair us with all ink teams in ranked. And punishes tower riders and RM carriers more than those that don't ride the tower or carry the RM since they will have more deaths (and possibly negative k/d often.) If that's the case then @Zombie Aladdin 's little inkers that are terrified of getting splatted are actually the smart players. Avoid the tower, avoid the RM, go 0/0, and you'll get paired with better teams to soar through the ranks later.
I think we can all agree that the matchmaking in Splatoon is...off kilter to say the least. I think that's because the devs used a standard FPS matchmaker and tried to modify it to fit Splatoon's unique framework. It's possible that a lot of TW raises the coverage variable in a player's skill value, but players are also free to focus on building their kill count. I don't think w/l weighs much on a player's skill level and only impacts rank in Ranked mode.

With that said, if someone builds up a higher coverage stat in TW before starting Ranked, the matchmaking will likely pair them with other people who focused on coverage, and are more likely have a passive play style. That may have been a means of "easing" players into the more competitive Ranked mode in addition to building a baseline player skill value.

I'm really hoping there's more to it than that. I can't imagine they'd be so short sighted to miss the gigantic holes and outright disasters that system would produce. Maybe it at least tracks it by game mode? But that still doesn't explain why they'd be trying to match teams of only homogeneous skillsets, defying the very point of a team.
I think the problem is that the devs tried to use a run of the mill online shooter matchmaking algorithm for the sake of convenience and financial reasons. Splatoon is very different from other online shooters, so we ended up with a square peg jammed in a round hole. Now that the series has proven itself, I'm hoping they invest the time and money into building a matchmaking algorithm that is a better fit for Splatoon's unique gameplay should they make another Splatoon shooter.
 
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Zombie Aladdin

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LOL, you had my almost on the floor with this. I didn't think it was possible to get worse players than my teams, but you somehow consistently manage to. Even my courageous little level 1 bravely went out to the middle to get splatted over and over again. And the sweet little level 14 patiently practicing chargers by repeatedly shooting the floor in the middle of kelp dome next to the tower that I must apologize for mercilessly butchering with a roller. I've never see the ones that won't even enter their own base if it's not painted yet. I don't know how you got those! or maybe that's who I see lagging behind on the spawn all the time and assume they've dc'd! I see them standing there, assume they're afk or dc'd, but maybe they're your inkers! I'm usually flying past them to go recover from the inevitable collapse of the defense line after I got splatted. :p
Yes, I would often see very low-level players, like 5 or below, who I know are true beginners because they behave like beginners, but they still try and are not afraid to get splatted. They might go 0-6 or so, but I see they've gained about 300p or more and I see them on the front lines on the map, either in the middle or getting to the middle. And admittedly, I see them WAY more, at least in Turf War, than the players who fear getting splatted so much that they will stay as far away from enemy ink as possible. At least until Ranked and Splatfests. Then, they come right out of the woodwork, especially in Splatfests.

Maybe it's because my splat counts are usually not that high in Turf War. In Turf War, I typically mind my own business. My style is to observe what my teammates are doing, figure if they have some void in roles that need to be played, and play that role. If I get a lot of, erm, Team Deathmatch people, I stick around and ink the area around the spawn, then head out looking for uninked ground. If my team is full of people who are more concerned with inking, I'll move forward ahead of them and see what the opposing team is doing. I only really attack opponents if they're interfering with what I'm doing; I don't go out of my way to fight (the exception being snipers, as it's important to get rid of them to open up space for me and my teammates). I most often lead the pack in ground coverage though, regardless of how I play or what I'm using.

But because my splat count is likely lower than any of yours, I'm guessing I'm getting teamed up with other players with low splat counts, only they're low because they actively avoid any opponents and won't take any chances. (Not that it stops them, as I usually see at least a 0-2 by the end of a Ranked match.)

LOL, you mean your opponents wait until the gates to come down to flank your team??? Mine charge through the gates in the first 20 seconds of the match. 2-3 of them, and if I'm not guarding the gates, the team will get slaughtered up on the bridge! If they wait a full minute I know I'm in deep doo doo, because that means they've charged up their bubblers and I can't resist the assault!
Usually, the area in front of the spawn in Camp Triggerfish remains pretty free of opponents for me much of the way through. It's probably a consequence of there always being at least one person on my team who immediately heads out to fight and can hold them off for at least a little while. Rarely do I ever see anyone, regardless of how splat-hungry they are, go for the jugular and get to the opponent's spawn point as quickly as possible. That behavior they save for when Walleye Warehouse comes up.

No, because in our EU version it's supposedly directly translated from theirs and from Google Translate (from a video on Yt) roughly it means 'take the Rainmaker to the goal' for the general idea. They're probably screwing around.
That'd be a terrible way to screw around then, to deliberately invoke a loss.

(It was Walleye Warehouse, they hid behind that second shipping container with the sheets of paper on it, and the opposing team was winning. They were ultimately inksploded by the Rainmaker.)

Meanwhile even a bad eliter player is going to have very low deaths and much higher liklihood of positive k/d (unless the team let them get totally overrun.) Good ones will have high kills, bad ones will have low kills. But at face value, that system would assign eliter players to teams that have good balanced stats by nature of the stats the weapon offers.
I'm actually bad enough with an E-liter that I get records of 1-4 or somewhere around there more often than not. I frequently get cornered, then splatted. Well, unless I'm using a Custom E-liter, and THEN I get more splats than I get splatted pretty consistently because I can activate the Kraken should that situation happen (or rather, when).

Then again, most often, what happens is that my team has so little ink that, by the last 60 seconds, I have to leave my usual spots and go ink with the rest of them, which usually results in me getting splatted once or twice in the process.

Worse, team composition, by nature of being a team, should never, ever, ever, every be a homogenous group of identical traits, it should be a mix of complimentary traits. The system ideally should be mixing 2 inkers and 2 aggressors to create a balanced, well rounded team capable of offense and defense, not assmbling polar opposite teams of all defense and all offense and pitting them against each other in game modes that require pushing an objective. I can't fathom that anyone skilled in game design enough to work at Nintendo at all could be so incompetent as to miss that concept. There must be more to it. Any school sports coach could have told them as much. Moreover their own company tells them as much with how they pitched ideas to come up wtih Splatoon and cited the very different designs people came up with which led to the variety of maps due to the very different types of people on the team. That should have been a clue for them!
I'm sure people who work on Pokémon games have had some degree of communication with the Splatoon team; they probably know more than anyone about how a good team is varied in purpose, as it creates adaptibility. I don't think an all-offense or all-defense team is a good idea, and I hope the Splatoon peopleknow that.

That being said, NCAA basketball is going on right now--a lot of the coaches have a high-defense strategy, where one or two players play offense and the rest play defense. While there is still some variety, the sheer defensiveness compared to regular NBA games means scores for winning teams are normally 60 to 80 points, as opposed to 100 to 140 points for an NBA game. (Indeed, basketball fans are largely not happy about this because it means not much happens in a particular game.) But I guess that's an extraordinary circumstance, because high defense is a consensus among college basketball coaches, so it's going to be defense vs. defense most of the time.

That makes me wonder if the system effectively punishes players who play more TW than ranked. Those of us that play a lot of TW will have a lot more inking, and then it would pair us with all ink teams in ranked. And punishes tower riders and RM carriers more than those that don't ride the tower or carry the RM since they will have more deaths (and possibly negative k/d often.) If that's the case then @Zombie Aladdin 's little inkers that are terrified of getting splatted are actually the smart players. Avoid the tower, avoid the RM, go 0/0, and you'll get paired with better teams to soar through the ranks later.[.quote]

They don't go 0-0. These people get splatted every single match. They don't get splatted much (unless it's a total massacre with the opponents having reduced all of us to the spawn point), but they do get splatted. When they're focused on inking tiny patches of uninked ground, they don't pay attention of an opponent has snuck up behind them. Even if they realize it before the opponent's ink can reach them, it's too late because they are not accustomed to attacking opponents at all. They cannot aim, and they panic. These are the people you see pointing their Aerospray RGs and Tentatek Splattershots at the ground two feet in front of them. Sometimes they swim to the next patch, sometimes they walk. And if they're using a roller (usually Splat Roller, Krak-On Splat Roller, or Carbon Roller), they only dive down into ink to refill, making them an obvious target 95% of the match.

That is, they only pay attention to the five feet or so around them until they look for another patch to ink. If an enemy comes close, creating a path to ink and siwm in to reach this person, they WILL get splatted because they don't know what to do.

I did a more detailed post on how TrueSkill (Microsoft's matchmaking algorithm for games like CoD & Halo) works here. It goes into more detail. Without looking at the game's source code, it's hard to tell how different weapons are weighted in assessing kill and coverage counts but I wouldn't be surprised if they were weighted differently. Still, weapon choice reflects play-style to a degree.
I acutally played a game that uses TrueSkill that isn't a shooter at all: Meteos Wars. It's a falling-blocks match-three puzzle game (which apparently, this time around, did not have Masahiro Sakurai's involvement). If TrueSkill can be applied to a falling-blocks puzzle game, then other formulae can be applied to Splatoon, as, while it's not a typical shooter in the least, it is still a shooter. I have no idea how TrueSkill is used for Meteos Wars though. Not enough people were playing the game for me to do much with ranked.

[QUOTE="BlackZero, post: 141895, member: 11772"I'm sure there is, but I simplified it to those three variables because a) these things are horrendously complex and we'd be here all day listing out everything that could factor in to skill, and b) these three stats are key indicators of play style and factor heavily into all the online play modes. I'm sure the game records how many times you play Rain Maker and carry the RM yourself vs letting someone else carry it and factors that into your player skill in Rain Maker. It probably also records how close you get to the goal with it and factors that in. That may be why some RM teams are full of people who don't want to carry the RM while others aren't. I would imagine that Tower Control matchmaking does something similar with how often you ride the tower.
Hmm, that's interesting. I am usually the most aggressive on my team in getting the Rainmaker and the tower. I feel it's important to be the first team to get on the scoreboard, because that pressures the opposing team to act and might make them nervous. I wonder if that affects the type of teammates I get any.

[QUOTE="BlackZero, post: 141895, member: 11772"With that said, if someone builds up a higher coverage stat in TW before starting Ranked, the matchmaking will likely pair them with other people who focused on coverage, and are more likely have a passive play style. That may have been a means of "easing" players into the more competitive Ranked mode in addition to building a baseline player skill value.[/QUOTE]

That might also explain a lot--I was focused on inking, and I still am. I don't think I'm that passive of a player though, but I guess as far as the matchmaking system goes, it probably classifies me as the same type of player as the one who will avoid and run away from opponents (if they see them).
 

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