Following some more recent events I felt now would be a better time than ever to talk about this. I have a story that I've shared some details about, but have not fully explained to anyone here.
It kind of goes without saying that Splatoon 3 was a game that had me hooked the moment I had started playing it. It was fun to play Splatoon 1 as a kid, but something about Splatoon 3 felt both exactly how I had remembered and yet very different to me. All of the things I loved about the first game felt like they were here but coming back to Splatoon with a more developed brain added layers of stuff to appreciate. There's a lot of nuance to the gameplay that I quickly grew to respect a lot more than what the way I used to play the game allowed for, so I stuck around.
However, after some amount of time, I started to get a bit more interested in what this game's community is like. I knew that playing the game in a voice call setting would change a lot and was curious about that. Sure enough, I joined a pickups-only tournament and had a pretty good time. We had an experienced player with three newcomers, myself included, and it was a great introduction to the competitive scene. It was nice having one person for guidance and two other people that I felt were in a similar spot as I was.
I wanted to keep playing more pickups, and I did, but I quickly realized that entering tournaments as a sub for an existing team was functionally very similar. This gave me another avenue to play the game without relying on such a niche kind of tournament popping up. Oddly enough it was one of the first of these teams that I had subbed for that I had most clicked with, that being a team called Determination. The only reason I had found out about them was because their Co-Captain had said they'd pay whoever subbed. I was looking for a team to play for anyways and didn't want this poor guy to need to spend money so I figured I'd fill in and keep them from needing to do that.
Put simply, this group was straight-up more fun to be around than the rest. I loved everyone's mindsets in this group and they seemed like people I would click with more easily than the others. Oddly enough, they ended up needing a sub pretty often as their Captain was on a long-term vacation, so I ended up filling in for them a lot and stayed active in their Discord server regardless. I appreciated their presence, and they appreciated mine. Really was just a matter of time until I joined in. After around two or three months, on October 2nd, 2023, it was official. I was the final member of their roster of now six. It was me alongside players by the names of Tk, Painpat, Fox the Box, Altaria, and our captain Uolter.
Things pretty quickly settled in and for basically every voice call that happened, there would be fun banter going on at least once, but usually at several different points. I don't think there's been a single one where people haven't spontaneously broken out into singing or doing Waluigi impressions or something similar. For a while there was a "days since someone has said something sus" counter which quickly turned into "days since Uolter knew about the sus counter and deliberately said something sus to ruin our streak." People messed with me for being the one American on a European team, people messed with Fox for sleeping way too often, people messed with Uolter for ruining our sus counter. Lots of little things like that and it's always enjoyable.
The team itself in terms of how it played was what I can only imagine to be fairly unusual. Thing is, Tk was leagues ahead of all of us in skill. To this day he still is but this has always been the case. This lead to a bit of weirdness where I felt like I could get away with being not as strong of a player because my team would pull through. To be perfectly blunt I was definitely the team's weakest member when I joined and while the gap between him and the rest of us has definitely narrowed, he still is easily the best player out of all of us.
Over time I slowly but surely started to work my way into the environment of a coordinated team setting. Callouts did not come to me quickly, but even when I didn't have anything to say it was nice having people instruct me on what to do and what not to do. Team play actually has never been something any of us but Tk have been super good at. Our team's mostly been known in the mid-level EU community as "a group of very strong individuals that could be a lot more coordinated."
...well, that much quickly started to cause problems for me. The beginning of this year was pretty rough for me for reasons that I won't get into. Having this little group was nice when we were able to play but everything else about my life ranged from being whatever to unpleasant. Even still, I knew I was not a very strong player and it kind of hurt. By this point Pat and Fox had both gotten a good bit stronger so here I was noticeably below the whole rest of the team. I knew everyone else was capable of great things but I was the one keeping them away from all of it. While there were some nice results I was there for, like getting 17th/~140 or so teams at SQUIDS FOR PALESTINIAN KIDS, there was always going to be that nagging thought in my mind that they could've gone further if it weren't for me. Maybe it'd be better if I left. Things would be a whole lot sadder for myself as I lost my one big fun escape from the rest of life, but in the end it would be a whole lot better for everyone else.
After a brief break from the game something started to change. When you look at video games the way I do you're continually looking for things to get better at. While before that break it had felt like I hit a bit of a roadblock, I had suddenly gotten way more consistent when playing Anarchy Open. I still felt like I had a very long ways to go before my Stamper would be at its peak but it didn't feel like every death was me getting jumped and it felt like I could capitalize on every pick I got a lot more than I could beforehand. That little break had given me a whole new perspective on my positioning that had made me a much stronger player.
And then the Decavitator released.
For the first night or so of it being out I was really struggling to get a grip of when, where, and how to use the dash but after then it was smooth sailing. I was having a lot more fun with the game while playing it in open compared to other weapons so I tilted a lot less and improved a lot faster as a result. It took me two days to reach four stars on both kits and less than a month to hit five stars on the Charcoal kit. Some part of that was how much I had played but some was the insane winrate I had on my grind to 5 stars. Need I remind you that this was basically me levelling up a second time after my Stamper had leveled up on its own.
Most of you know how strongly my gameplay is tied to this weapon at this point. It makes it kind of funny to say in hindsight that my teammates thought we would do explicitly worse with it than had I continued playing Stamper. Back when the Decavitator was new, there were a lot of people who wrote it off as being blatantly worse than Stamper and I don't even blame them for that. After seeing just how enthusiastic I was about the weapon, we decided there would be no harm in at least giving it a shot. I know this would've happened even had I chosen a completely different weapon though seeing as very similar weapon changes have happened in the past.
One of my first times playing it with them was around three weeks after it had dropped. It was a LUTI set, which if you're not aware is a competitive, season-long league that's commonly used to determine how strong each team is. My brain does this pretty often but I had arbitrarily considered this set "important" since a lot of this team's gameplan had centered around one user, one of few outside of my team who I had spoken to often - another Splatana Stamper player, just like I was for so long. I had every reason to crack under pressure and let every little mistake I made pile on my mental as I felt some pointless need to impress this one person.
But when the set had actually started, things were going well. Like, REALLY well. I distinctly remember a game on Clam Blitz Um'ami Ruins in particular where I got a lot of very important picks that, because my teammates were able to play quickly off of it, were the start of every single one of our pushes that resulted in points. All of this from the guy who considered himself easily the weakest on the team a month ago during a set that I wanted to do well in. We won 5 games to 1. wasn't sure if I would hit any kind of consistency with this result but it felt pretty nice all the same.
The weekend after this was my first tournament on the weapon. If you're not aware, Low Ink is the single biggest tournament in the Splatoon community. Players above a certain skill level are not allowed to play so they could give other teams a chance to win and it's been a massive hook for getting a bunch of people playing. It happens over the span of two days and sadly, Day 1 was kind of a bust. I had to watch my family's dogs since they were out of town that day and it lead to me playing unfocused and sloppy. How well your team plays during Day 1's games will determine which double elimination bracket you get put into on Day 2, and despite that we still got placed into the second highest Day 2 bracket. All of our losses were incredibly close despite me playing badly and two of us literally said "we can win our bracket tomorrow" that same night.
The following day, however, was kind of insane. There were a lot of matches we played that were neck-and-neck and had us tied with our opponents before the final game. Despite how hectic things got...I was still playing good. Not every game was perfect, some were pretty weak, but this was a level of strength and consistency I had never seen. This game in particular was a huge highlight for me. It's funny because I look back at this gameplay and see countless things, both in terms of actual fighting capabilities and game knowledge, where had I been playing with my current skillset I would have done so, so much better.
And I have to reiterate - look at this through my lens back then. I was in a pretty shaky time in my life as it stood and my one consistently positive outlet had me stuck with the constant feeling that this group of amazing people was being burdened by me. This tournament and the LUTI set preceding it were the first times I ever felt like I had been capable. Still not nearly as good as everyone else, but there were games where I was being a genuine help instead of my strongest games being ones where I had to grasp at straws to come up with reasons I wasn't damaging my team. I was pumped enough after the replay I had shared and it made what happened next all the more amazing.
When the tournament was over, when the dust had settled...
...we won our first tournament.
After we had gotten the final pick on the Rainmaker in overtime, I was given the sudden whiplash of going from being confident and laser focused on winning our final game to a set of feelings I've never felt before. All of the suspicions that I had before about this team being capable of great things had I not been there had been proven right. However, I ended up working my way into becoming the better player that they needed. The fact that this was the very first tournament after I had started getting better and after that good set in LUTI was no coincidence. I still wasn't on their level but I was close enough to the point where the gap didn't matter nearly as much. The pessimistic thought that I would need to leave the team for everyone else's sake was dead in the water and it was in a point in my life where it mattered most that I learned that.
So when that final game was over, while everyone was popping off, I sat in my chair crying tears of joy in complete silence. All of my teammates were in the voice call, excited as can be, talking about their first tournament win, but I had way too much going on in my head to even be able to hear what all was being said, let alone come up with words to say back. Despite playing two other competitive games for way longer and arguably still not being as good of a player now as I ever was at Pokemon, there still isn't a single moment from playing any video game ever that comes close to how I felt in that moment. I still choke up whenever I think about this including while I'm typing this post right now. Genuinely one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't think to ask anyone to download the vod of streaming our run.
I think it's pretty funny that depending on how you look at things and depending on who you ask, this may very well be Charcoal Decavitator's first ever notable tournament result. This was on Sunday, June 23rd, 2024, which is barely over three weeks after the weapon had dropped. Not many people were pushing the Decavitator back then and most people that were had instead chosen to push the Mint kit. In the grand scheme of things any top-level or even high-level team would have completely smoked everyone in Low Ink since it's not a very high-level tournament but this is still a tournament where many people would dream of doing as well as we've done.
Crazy part is that as some of the things I've said would imply, I've only gotten better since then! There were not only a few more particularly strong games like the Mahi-Mahi one I shared, but also a lot more consistency and way fewer weaker games for me in the very next Low Ink we played in after this. We placed second in another bracket that day to a team that many people said was incredibly strong and only because an unfortunate pause we had to take made it incredibly apparent just how exhausted two of my teammates were. While winning Beta Bracket made me feel capable, this run made me feel strong. You could hear a lot more confidence in my voice compared to usual as the bracket went on. These past few months in particular have easily been the fastest I've grown in any competitive game ever and it's shown no signs of stopping.
Sadly, this is where the story of Determination seemingly comes to its end. Fox has been losing interest in Splatoon as a whole and both Tk and Pat have expressed interest in playing with different people for their own reasons. Scheduling started to get particularly difficult for a number of reasons and it wouldn't feel the same so I felt it would be best to leave as well. As a result, the whole team has formally disbanded as of earlier today. It's not on bad terms at all though. All of us have expressed interest in playing in pickups at some point in the future or having one another sub for the teams we may find each other on. Even beyond that there's zero reason for the team's Discord server to lose its activity when we'd talk there even on days we aren't playing in anything.
I don't think competitive Splatoon is for everyone. At the same time, I'm not going to pretend like my experience so far hasn't been an incredibly good influence on my life. I apologize for getting sappy but I'm never going to forget any of this. The past few days I've been a bit upset that everything has to be stopping but above all else have been glad that it all happened in the first place.
It kind of goes without saying that Splatoon 3 was a game that had me hooked the moment I had started playing it. It was fun to play Splatoon 1 as a kid, but something about Splatoon 3 felt both exactly how I had remembered and yet very different to me. All of the things I loved about the first game felt like they were here but coming back to Splatoon with a more developed brain added layers of stuff to appreciate. There's a lot of nuance to the gameplay that I quickly grew to respect a lot more than what the way I used to play the game allowed for, so I stuck around.
However, after some amount of time, I started to get a bit more interested in what this game's community is like. I knew that playing the game in a voice call setting would change a lot and was curious about that. Sure enough, I joined a pickups-only tournament and had a pretty good time. We had an experienced player with three newcomers, myself included, and it was a great introduction to the competitive scene. It was nice having one person for guidance and two other people that I felt were in a similar spot as I was.
I wanted to keep playing more pickups, and I did, but I quickly realized that entering tournaments as a sub for an existing team was functionally very similar. This gave me another avenue to play the game without relying on such a niche kind of tournament popping up. Oddly enough it was one of the first of these teams that I had subbed for that I had most clicked with, that being a team called Determination. The only reason I had found out about them was because their Co-Captain had said they'd pay whoever subbed. I was looking for a team to play for anyways and didn't want this poor guy to need to spend money so I figured I'd fill in and keep them from needing to do that.
Put simply, this group was straight-up more fun to be around than the rest. I loved everyone's mindsets in this group and they seemed like people I would click with more easily than the others. Oddly enough, they ended up needing a sub pretty often as their Captain was on a long-term vacation, so I ended up filling in for them a lot and stayed active in their Discord server regardless. I appreciated their presence, and they appreciated mine. Really was just a matter of time until I joined in. After around two or three months, on October 2nd, 2023, it was official. I was the final member of their roster of now six. It was me alongside players by the names of Tk, Painpat, Fox the Box, Altaria, and our captain Uolter.
Things pretty quickly settled in and for basically every voice call that happened, there would be fun banter going on at least once, but usually at several different points. I don't think there's been a single one where people haven't spontaneously broken out into singing or doing Waluigi impressions or something similar. For a while there was a "days since someone has said something sus" counter which quickly turned into "days since Uolter knew about the sus counter and deliberately said something sus to ruin our streak." People messed with me for being the one American on a European team, people messed with Fox for sleeping way too often, people messed with Uolter for ruining our sus counter. Lots of little things like that and it's always enjoyable.
The team itself in terms of how it played was what I can only imagine to be fairly unusual. Thing is, Tk was leagues ahead of all of us in skill. To this day he still is but this has always been the case. This lead to a bit of weirdness where I felt like I could get away with being not as strong of a player because my team would pull through. To be perfectly blunt I was definitely the team's weakest member when I joined and while the gap between him and the rest of us has definitely narrowed, he still is easily the best player out of all of us.
Over time I slowly but surely started to work my way into the environment of a coordinated team setting. Callouts did not come to me quickly, but even when I didn't have anything to say it was nice having people instruct me on what to do and what not to do. Team play actually has never been something any of us but Tk have been super good at. Our team's mostly been known in the mid-level EU community as "a group of very strong individuals that could be a lot more coordinated."
...well, that much quickly started to cause problems for me. The beginning of this year was pretty rough for me for reasons that I won't get into. Having this little group was nice when we were able to play but everything else about my life ranged from being whatever to unpleasant. Even still, I knew I was not a very strong player and it kind of hurt. By this point Pat and Fox had both gotten a good bit stronger so here I was noticeably below the whole rest of the team. I knew everyone else was capable of great things but I was the one keeping them away from all of it. While there were some nice results I was there for, like getting 17th/~140 or so teams at SQUIDS FOR PALESTINIAN KIDS, there was always going to be that nagging thought in my mind that they could've gone further if it weren't for me. Maybe it'd be better if I left. Things would be a whole lot sadder for myself as I lost my one big fun escape from the rest of life, but in the end it would be a whole lot better for everyone else.
After a brief break from the game something started to change. When you look at video games the way I do you're continually looking for things to get better at. While before that break it had felt like I hit a bit of a roadblock, I had suddenly gotten way more consistent when playing Anarchy Open. I still felt like I had a very long ways to go before my Stamper would be at its peak but it didn't feel like every death was me getting jumped and it felt like I could capitalize on every pick I got a lot more than I could beforehand. That little break had given me a whole new perspective on my positioning that had made me a much stronger player.
And then the Decavitator released.
For the first night or so of it being out I was really struggling to get a grip of when, where, and how to use the dash but after then it was smooth sailing. I was having a lot more fun with the game while playing it in open compared to other weapons so I tilted a lot less and improved a lot faster as a result. It took me two days to reach four stars on both kits and less than a month to hit five stars on the Charcoal kit. Some part of that was how much I had played but some was the insane winrate I had on my grind to 5 stars. Need I remind you that this was basically me levelling up a second time after my Stamper had leveled up on its own.
Most of you know how strongly my gameplay is tied to this weapon at this point. It makes it kind of funny to say in hindsight that my teammates thought we would do explicitly worse with it than had I continued playing Stamper. Back when the Decavitator was new, there were a lot of people who wrote it off as being blatantly worse than Stamper and I don't even blame them for that. After seeing just how enthusiastic I was about the weapon, we decided there would be no harm in at least giving it a shot. I know this would've happened even had I chosen a completely different weapon though seeing as very similar weapon changes have happened in the past.
One of my first times playing it with them was around three weeks after it had dropped. It was a LUTI set, which if you're not aware is a competitive, season-long league that's commonly used to determine how strong each team is. My brain does this pretty often but I had arbitrarily considered this set "important" since a lot of this team's gameplan had centered around one user, one of few outside of my team who I had spoken to often - another Splatana Stamper player, just like I was for so long. I had every reason to crack under pressure and let every little mistake I made pile on my mental as I felt some pointless need to impress this one person.
But when the set had actually started, things were going well. Like, REALLY well. I distinctly remember a game on Clam Blitz Um'ami Ruins in particular where I got a lot of very important picks that, because my teammates were able to play quickly off of it, were the start of every single one of our pushes that resulted in points. All of this from the guy who considered himself easily the weakest on the team a month ago during a set that I wanted to do well in. We won 5 games to 1. wasn't sure if I would hit any kind of consistency with this result but it felt pretty nice all the same.
The weekend after this was my first tournament on the weapon. If you're not aware, Low Ink is the single biggest tournament in the Splatoon community. Players above a certain skill level are not allowed to play so they could give other teams a chance to win and it's been a massive hook for getting a bunch of people playing. It happens over the span of two days and sadly, Day 1 was kind of a bust. I had to watch my family's dogs since they were out of town that day and it lead to me playing unfocused and sloppy. How well your team plays during Day 1's games will determine which double elimination bracket you get put into on Day 2, and despite that we still got placed into the second highest Day 2 bracket. All of our losses were incredibly close despite me playing badly and two of us literally said "we can win our bracket tomorrow" that same night.
The following day, however, was kind of insane. There were a lot of matches we played that were neck-and-neck and had us tied with our opponents before the final game. Despite how hectic things got...I was still playing good. Not every game was perfect, some were pretty weak, but this was a level of strength and consistency I had never seen. This game in particular was a huge highlight for me. It's funny because I look back at this gameplay and see countless things, both in terms of actual fighting capabilities and game knowledge, where had I been playing with my current skillset I would have done so, so much better.
And I have to reiterate - look at this through my lens back then. I was in a pretty shaky time in my life as it stood and my one consistently positive outlet had me stuck with the constant feeling that this group of amazing people was being burdened by me. This tournament and the LUTI set preceding it were the first times I ever felt like I had been capable. Still not nearly as good as everyone else, but there were games where I was being a genuine help instead of my strongest games being ones where I had to grasp at straws to come up with reasons I wasn't damaging my team. I was pumped enough after the replay I had shared and it made what happened next all the more amazing.
When the tournament was over, when the dust had settled...
...we won our first tournament.
After we had gotten the final pick on the Rainmaker in overtime, I was given the sudden whiplash of going from being confident and laser focused on winning our final game to a set of feelings I've never felt before. All of the suspicions that I had before about this team being capable of great things had I not been there had been proven right. However, I ended up working my way into becoming the better player that they needed. The fact that this was the very first tournament after I had started getting better and after that good set in LUTI was no coincidence. I still wasn't on their level but I was close enough to the point where the gap didn't matter nearly as much. The pessimistic thought that I would need to leave the team for everyone else's sake was dead in the water and it was in a point in my life where it mattered most that I learned that.
So when that final game was over, while everyone was popping off, I sat in my chair crying tears of joy in complete silence. All of my teammates were in the voice call, excited as can be, talking about their first tournament win, but I had way too much going on in my head to even be able to hear what all was being said, let alone come up with words to say back. Despite playing two other competitive games for way longer and arguably still not being as good of a player now as I ever was at Pokemon, there still isn't a single moment from playing any video game ever that comes close to how I felt in that moment. I still choke up whenever I think about this including while I'm typing this post right now. Genuinely one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't think to ask anyone to download the vod of streaming our run.
I think it's pretty funny that depending on how you look at things and depending on who you ask, this may very well be Charcoal Decavitator's first ever notable tournament result. This was on Sunday, June 23rd, 2024, which is barely over three weeks after the weapon had dropped. Not many people were pushing the Decavitator back then and most people that were had instead chosen to push the Mint kit. In the grand scheme of things any top-level or even high-level team would have completely smoked everyone in Low Ink since it's not a very high-level tournament but this is still a tournament where many people would dream of doing as well as we've done.
Crazy part is that as some of the things I've said would imply, I've only gotten better since then! There were not only a few more particularly strong games like the Mahi-Mahi one I shared, but also a lot more consistency and way fewer weaker games for me in the very next Low Ink we played in after this. We placed second in another bracket that day to a team that many people said was incredibly strong and only because an unfortunate pause we had to take made it incredibly apparent just how exhausted two of my teammates were. While winning Beta Bracket made me feel capable, this run made me feel strong. You could hear a lot more confidence in my voice compared to usual as the bracket went on. These past few months in particular have easily been the fastest I've grown in any competitive game ever and it's shown no signs of stopping.
Sadly, this is where the story of Determination seemingly comes to its end. Fox has been losing interest in Splatoon as a whole and both Tk and Pat have expressed interest in playing with different people for their own reasons. Scheduling started to get particularly difficult for a number of reasons and it wouldn't feel the same so I felt it would be best to leave as well. As a result, the whole team has formally disbanded as of earlier today. It's not on bad terms at all though. All of us have expressed interest in playing in pickups at some point in the future or having one another sub for the teams we may find each other on. Even beyond that there's zero reason for the team's Discord server to lose its activity when we'd talk there even on days we aren't playing in anything.
I don't think competitive Splatoon is for everyone. At the same time, I'm not going to pretend like my experience so far hasn't been an incredibly good influence on my life. I apologize for getting sappy but I'm never going to forget any of this. The past few days I've been a bit upset that everything has to be stopping but above all else have been glad that it all happened in the first place.
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