Splatoon 3's game mechanics are absolute bullshit at this point. And I wasn't sure what other vague term to use, because that's the shortest way I can describe it.
Yes, this is going to be a long post, ranging from discussing badges, matchmaking, weapon balancing.. etc. I've had a lot of issues with the game for a while now and while the fandom is a part of it, I already addressed part of that in one of my other posts, so I'll keep this one dedicated to the game itself.
Keep in mind I may over-explain things so this post is as accessible as I can make it to people who don't play the game.
I think I'll start with the badge issue, since it's one I have personal experience with. EVP 999, specifically.
(Context paragraph.) For those who don't know, EVP is a ranked badge you can get during one of the game's extra modes, Salmon Run. The gameplay itself isn't incredibly important to explain why this badge setup is awful, so I'll go over the context that is important. Every match is about 6-9 minutes (Depending on if you get the king salmonoid, which appears every couple of waves.) Each match has 3 waves, a wave 1 loss gets -20 points, wave 2 loss is -10, and a wave 3 loss results in no point change. If you win a match, whether or not it has a king salmonoid, you get 20 points.
Keep in mind the name of the badge here with that information in mind. The game expects you to get from EVP 40 to EVP 999 within ONE SINGULAR ROTATION. Each rotation lasts a quarter over a day and a half, around 40 hours. As an example of the hours they give you, the current rotation as I type this started at 9 AM on the 17th, and ends at 1 AM tonight, which would be the 19th. With previous calculations done by the fandom (That are not 100% accurate, but the closest we can get.) To count for lobby-waiting time, inevitable disconnects from the lobby, even if you got 0 losses it can take anywhere from 6-7 hours. Due to splatoon's TERRIBLE matchmaking, unless you have a team of friends to do this challenge with, you're probably gonna get a decent amount of losses. Let's say you only lost 1/4 of your matches, depending on which wave you lost, you may have to do another full match to make up for that loss.
If it takes roughly 50 matches of solid wins to get to EVP 999, and you lost 1/4, let's say all wave 1 losses, you'd be behind by about 12 losses. Which means you'd have to get 12 more wins just to undo those mistakes. That already adds roughly another 72 minutes to the amount of time it would take, nearly an hour from only 12 losses.Â
While we're at it, let's say you actually got a healthy amount of sleep, 8 hours each night. That could potentially mean you're skipping out on only part of the rotation, for example if you went to bed at 10 when the rotation ended at 1 AM, but for calculation's sake, since it's not fully two days, let's go for the amount of time the rotation lasts, a day and 3/4 worth of sleep. If you get a decent amount of sleep, that decreases the amount of time you have to play by 14 hours. Leaving you with only 26 hours to get EVP 999.
But oh wait, you're a functioning human being, you're gonna need to take breaks to eat and go to the bathroom. According to google, "on average, we spend only 1 hour and 8 minutes of every weekday consuming food and drink.." Once again counting for a day and 3/4, that's nearly 2 hours spent eating and drinking. Which would leave you with 24 hours. But oh, yet again, the bathroom exists. Once again according to a google search, "the average person spends 30 minutes in the bathroom daily." Again, 3/4 of a day added, that's nearly an hour to add to the count.
Which brings us to 23 hours. If all you do besides playing this video game is eat, sleep, and use the bathroom, you only have around 23 hours of the 40 hour window to play. So that's assuming you have that day and 3/4 free, and don't spend any extra time doing things like socializing or talking to your family or roommates.
Oh wait.. you might have a job? Working 9-5.. Or school? About 6 hours in the day are lost, even if you have no homework. Forget even attempting this.
 Now here's the part where we get to my personal experience: I have gotten this badge. And I never want to do it again. Every time I complained about these circumstances or saw others doing so, the response was basically just "get good." And I'm one of the people lucky enough to not have had a job or school work when I attempted this. Now that I do have the badge, I can safely say: this response is bullshit. You're not "not good enough" to get the badge. The game simply doesn't give players enough time to get the badge without dedicating an unhealthy amount of hours playing it. The game really doesn't get much harder as the hazard level increases either: It's not a skill issue. It's a time issue, and if you have terrible teammates, a matchmaking issue too.
When I got this badge, the rotation was the same. It started at 9 AM, and ended at 1 AM the next night. The first night I started playing around 7 PM, I had spent the entire day cleaning. According to the screenshots I saved, I finished playing around 3 AM and got to EVP 480. So in about 8 hours, I had only gotten about halfway there. Unfortunately for me, I was sick, and woke up at 9 AM the next day. I also had a hard time falling asleep, I remember only getting about 3 hours that night. I played the ENTIRE DAY. I don’t know how many breaks I took to eat or go to the bathroom, but I can tell you it wasn’t many. I was dedicated. Eating and using the bathroom were the only breaks I took. I was dead-tired, zoned out, and trying hard not to stay on autopilot. By the time I finished, my mind had melted so much it didn’t even feel like the same map anymore. Logically, I knew it was, but each jump felt like it was coming from a different place entirely. The time I finished? Around 12:40 AM if I remember correctly. I was nearly 15 minutes behind the cutoff, meaning if I had lost one or two matches: I would’ve just barely missed the count for the badge entirely, after all I went through. I got the badge but, my god, at the cost of my physical and mental health. That was at least 4 months ago and I still remember how drained I was so clearly. The worst part is this wasn’t even a rotation on a map I wasn’t good at, or completely random weapons that leave you forgetting what weapon you’re even holding: Nope. It was on my second favorite map, with me being good/decent at 3/4 weapons in the rotation, with 1 weapon randomized. It was a GOOD rotation, and I still came that close to failing. All the people that claim it’s easy: I am willing to bet money they did this with friends or other pro players. I didn’t have a team of four. The person I typically play with was unable to play beyond a few matches of the rotation. I was doing this completely alone, only with help from pools, which were still new at the time. And I’m good at this game too. This badge is COMPLETELY unattainable for a casual player. And I know it’s intended to be a pro-player badge.. But, I honestly struggle to decide whether or not it was worth it. I’m glad I got the badge, but I certainly went through a lot to get it.Â
What makes this frustrating is that there’s such a simple solution: Checkpoints. Yeah, there is none. If you can’t get the points before the rotation ends, your number will be reset to 40. Even if you got to 990, you will still go back just like everyone else. What makes this even worse is that Splatoon 2, which introduced Salmon Run, did have checkpoints. Another point: Splatoon 2 didn’t have any sort of badges. No matter how high your score got in Salmon Run, you would not receive a reward for doing so. And yet, the game would give you a checkpoint every 100 points up until 400. I never got that far, but from old posts, it seems like 900 is the highest you could go. Even this would be so much better, if you got up to EVP 500 and the game would reset your points to 400, that means you’re already nearly halfway there AND you still have the full rotation to keep trying! It’s such an easy fix, by giving players checkpoints you’re giving them more time to achieve this goal, even if it got reset back to 400 that is WAY more attainable than getting reset to 40.
Some people argue against this because “oh, what about the poor, poor sweaty players that got EVP 999 without checkpoints?” As one of them, y’know what I say? Fuck it. I don’t care if that makes my achievement less valuable, I can always tell people “I got the achievement before they added checkpoints.” It just feels like “I suffered, why shouldn’t they?”
I didn’t expect to have written this long of a post solely on the EVP 999 badge requirements, so I’ll move on to the servers.
It’s no secret this game’s matchmaking is terrible. You can be a pro player and still get in lobbies with new players. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Like I’ve mentioned, I’m a player with the EVP 999 badge, and I’ve gotten into X rank. Granted, I haven’t gotten good enough matchmaking to get near a badge for it, but that’s part of what we’re complaining about today, isn’t it? Unfortunately it’s hard to use any sort of stats to prove this, as now you can really only see the stats players choose to show off, so you don’t know what level they are or if they’re simply hiding higher rank badges because they prefer characters’ head badges. The simplest way to show this is to just.. Play the game, or watch videos of other players. I don’t think any way I write it could be more damning than.. Watching a clip of someone getting a wipeout, and yet your teammates still manage to lose the ranked match, despite the goal being wide open. Or watching a rank C player get matched with a X rank player.Â
Unfortunately this is just the category I’m not as good at writing about, though I planned to, I apologize. So I’ll link some videos that can explain or show this.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dYcdFs0Hojk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRZw3PZoU-E
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lh9TpiaFt0Y (This video is sarcastic, btw.)
Other people have complained about matchmaking enough that I feel like if you’re involved in the community, you probably don’t need it to be explained to you anyway lol. It’s something the majority of players can agree on.
Either way, I’ll move on to another somewhat-fandom related issue, though I do once again want to focus on the game itself, less than the way players influence it.
While Tricolor has had plenty of issues since the game’s release, I actually wanna start by focusing on one specific update that changed the point system we should be talking about. Here’s the chart for reference.
(Before: Splatfest Sneak Peek 8p, Votes 10p, Open battle 12, Pro battle 12, Tricolor battle 15.
After: Sneak peek 7p, Votes 8p, Open Battle 12, Pro battle 12, Tricolor battle 18.)
Now, while this hasn’t affected the splatfest results yet due to the way points have been collected by the winning team: I want to make this very clear: it could, drastically. It doesn’t seem like a big change but it makes Tricolor such an important category, despite being a problematic game mode, it could single-handedly give you a win. Let me explain by going through hypothetical situations.
Let’s say Team 1 got Sneak Peek, Votes, and Pro battles, Team 2 got Open Battles and Tricolor battles, and Team 3 got no points.
Pre-update, Team 1 would’ve gotten 30 points, and Team 2 would’ve gotten 27 points, giving Team 1 the win.
Post-update, Team 1 would’ve gotten 27, and Team 2 would’ve gotten 30, reversing the numbers completely.
Post-update, even though both won a point on turf wars, and Team 1 had not only the votes but the playtime during sneak-peek.. Team 2 would’ve still won simply because they got Tricolor. I dunno about you, but this seems pretty broken to me. Sneak peek counts how much XP players get in the week before splatfest, basically how much you play. Winning the votes would literally mean the majority of players chose that category. They EACH get one turf war category, and yet the second team would win solely because they got a category that’s only available halfway through the splatfest? A category the lower votes actually have a better chance in due to less mirror matches? That’s prioritizing Tricolor WAY too much. If Team 1 gets 3/5 categories, Team 2 can win just by getting those remaining 2 categories.Â
Some people praise this change because it makes it less likely for the popular team to win, and still gives others more of a chance, but honestly? I think it makes it more likely for unpopular teams to win, depending on how severe their lack of popularity is. As I mentioned before Tricolor is way more likely for less voted teams to win due to the lack of mirror matches. If a team has too many players, previously they may not get matched in Tricolor at all, instead matched into a regular turf war match, but at least now, a mirror match would result in them playing Tricolor against their own team. No point gain for anyone, just practice pretty much. You could have the possibility of playing for hours, and getting less points than someone who played half as much as you, simply because they didn’t get as many mirror matches, and got to play matches that actually count towards your team’s points. Plus, with the gamemode only being available during the second half of splatfest, it can kinda encourage players to only play Tricolor, and nothing else, since it’s worth that many points. And I can’t lie here and say I’m not one of those people, lol. Turf war is boring to me so I tend to mostly play Tricolor if I don’t care much about the splatfest theme and I’m not very dedicated to who wins.
I don’t think that votes should be worth more than Tricolor, but I don’t think Tricolor should be worth as many points as it is. Worth votes and sneak peek combined, nearly 1 1/2 of the points the turf war categories are worth. I’m not sure what an ideal system would be, I’m not a huge fan of sneak peek as a category personally, I feel like it’s better the splatfest points are within the time of splatfest itself, and that having the snails to use on the machine is already enough to encourage players to play more during that time, if they want to. But, my point is, Tricolor is worth way too many points in comparison to the other categories.Â
Especially when you consider Tricolor’s broken history..
When Splatoon 3 launched, it actually released a demo specifically for splatfest leading up to the release date. During the first half, it was just the typical turf war modes. But during the second half of the splatfest.. Whichever team had the most points was put in the lead. The leading team would be put on the Defending team for Tricolor mode. If there weren't enough players, you’ll be placed into a regular turf war match. But here’s the thing: You didn’t have a choice. If you were on the leading, defending team, you could ONLY play Tricolor. If you were on Attacking (Not in the lead) you could choose to play turf war or Tricolor.
Which is why most people complaining about how unbalanced the gamemode was were met with: “Just don’t play it then.” Or any type of “get good” argument. This was only from players on attacking teams, too. Even worse, naturally after how unbalanced it was: The win shifted from Team Scissors to Team Rock. But if you complained about Team Rock winning due to Tricolor: Take a wild guess what would happen to you. This continued and only started to get recognized after youtubers made videos about it, and/or until the next splatfest came along, and people previously on the attacking team were left to defend and experienced how difficult it was. Like I mentioned in another post.
And according to these polls: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/08/poll-what-did-you-think-of-tricolor-turf-war-in-splatoon-3Â
(What do you think of Tricolor Turf War? “It’s good (Team Scissors)” 12%, “Attacking team is best! (Team Rock and Paper)” 36%, “It’s easy” 6%, “Defending sucks, I hated it.” 46%)
I think the results speak for themselves, as only 12% of those in the poll, team scissors, actually enjoyed defending. Whereas 46% hated it.Â
(Do you think Tricolor needs improving? “No, it’s perfect!” 5%, “Ultra Signals need to be changed, they’re too good” 17%, “The defending team needed some kind of boost” 26%, “The maps aren’t built for tricolor, they need to change.” 10%, “Weapons aren’t suited for a three-way match” 1%, “Results should be checked more often and defending team should change to match” 15%, “It should be 3-v-3-v-3” 18%, “I want old splatfests back!” 9%)
NOBODY was fully happy with Tri-color. Only 5% of people actually said it was good as it is. I don’t think anyone would consider that good for a demo. Ironically people assumed the defending team would do best, since it was 4-v-2-v-2 instead of 3-v-3-v-3. But clearly that was a wrong guess. If you got the signal, you’d get an infinite sprinkler to give you free turf throughout the match, and if you got both? You’d get free turf in the middle of the map. Right where the defending team spawns. And god, there was a LOT of spawn-killing.
For some added perspective, these were spawn points for the teams.
And this is what a lot of maps looked like at the end.
The attacking team’s spawn has a lot of high ground and multiple entrances to get to the middle. There were far too many opportunities for the attacking team to get to the middle, and far too little opportunities for the defending team to get in the attacking team’s spawn. (Which was the only way to get enough turf to overpower at least one of the other two teams.)
Needless to say the first demo was an absolute wreck. But we’re not done yet. Somewhere around September, their temporary solution to splatfests was to make it less likely to even get into them. If I remember, the rate may have been around 2%. It was very unlikely, I played for a couple of hours and got LUCKY to get in 2-3 matches. Obviously people were upset with this too.
They tried changing points and maps, but it was never enough, so they simply gave up and made it so that you could get into Tricolor on Defending or Attacking regardless of if your team was winning or losing. This change was mixed at the time but unfortunately I think it’s the best solution they could come up with, considering they were completely unwilling to change the mode’s gameplay. If all we have to work with is changing how players get into matches, so be it. Though players would get extra points if they got randomized onto the team responding to their points. For example if the winning team got placed into defending.
Nearly every splatfest there’s been some sort of complaints about the map, though they largely stem from what a lot of people mutually agree on: The mode should have been 3 players on each team, so they could balance a third of the map for each team. Trying to squeeze 2-v-2-v-4 is just difficult to do without giving one team too much of an advantage, especially when one team spawns at mid. The fact that the original purpose of 2-v-2-v-4 has been rendered useless- With it originally being to give the other teams more of a chance to catch up. (Which was a bit unfair already, to be honest.) It doesn’t matter if they can be on any team now. It’s backtracking, really. Trying to appease the fandom while refusing to address the core issues because they’re too stubborn in what they’ve created.
Speaking of being too stubborn to change core gameplay..Â
Yeah, Tricolor isn’t the only thing people have been upset with since launch. One of the new specials introduced, the crab tank, has absolutely been argued as an overpowered special. Even in pro tournaments there’d be teams with 3-4 crab tanks. Needless to say people were definitely choosing that special more often, and for a reason. On launch, the crab tank has 500 HP. In comparison to a normal squid, which only has 100 HP.. You can see why this thing is a pain in the ass to fight. If you’re a short range weapon, unless you get the opportunity to sneak up on the back, you’re dead. With extremely high range and damage, the thing’s like an overpowered Hydra Splatling, without the need to charge up.
What makes this more of an issue is that: It’s barely been nerfed, at all. Its stats have barely changed since launch. They spent months slowly trying to make players happier, not by changing the tank, but by changing the effect other specific weapons have on it. Specifically by increasing the damage certain weapons deal to it, decreasing the amount of damage done to certain specials.. The tank was never actually made less powerful, and if you didn’t main a weapon that got any of these specific changes- It wouldn’t matter to you. The only stat change is that the duration changed from 9 seconds to 8 seconds. Yeah, what a big change, right? They made special power up more effective anyway (Which increases the duration) so you could very easily undo the tiny inconvenience this update created.Â
As a slightly less inconvenient change, tenta missiles got a lot more powerful from splatoon 2 to splatoon 3. I can’t find the exact stats for comparison, but back in splatoon 2 the targeting was much less effective and easier to dodge, in splatoon 3 its targeting is much more accurate, and for whatever reason, it’s generally a lot more dangerous to deal with than it used to be. Back in splatoon 2 dodging tenta missiles was pretty easy, yet in splatoon 3 it’s harder to do successfully. I don’t have the stats to know why, but I wish I did. Still, it’s a minor change, though it caused players to heavily spam them with weapons that can refill their specials quickly. So it definitely affected the game.
And now we move on to what was my biggest sign this game was going downhill and the devs didn’t fucking care. When it was announced they were bringing a splatoon 1 special into splatoon 3, I think we all expected major changes for it, but somehow.. They didn’t. All the specials in splatoon 1 are infamously overpowered, and you’ll quickly see why. You thought a tank with 500 HP was bad enough to deal with? Try dealing with an INVINCIBLE SPECIAL. That’s right. You CANNOT damage this thing until the duration is over. (Which, by the way, was actually INCREASED from splatoon 1 to splatoon 3.) What made me the most shocked about this special being added was how little they seemed to care about the ways it can affect the game. On launch, if you went into the Kraken you would NOT lose any of your clams in clam blitz. Most specials you either lose your clams or you cannot fire them, and considering how quickly it was changed so you would lose clams, I’m willing to guess they just didn’t think about it. Unfortunately around that time I played ranked a lot, so you can imagine what an experience that was. Splat Zones? The Kraken can just run around the middle, and remember, you can’t kill it, and if you get close to it you’ll die, so if you don’t have a long ranged weapon, you can’t do anything about it. You just have to sit there and let them take the turf. Rainmaker? Not so bad, but it can basically be a shield for the rainmaker holder. Tower Control? OH MY GOD. I don’t know if they fixed it since, but at least back when I played more often, a kraken could just sit on top of the tower and keep getting points. The only way to retake the tower is to either push off or kill the person on top of it: Oh right, you can’t kill them. Needless to say I didn’t play tower control much after that.Â
Now think about how all of these issues combined affect the game. You can’t have much fun playing the basic modes because of the balancing and matchmaking issues, you can’t have much fun during the special events like splatfests unless you’re on the winning team and it’s a good tricolor map.. So how do you still have fun? It’s why I stopped playing. I like playing video games competitively. I’m really good at them, and I know that, I have really rare achievements in other games I find more difficult. But I honestly gave up on this game for a while. After all these issues piling up, I couldn’t find a point anymore. With all the matchmaking and shit, I genuinely don’t think I can have much fun in this game again unless they somehow fix the many issues the game has right now, or unless I can get any friends into the game so I can get a team of 4 and not rely on random level 2 players. I’ve only been playing the special events so naturally I don’t have much recent experience. The game just isn’t fun anymore. The community, and the gameplay itself.. It’s been rough. I used to love this game a lot, and don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it or anything, but I hate the way Nintendo and the fanbase are treating it.
I’ve let this rant go on for a really long time at this point so I’m gonna cut it here. If I think of more I wanna say I’ll add it in reblogs or something but for now, I think I’m done lol.Â
