Splatfest Frustrations
I’m a little behind on blogging since I have a lot of things I want to write about, but I spent most of my blogging time last week transferring my project blogs to WordPress.com. That’s a story for another time.
So, while Splatfest actually took place on Saturday, I’m only getting around to talking about the experience today. I want to start by saying that overall, it was still a fun time, but it was marred by uneven matchmaking.
So, the theme was to pick between two superpowers: Flight or Invisibility.
I had a hard time choosing, but eventually went with Invisibility… because it’s the introvert’s dream to be completely unseen and left alone! Apparently, other people had more devious thoughts about how to use it, but those didn’t cross my mind at all when I picked it. (No, really!)
Major Losing Streak
Now, I am NOT a great Splatoon player. I prefer to play paint roller, which isn’t the most offensive of weapons. Sometimes, I’m a bit too reckless and don’t retreat when I should. I recognize this.
However, if I have a stable team with decent firepower to back me up, I can do some awesome inking. For the most part, awesome inking didn’t happen on Saturday.
I have no idea if it was a glitch in matchmaking, but that’s what people are saying. While I only got one mirror match (which means the teams were much more evenly populated), I often saw that my team’s power rating would be in the 1500’s and it would put us up against teams in the 1800-1900’s. This happened consistently, and we almost always got wiped.
I never got beyond the 1600’s in power rating, while in the first Splatfest, I’m sure I was much higher than that. Just didn’t win enough to move up.
Then there were times when I just didn’t know what the heck my team was doing. I felt like I was out there playing a pretty solid match, inking and splatting. Then, I’d look at our map and it was a mess of ink from the other team up to our spawn!
“Where are you guys!?” I’d cry forlornly at my screen.
No answer came. 🙁
I was spawn-camped so many times this weekend. My team just didn’t have a chance, and it seemed like the other side did it so effortlessly.
I’ve seen us lose with 10% or less of the map inked on our side.
Then there was the match where my team played hard and well… and we lost by a 0.1%! Oooohhh… that was just gut wrenching.
I even gave up the paint roller and tried the zapper for the first time thinking maybe I needed to be more offensive in play style. That didn’t help in the long run, so I ended up limping along and quitting partway through Invisibility Champion. I just couldn’t make it to Queen this time.
Later, I saw threads on Reddit where other people on Invisibility described the same frustrations. So I wasn’t the only one who saw this. I didn’t experience this kind of one-sided play in the first Splatfest — wins and losses felt pretty even, with wins being a bit more common.
The one nice thing was I got to see the newest map — once. It rotated in just as I was going to quit for the day, so I stayed on to play some matches until I actually got to try it.
Results
I woke up the next day and immediately turned on my Switch for results. I wanted to hear it from the game and not from the Internet. Sadly, I found that results were delayed because they decided to pool Europe and NA results together.
This had many people waiting anxiously.
When results finally did come, closer to lunch time, they were disappointing but not at all unexpected. I was surprised to see that Invisibility was actually the most popular team, though only by a small margin.
I was sad to see we got trounced, just as I was afraid we’d get. I don’t know if it was just my bad luck, or really an issue with matchmaking, but it was a rough time.
