Splatoon

Glicko-2 has been around since Splatoon 2, unfortunately. As a system designed for chess, the weaknesses definitely start to show when you put it to use in a 4v4 game

Side Order concept art

What’s the skinny on how Glicko works?

I've been reading through the new Famitsu interview, and most of it isn't explicitly new stuff. Just cool details, like noting that Pearl's S3 jacket was modeled after a space suit (to show that she's become an internationally renowned artist who's breaking into new worlds) and is a bespoke piece that cost 200,000,000 cash, and Marina used that as inspiration for the starry pattern on her tentacles. Again, "exploring brave new worlds", "I'm brave new worlds", "what lesbians?", etc. etc. But that preliminary key art is bugging me

To be honest it reminds me of Callie in the promo art for Octo Valley◊. Like, saving Marina from being trapped in her own virtual world was a plot element from the beginning, but it gives the same visual prominence to early Marina Agitando as it did to Callie in the hypnoshades. Making it seem like it was intended to be a central plot feature, instead of just kickstarting the main story. The interview moves on after they show the sketch, but when you take into account how Marina's Dev Diaries are set up like an Apocalyptic Log, and the early images of Off the Hook we got in the February 2023 teaser... it just gives the impression to me that the story of Side Order used to be different. And it went through heavy rewrites at some point (which might account for its lengthy development time and how long it took us to get any real news) because they suddenly realized people would be pissed

If that's true, then in one respect, I am so glad this is the timeline we live in

Edited by Midna on Mar 28th 2024 at 12:05:22 PM

Glicko was originally invented for one-vs-one games, not team-based multiplayer games, but it might currently be the best (or least bad) rating system out there for matchmaking. It tries to group people up with players who are as good/bad as they are, and it does this with the use of three ratings.

• Rating: How good or bad you are at the game.
• Ratings Deviation: How often an "unexpected outcome," such as beating an opponent way better than you or losing to one way worse than you, happens. More or less, it's the "reliability" of the rating.
• Ratings Volatility: How expected these "unexpected outcomes" are. This was created in the Glicko-2 revision of the system to try to handle players who are very erratic with their performance.

These all influence each other. For example, a high Ratings Deviation means that the game needs you to play for a while before it "knows" how good you are. Once it does, it adjusts your Rating.

Once your Rating changes, the game starts putting you in matches with better or worse players (on either team). Get ready to experience a big winning or losing streak until the next Rating update!

And typically it is streaks that update your Rating. Inconsistent play results in it needing more matches before it can judge how good you are.

The end result is that you often tend to have 50:50 wins/losses overall as the game tries to keep grouping you up with equally good/bad opponents and teammates. This can frustrate players who don't feel like they're improving when they actually are, since the game doesn't show an onscreen rating to them (unless they're in ranked). It can also prevent frustration from players who are bad at the game ending up in totally random matches where almost everyone else is better than them.

It has its pros and cons, but it's been blamed for having winning streaks followed by vicious losing streaks.

I instantly hate it

Same. It's why I pretty much dropped Splat 2 and didn't even bother playing almost any of the fests(including the first Splatoween and Frostyfest). It just burnt me out and really the only thing that still keeps me from dropping Splat 3 is the catalog and my pathological need to complete it(also the only reason I bother with Fests aside from conch sells).

Edited by doomrider7 on Mar 28th 2024 at 11:17:18 AM

I still find the game fun, but I do think it would be nice if it had an openly ranked turf war and a much more random turf war. Or some other solution?

I don't like the idea that new players would get continually rolled by being placed purely random with everyone. My niece isn't good at the game, but she finds it fun, and that's important to me.

Pure randomness has its issues, and so does rigging it to create a 50:50 win/loss ratio. But what is the solution? What wouldn't create different problems in the place of the ones it tries to fix?

Anytime my team wins a match, I always take a pic of the map, then of our team's victory pose (and if I'm fast enough, I can snap a fist-bump when it happens as well).

Yeah, the “no items or Pearl” danger can be an instant death sentence depending on how your run has been going. Unless the game has allowed me to invest well in actually abilities and buffs, I just immediately go back into the elevator.

Isn't the ability to go back to the elevator also a buff that you can unequip? The ability to reset floors?

Resetting floors is a separate thing, you pay membux to reroll the 3 choices before starting any floor.

wait i could have just gone back in the elevator?

I basically gave up on Splatoon 3 because I was just constantly losing. Well below 50/50, constantly, for more than a year. Maybe I wasn't playing often enough for it to dial in my rating accurately, or maybe some quirk of the system ranked me higher than it should have and never pushed me down far enough to get good matches. But whatever the reason, I eventually decided that it wasn't getting better and I was just making myself miserable trying, so I gave up.

That, and the more linear map designs that just turn everything into a straight shootout every time, basically killed the game for me.

Y'know, Eeltail Alley really is just Port Mackerel 2: Return of Octavio, isn't it

Yeah. It either costs a life or costs some membux, I don't remember, but you can just walk back into the elevator whenever you want once you enter a level.

For some reason, in Splatoon 2 Japan got more Splatfests focusing on IRL brands like McDonald's, Hello Kitty and NIKE.

Alas, on playing variants of the Squeezer and the Ballpoint Splatling, I do see merit in having the different distance modes. Revising my opinions, it hurts.

I think a big reason for that is because Splatoon seems to be advertised to general audiences in Japan, but more to boys internationally. (go back to the American Splatoon 1 ads sometime. Tongue-in-cheek '90s ad jingles aside, most of the close-up shots are not of the feminine squibs.) So in Japan they have sponsorships for chocolate snacks, Nike, Sanrio, McDonald's, and government programs(!), while the few we get over here are mostly for "other boys' series" like Transformers and Ninja Turtles

I think a large part of why there aren't as many sponsor fests in Splatoon 3 because most Splatfests in Splatoon 3 are international, so they had to pick sponsor themes that players would be likely to recognize no matter the region... which, as we've seen, basically limits them to other Nintendo franchises. But that still doesn't explain stuff like the Japan-only potato chip fest, which seems like it should have a sponsorship attached but didn't. Idk

Edited by Midna on Mar 28th 2024 at 1:30:01 PM

Going back to the elevator costs Membux equal to the amount you would've earned for clearing the room.

That being said, whenever a unique Splatfest happens there, I send a picture of its announcement to my step-aunt, who’s Japanese herself and hear which side she’d pick.

Is Splatoon really marketed to boys specifically internationally? A large number of girls and women play it.

• My niece is the Splatoon player in her family after my nephew lost interest as he got older,
• there are a large number of female livestreamers playing the game,
• and there was also the time I had to babysit my niece and nephew years ago during Super Bowl Sunday, my niece's friend, a girl who was about 9, asked if she could try Splatoon (when no-one was playing it and it hadn't even been mentioned, which indicates she wanted to try it on her own),
• and many of the celebrity artists in the game (the people whose posts get upvoted the most and appear in most people's plazas) are female.

Maybe it was initially marketed to boys in the US around the release of the first game, but it's pretty clear the playerbase is not overwhelmingly male.

I also once read (forget where) that the three shooter games with the largest female playerbases were Splatoon, Overwatch and Fortnite.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Mar 29th 2024 at 8:55:07 AM

Yeah I don't think splatoon was marketed just for boys at all internationally, especially when the girl inkling is still front and center on the box art.

And the manga adaptations of Splatoon have a boy main character, the most horrible irritating inkling of all, and are aimed at a shonen demographic

God I hate him