Splatoon is one of the most innovative third-person shooters to date. However, the games' workings do have their fair share of widely disliked aspects.
Series-Wide
Announcements
- Some stage announcements screens, depending on which game is played, can't be skipped entirely, forcing you to press A as quickly as you can instead.
- In the first game, announcements occurred every time the stages rotated, though stages also rotated less frequently (every four hours instead of two).
- Splatoon 2 made sure the announcements no longer occur every time the stages rotate, since they now rotate every two hours, but that only matters for extended play sessions. Moreover, announcements still play whenever Salmon Run opens up (due to it being a time-limited mode in 2) or when a Splatfest-related announcement hit, all of which are unskippable.
- Splatoon 3 introduced the long requested ability to skip the news broadcasts, but not every broadcast can be skipped:
- If the broadcast involves game updates, the start or end of a season, or special events (Challenges, Eggstra Works, Splatfests, and Big Runs), you will be forced to mash through like before. This is especially the case for Splatfest and Big Run announcements, which are longer in length than normal.
- If the announcement occurs during a Splatfest, you are also forced to listen through the battle stages. Those are accessible through the menu, so the fact that thay can't be skipped in a Splatfest is purely an oversight.
Multiplayer
- Getting disconnected counts as a loss.
- You could be winning and suddenly, because of an unstable connection, lose the match and lose the rank you just acquired. It's supposed to discourage people from Rage Quitting, but the games can't distinguish if someone intentionally disconnected, or just suffered a bad connection.
- "The results screens that show up after time is called and the screen fades" counts as "middle of the match"; you can only safely disconnect when the menu asking if you want to play again, change gear, or quit appears. For those who just suffered an obvious Curb-Stomp Battle, this means 30 needless seconds of the game reiterating to them that that they lost 15%-70% or with a KO Bonus before they can safely close the game.
- Disconnecting in Salmon Run will always dock you the full 20 points as if you failed the first wave. In Splatoon 3, the Xtrawave is considered a bonus round by the game, so wiping or running out of time will still result in an overall victory... unless you disconnect during it, which is still considered a loss and will set you back 20 points. You're only completely safe from a pay cut if you disconnect on the results screen. If a teammate is the one who disconnected, failing a job will still count as a loss, only divided by half (-10 points for the first wave and -5 for the second) instead of not losing anything if you're not playing with a full team like in the other modes.
- If the server enters maintenance during a match, everyone will be disconnected and the match will count as a loss. Sometimes there will be an announcement about when the server will enter maintenance but other times there won't, hope you're not unlucky enough to be playing a Ranked match and experience this when it's not announced.
- Disconnection in general is annoying, since one team being down a player will probably decide the outcome of the match on its own. In 3, if the disconnect happens early enough, the entire match is aborted and none of the remaining players are penalized, though it has a very significant drawback of its own in Ranked Battles.
- All multiplayer matches use peer-to-peer connections instead of dedicated serversnote . This creates lag, latency, and can lead to potential disconnects between players if the host has a bad connection or disconnects, or the connection goes haywire when moving to another host, often creating more unintentional disconnects — which are counted as losses anyway. Players of various shooters typically advocate for dedicated servers for online play, since dedicated servers are typically much more consistent than peer-to-peer.
- This can also be caused by the games' tick rate
, which when decreased, can cause the online multiplayer to be quite inconsistent by receiving and sending data at a significantly slower pace.
- This can also be caused by the games' tick rate
- If multiple players in a room choose to start another game immediately, they will be kept in the same room in Salmon Run and PVP. This hampers skill-based matchmaking and can allow skilled players to be held back by less skilled teammates.
Player vs. Player
- Non-competitive players don't like that all of the online multiplayer modes besides Turf War are locked behind Ranked Battles. You could just ignore rank, but losing in Ranked Battles by knockout gets you zero rewards in Splatoon 1, and only 100 XP for each minute your team lasted on the map in Splatoon 2, and if the KO against you comes in less than a minute, you get absolutely nothing, unlike loss by decision (which nets you 500-995 XP depending on how far your team got toward goal) or in Turf War (which always nets you anywhere from 300-800 XP depending on how much you inked).
- The game's way of breaking ties in Turf War is to add 1 point to a randomly and secretly-assigned "Alpha Team". You'll never know if that 1-point loss was because of a genuine advantage on the enemy's part or if you tied with them.
- Out of all the ranked battle game modes, Clam Blitz is the most hated one for several reasons. The mode requires teams to coordinate far more than in any of the other modes. Not a problem for organized teams, but for solo play, where your communication options are limited, this makes it difficult to get on the same page as them, making the game mode frustrating for lower levels of play. For competitive play, there's the Clam Jump tactic. Where a teammate can be positioned near the enemy's goal, so a teammate with a Power Clam can super jump to them, bypassing any defenses the enemy can put up and score a very easy 20 points. What makes this tactic so hated is that it is completely impossible to stop once it happens. A player super jumping can toss the Power Clam into the goal well before they land and completely unopposed, because a player can only take damage after they have completed a super jump. Because of this, Clam Blitz is considered to be poorly designed by the competitive community, and is hated as a result. Data gathered from player rankings in Splatoon 2's X rank also showcased that it is the least played mode out of all the ranked battle game modes.
- When playing with voice chat on the Nintendo Switch Online mobile app, players are prohibited from being able to communicate with even their own teammates in spectator mode.
- The games not taking into account individual performance almost always, with the only exception being on Anarchy Battle (Series) in Splatoon 3 (and even then it's just losing slightly less of the points you gambled). You could be doing personally well; playing objective, defeating everyone who tries to bring you down, and protecting your team as much as you can; however, inevitably as co-op games, those who aren't skilled enough can drag the team down, and as only one player there's only so much you can do by yourself in a team game. The games unfortunately don't acknowledge this in any way the vast majority of the time, and can leave you with losses that weren't exactly your fault.
- Matchmaking in Turf War can pair players of all levels together despite any possible skill difference, even a new level 1 player can easily get paired against an experienced 99* player.
- Weapons and specials are often distributed in uneven ways in all modes:
- Matchmaking attempts to sort groups of eight players into teams with similar distributions of weapon ranges, so if enough players have redundant long/short range or flanking-oriented weapons, the match will end up with an awkward situation where one team is going have more long/short ranged weapons than the other (another much more uneven distribution can happen when there are enough long/short ranged weapons, see below). This also heavily restricts the number of combinations of players, making gaps in skill between teams more likely to be repeated.
- The matchmaking will fairly frequently set up team comps in very uneven ways, for example, in a game with 2 Chargers (or Splatlings or any long ranged weapon) and 2 Rollers (or Splooshes or any short ranged weapon), it can mistakenly put all chargers in one team and all rollers in the other, leaving all short ranged weapons in one team and all long ranged ones in the other, repeating them in one team instead of evenly balancing them by putting a charger and a roller (or any other weapon class) in each team. The same can happen with specials as well, one team can have all Booyah Bombs and Splashdowns or Inkstrikes, while the other has more undertuned specials. Have fun with that in Turf War.
- Not taking into account player skill in Turf War, combined with the fact that when players choose to continue are kept in the same room there and in Ranked/Anarchy Battlenote , alongside other factors such as flawed distribution of weapons (taking precedence over difference in skill) in all modes, causes the games' matchmaking to questionably indirectly favor upsets, which means that players unlikely to win are more likely to be paired together more often, contributing to the notorious losing streaks mentioned in other examples.
- The only way to significantly increase your X/Splatfest power (or Glicko 2/MMR rating, however you want to call it) is by "battling players with (considerably) higher power levels (than yours)", however, that is completely out of your control contrary to what the game might want you to believe and much more often than not, if your X/Splatfest power is just not at the very bottom, instead of pairing players with higher power levels than yours as it should, the matchmaking will much more frequently pair you with players of lower or only very slightly higher, leading you to possibly barely win any power but still being able to lose a lot (even though your power isn't the greatest in the first place). This can happen even in the calculation matches as well so if you won most matches but your power is still low, this is why. You'd be forgiven for thinking this is due to players near your level not playing at the time you are but it can also still happen even when there are players with considerably higher powers playing at the same time. This problem happens in all games with the Power levels used in the Splatfest Pro and X Rank/Battle modes.
- Splatoon 3 initially only changed X Battle so that it uses a best of 3 system like Anarchy Battle, if you succeed you're warranted to get at least 10 points but if you fail you're warranted to lose at least 10 points, however, this was not quite a solution instead being more of a band-aid, as how the matchmaking handled player matching had not been altered in any form.
- A year after the introduction of the mode in 3, on Chill Season 2023, the developers tried to partially address this by altering how much X Power is gained/lost after finishing an X Battle series. Now the minimum amount of power that can be won/lost is based on your win/loss ratio during them and matchmaking is altered so players with power levels lower than those on the high-end of the standings are no longer able to be matched together, unlike all prior seasons, where all players could be matched together and the only thing certain after finishing an X Battle series was that you could either win or lose 10 power points after winning or losing three matches, but depending on your opponents' power, you could lose a lot of power (even hundreds) even if you power was not that high but only win 10 points. While you can still lose a lot of power after the update (and more than before overall, because you can lose as much as you can win), this change at least prevents players from only winning 10 points when winning all three matches as was the case in prior seasons and Splatoon 2 (where you could even win 0 points after winning an X Battle).
Splatfests
- During a Splatfest, all lobby modes besides Splatfest battle and private battle are removed, and in the first two games, cross-region play is disabled (since, with the exception of Splatoon 3, each region had its own Splatfest), preventing you from playing with friends from other regions in the meanwhile unless you create a private battle.
- Originally during Splatfest in Splatoon 1 and Splatoon 2, there was no way to advance in a team battle without having a full team (Unlike in Salmon Run, where you can hire a random player to fill in the gaps). This was fixed when Splatfests were overhauled in Splatoon 2 Version 4.0.0. Splatfest tiers are now split into "Pro" (a Splatfest Power-based ranked mode that only matches solo players together), and "Normal" (which does not involve Splatfest Power ranking, and allows you to join with friends in a system similar to Salmon Run).
- Separate Splatfest-wide teams slow down player searching as it has to take into account the teams and try to match four against four (or else it just throws up a Mirror Match that ultimately does not count towards the team's total Clout). Some players also like to comment on the older games' "Popularity Curse" (The popular team loses in both the categories involving Wins or Clout) that pops up frequently, often as a result of the aforementioned slowed matchmaking and mirror matches.
- Mirror matches in particular became the most universally hated aspect of Splatfests to the point many player would rather wait for literal hours for a real match than play a series of mirror matches. Because Splatfest centers around the idea of Turf Wars over the "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate and that clout is only earned through actual matches, many players feel demoralized that they were unable to contribute to their teams because RNG keeps putting them into mirror matches against a team of players on the same Splatfest team instead of the battles that count. It also makes the popular team (excluding most worldwide 'Fests in 3) the most undesirable team because they have a higher chance of mirror matches. Many have demanded Nintendo to either cut mirror matches entirely or at least make them worth something despite potential balance problems in Splatfest point system.
- The constant nighttime environment and overly bright, neon ink causes enough of an Interface Screw to make splatting other players on more dimly-lit stages trickier. Certain ink colors are worse offenders than others, such as the almost-blinding white ink used by Team White Chocolate in Splatoon 3's chocolate-themed Splatfest.
- In Splatoon 3, Whenever a team wins a x10/100/333 match, it's broadcasted to everyone playing with no option to turn it off. This can be extremely demoralizing if you just got done suffering a Curb-Stomp Battle or you won a 10x battle while one of the enemy teams takes home a 333x at that exact moment, making your multiplier win feel like a Consolation Prize at best. Many players often choose to button-mash out of the lobby room and get to a new match in order to not bare the annoyance of knowing your team took a big loss.
Salmon Run
- You can't choose what weapons to use in Salmon Run, so it's easy to end up with subpar weapon compositions at high levels of play.
- If one of your teammates disconnects during a shift, the number of Golden Eggs required to pass the round will be lowered in an attempt at an Anti-Frustration Feature. However, it does not lower the intensity of the round to compensate for the reduced headcount, meaning you're very likely to be overwhelmed by Salmonids unless your team is especially well-coordinated.
Splatoon 1
- The Splatfest Tee is considered by many to be a source of unnecessary grinding. You are given the shirt up to 1 week beforehand, but it is a three-star shirt with three empty slots — so it takes the most experience to max out — and you are expected to level it up from scratch. Granted, the extra abilities are weaker and affected by Diminishing Returns, but if you wanna be in top form in Splatfest, or even in Ranked Battle, which is the fastest way to level up the shirt (...if you win), then you might want the extra skills. Also, you are forced to use it in Splatfest, and you might not appreciate the Special Saver ability over the other abilities on your other clothes. And finally, the shirt is taken away at the end of Splatfest, making all the effort seem wasted. Future games would cause this sentiment to do a 180° turn, as the introduction of "ability chunks", lower leveling costs, and other factors made it a valuable resource.
- The local same-console multiplayer mode is, at best, a Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode. Aside from a relatively simple "pop more balloons than the opponent" mode that doesn't offer much besides casual fun and doesn't really utilize the game's core element of inking turf, if player 2 wishes to use motion controls, since no twin-stick controller that is officially compatble with the Wii U besides the Game Pad supports motion controls, they have to use a separate Wii Remote Plus for that and, if they want to use motion controls comfortably, tie the Wii Remote to their controller of choice. It's rather telling that later Splatoon games ditch this mode and don't even attempt to feature same-console multiplayer, despite the Switch Pro Controller supporting motion controls.
- Matchmaking in Squad Battles is set up in such a way that if you have even a single S-rank player on your squad, you'll regularly be put up against squads that are all S-ranks, even if your own team has only one S-rank player and the rest are B or C rank.
Splatoon 2
General
- There's a rather infamous case of Fake Longevity in the SplatNet2 companion app, which tracks the amount of all lifetime turf inked while playing as either character overall or as Octoling and gives out rewards for reaching certain milestones. The final Inkling milestone needs a reasonable 4,652,000p but the last Octoling milestone needs a whooping 26,438,000p. Keep in mind, turf inked as an Octoling counts toward the Inkling milestones, but not in reverse. So if you started playing as an Inkling first, none of that ink counts towards the Octoling milestone. It requires several thousand hours of constant playtime to obtain all while turfing a significant amount of Ink on every match you play so an extremely low number of people have reached it. Also, the reward you get for all your efforts is just a wallpaper. It was mercifully completely toned down for its Splatoon 3 successor, the Wandercrust, with all of its milestones combined requiring less than the already reasonable Inkling milestone total.
- The game is one of the few games, no less a first-party game, to disallow backing up saves to cloud with the Nintendo Switch Online service. While this is most certainly in order to prevent Save Scumming for the sake of preserving ranks and League Battle ratings, it's unclear why at least the save data for multiplayer stats (such as level, gold, Super Sea Snails, weapon/gear purchases, and progress in single-player modes) couldn't be stored online, like other games such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Super Mario Maker 2. In fact, Splatoon 3 does exactly this — too bad that Nintendo never updated Splatoon 2 to do so.
Multiplayer
- The Matchmaking employed in this game enforced region locking by assigning each copy of the game (American, European, and Japanese) its own region value and it always prioritizes matching players from the same region. While at the time of the game's release this was done with the intention of preventing possible lag, this also had the negative effect of limiting the available pool of players to play with. This has gotten more and more pronounced as years have gone by and the game has become much less active (with most still active players after Splatoon 3's release being Japanese players), meaning that for non-Japanese players who want to play nowadays it's much harder to find matches (especially Ranked matches) due to the region locking. Splatoon 3 reverts this to the first game's approach of being able to match all players together except on region exclusive events.
- You can't team up with your friends in Turf Wars; you'll be put on random teams in every match unless you're playing a private battle. The only time where you can team up is during Splatfests, and only if you chose the same team as your friends.
- Salmon Run is only available at certain times in this installment, arbitrarily locking players out when it's most convenient for many. Fortunately, Grizzco is open 24/7 in Splatoon 3.
Octo Canyon
- "Sheldon Request". In this single player campaign, once you unlock the ability to use new weapons, every time you play a level before beating it, Sheldon "requests" you use a certain weapon (one of the new ones or your standard Hero Shot) so he can collect data, which basically means you're forced to play with that weapon and you can't switch. While you can use whatever weapon you wish on subsequent playings, some players find this limiting and wish they could choose from the get-go, or at least stay consistent and have them always use the Hero Shot the first time to prevent Damn You, Muscle Memory!.
- In order to get a hero weapon to be usable in multiplayer, you have to complete all single player stages with that weapon. Call it padding, call it Fake Longevity, but the fact is that you have to complete each stage nine times to get every weapon (including the Brella made available in an update about a month after release). A lot of people will lose patience quickly, feeling the meal tickets you get for completing each stage with every weapon isn't adequate compensation in the meantime.
- Cephalon HQ, the campaign's final Hub Level, has you use saucer platforms to go between sections of the hub. While it's not too risky to traverse due to the checkpoints scattered about, it's tedious to wait for a moving platform and then ride on it repeatedly. Super Jumping out of the section and then back to the start won't save a huge amount of time, either.
Octo Expansion
- Any test involving the phrase "Protect the Orb" is going to be a doozy, since said orb is extremely fragile and can only take a handful of hits before exploding.
- The payment system for taking the tests has been criticized for not really serving any purpose other than forcing players to go back and grind the earlier levels for more points if they use them all up on the more difficult stations.
Splatoon 3
Multiplayer
- When trying to get into a match, one significant difference the matchmaking has with prior games is that if a player disconnects without using the cancel button, the game doesn't take that into account until a full group is assembled and the entire matchmaking is cancelled with a message stating "One or more players disconnected.". This can get annoying real fast, as players tend to do so frequently and when it happens you have to wait from the start all over again to get into a match (40 secs on average in Turf War, 80 secs on average in Ranked Modes). This has been criticized as unnecessary change, especially considering that instead of being an improvement to the widely disliked (and in need of various improvements) matchmaking, bafflingly, it's practically a regression, as the game can't just continue matching like both Splatoon 1 and Splatoon 2 did if someone DC'd during matching.
- Also bafflingly, it's impossible to block a player for any undesirable conduct, all blocking does in this game is make them unable to send you a friend request, unlike all other games where blocking prevents you to get matched with those kinds of players again; including both Splatoon 1 and Splatoon 2 once again (with the only exception being if they were part of the Top 2000 in the Rank X in Splatoon 2, which was somewhat understandable, given that its intention was to prevent people to use it to avoid matching with players and rig the leaderboard, though even then it's flawed because it doesn't take in to account possible throwers/griefers) but here it's always impossible.
- Pool notifications are not updated in real-time, even if manually refreshed. Especially in public pools, it's easy for a closed room to have notifications sent that still lead to it.
- How the various leaderboards in prior games were not separated into regions despite the games' matchmaking always pairing players of the same regions together with the only exception being when there weren't enough players was disliked because it led to Japanese players with significantly higher power levels than players from other regions (most of the time unable to play against the Japanese players with higher power levels, while they still could with no issue) dominating the leaderboards. Splatoon 3 addresses this issue by introducing Regional divisions, unfortunately however, only in X Battles and Splatfests, with Challenges (and all Salmon Run events) lacking Regional divisions once again maintaining the issue.
- When it was first released, players took a myriad of issues with the Splattercolor Screen's functionality. The greyscale color blinding mechanic immediately faced strong backlash from players for turning the visuals painfully bright on certain stages. Some neurodivergent players found the combination of the sudden color shift and unsettling staticky splashing sounds resulted in borderline Sensory Abuse, while colorblind players would learn the Screen's change to color value made the default ink colors of Color Lock mode look practically indistinguishable. The mechanic was so hated it led to discussion of banning the Special in competitive environments — something unprecedented for the series despite being dominated by many Game Breakers in the past — with many Anarchy Battle players choosing basically any other weapon out of courtesy. An emergency fix pushed in late December altered the Screen's effects to lower the brightness of the colors in addition to the saturation, which is generally agreed to have fixed its most glaring issues.
Player vs. Player
- If you create a room for friends to join in on a Turf War or Anarchy Open match beforehand instead of "dropping in" on a match in progress, you and your friends will always stay on the same team no matter what. While it seems like a vast improvement over how the previous game handled it, the draw back is that the game has a tendency to match up these friend groups against players who have queued up on their own, leading to many severe team imbalances. Because of this, it's almost always strategically better to play with friends, leaving those who prefer to play on their own at a constant disadvantage.
- In the newly added Challenges, it's particularly a much bigger deal, as they're special limited competitions to determine the best players that grants medals as rewards where solo players are at a frequent disadvantage; instead of just being the equivalent of Turf War in Ranked for fun like Anarchy Open or an always available Ranked with Friends like Splatoon 2's League.
- The Anti Frustration Measure Splatoon 3 introduced of ending the match early if there's a DC is generally good and does its job well for the most part...except it has a very significant drawback too in Ranked Battles, the game will always end the match in draw as long someone DCs during the first minute. Now, think about this scenario: In a Ranked Battle, one team pushes the objective to single digits during the first minute, leading by many points over the other team, and a sly player in the losing team, knowing their team is very unlikely to win, rage quits the match to end it in a draw to also rob the winning team out of their highly likely victory out of pure spite. Needless to say this can be extremely unfair to the winning team, and can happen rather frequently.
- The X Rank is now a completely different mode from Anarchy Battles. If you want to use the former's exact rating system (X Power, Glicko 2, or MMR rating, however you want to call it), you have to rank up to S+10 by the end of each season lest you be gated from X Battles by seasonal rank reset (whilst X Power on its own is the most sophisticated and effective way to balance matchmaking in Splatoon 3 as the issues its players have with it have more to do with how player matching is handled rather than the rating system itself).
- "Point debt" in the ranked Anarchy Battle mode. Unlike ranked modes in previous games, Splatoon 3 doesn't demote you for underperforming — however, losing too often still deducts points, eventually going into negative numbers and making it substantially hard to recover. No way to skip ranks either if you're too good for your rank either. Situations with players falling into massive point debt due to losing streaks first became a major subject after streamer Arikose was stuck in negative numbers for weeks, leading to many arguments for either capping the maximum amount of negative points, or reworking the entire system. The same thing can happen in X Battle with X Power instead, unlike Splatoon 2, which had a hard limit of 1900 X Power before getting ranked down, Splatoon 3 has no Ranking Down on X Battle and the hard limit is a really questionable low of 500 X Power. For a mode where the idea is for players to compete for the highest X Power this is a very questionable choice as this means that the X Power range is extremely broad, going from 500 to 3000 X Power, with the possibility of always losing points even if the difference between power levels is way too high due to the game still matching all players together while keeping those with the lowest powers being unable to rank down.
- Ranks aren't gated even in Anarchy Battle (Series), meaning that an S+ player can still get paired with or against an A+ player, despite the skill difference possibly causing an unbalanced game.
- Due to this Anarchy Series can match up players of drastically different skill levels and how it does not shuffle teams after a match it can led to extremely unbalanced games where one lucky team is formed of skilled players (that are able to keep on playing on the same team) but the other unlucky team is a mess of skill levels that allows skilled players to be held back by less skilled teammates. At worst, it can make the mode a Luck-Based Mission of finding a team of balanced skill levels and if able to find one, stick with it.
- It also has the unfortunate side effect of making it possible to stay in a good team in Anarchy Battle (Series) or grind ranks in Anarchy Battle (Open) and "be carried", leading to players that don't belong in the higher ranks to reach them but be unable to rank down once they realize they cannot hold their own there.
- Before restoring the feature in Sizzle Season 2023/version 4.0.0, with the intent of making team compositions more predictable, the developers removed the ability to change gear and weapons in the lobby between Anarchy Battle (Open) matches.
- Unlike Turf War (including Splatfests), where you can stay in the same lobby and change your gear after each match—something that Ranked and League battles also had in Splatoon 2—in 3's Anarchy Battles, if you want to switch weapons or even gear, you have to leave your current lobby. This is incredibly annoying for those who find a lobby of other players in Anarchy Battle who they enjoy playing with, because then you're forced to choose between sticking with the same weapon for long periods and not being able to try something new, or leaving the lobby and starting over in a new queue with randos you may not coordinate well with.
- Even if you're playing with a full group of friends, it was still annoying, because if someone wanted to change their gear or weapons, all four players had to hit "Stop" to exit the lobby, then create a new one for everybody to rejoin.
- Inkling/Octoling defeat animations are absent from this game. If you lose a battle, the screen displays the other team's victory emotes instead. In more casual circles, it can come off as other competers bragging about their luck, making their opponents feel more upset.
- When one team has substantially more paint (the scoring advantage) in Turf War than the other team, a "Danger!" indicator will appear next to the losing team's icons in the HUD. This warns the respective team of their disadvantage, which is a useful mechanic in case someone uses a flank route to dive into their enemy's side. However, many of the maps in Splatoon 3 are so simple that the indicator does little more than hammer in the obvious losing state, making it much more frustrating.
- Unlike Splatoon 2, Splatoon 3's Ranking system doesn't take into account your team's probability of winningnote and award rewards (more increments to fill the rank bar/more rank points) depending on how likely you were to win a match. This means that if you manage to win a hard highly unlikely to win Curb-Stomp Battle all you will win is just as much as if you had won an easy highly likely to win battle. In the same way, if you were defeated on a hard highly unlikely to win match despite your best efforts, you will be punished just as harshly as if you had lost an easy likely to win match.
Salmon Run
- While the King Salmonid itself was a welcome addition, the way its encounter chance and rewards work can be upsetting:
- Players' individual Salmometers increase (up to a limit of five increments) for every shift they play, and reset instead if an Xtrawave is triggered. The chance of a King Salmonid increases more rapidly as the Salmometer total increases; that combined with the promise of new rewards incentivizes sticking with one's team. However, this escalates the issue with changing a whole team's rank the same way regardless of individual performance: less skilled players easily end up in ranks that are too difficult for them, and many EVP players have to contend with coworkers much less fit for the rank.
- Fighting a King Salmonid rewards the player with fish scales that can be exchanged for items at the reward exchange counter, and you get scales win or lose, though winning naturally nets you a bit more. What attracts ire is that there are three separate types of scales, bronze being the most common and gold being the rarest. Silver and especially gold scales are Rare Random Drops; they're weighted to drop more frequently at higher hazard levels but far from guaranteed, meaning there's a chance that a team that manages to complete an Xtrawave at Eggsecutive VP might see mostly bronze with a paltry amount of silver, while another team may be lucky enough to receive gold scales despite wiping, running out of time or fighting the boss at a lower rank. Combine this with how hard the Xtrawave is to get to (itself randomly occurring after beating all three standard waves) and most of the Kings being Damage Sponge Bosses that are hard to defeat under the time limit (much less with the 30 spare seconds needed for maximum scale payout), and collecting enough silver and gold scales to the Grizzco shop's full inventory can feel like a Luck-Based Mission. Not helping is that there are multiple shop items that require triple-digit numbers of gold scales — including two banners that cost 333 gold scales each, which will take months (or if you're really unlucky, years) of grinding to afford.
Events
- Tricolor Turf War is a special Splatfest-exclusive mode intended to give struggling teams a shot at taking the lead, but it may have done its job too well.
- Four players from the leading team take the center of the map, while two each from the other teams approach from the spawn points. Which would be simple enough... except Tricolor Turf War features items called Ultra Signals that spawn in the middle of the stage (up to twice per match). If the defending team can keep the other players from activating them, they have the numbers to ensure an easy victory. If they can't, whichever team claimed the Ultra Signal gets a Sprinkler of Doom to ink a large area in their color for the rest of the battle, forcing the defenders to focus on fighting enemies and inking turf to make up for lost ground. Because the leaders are always in the middle of the stage, they have few flanking options and will usually fight opponents head-on, making close-range combat impractical; meanwhile, the losing teams rarely clash due to being on opposite sides of the stage. And if either losing team wins, the first-place team loses.
- In the game's demo, this made being the leader at the halfway mark an Undesirable Prize and all but guaranteed the second-place team would pull an upset victory. The Unstable Equilibrium was so bad that for the actual game's first Splatfest, Nintendo drastically cut the rate of Tricolor Turf War battles to adjust balance... which naturally drew complaints from people who wanted to play Tricolor Turf War and kept getting shunted into basic Splatfest fights instead. After various balance tweaks and adjustments that helped somewhat but didn't really address the core of the problem, Chill Season 2022 reworked Tricolor Battles from a Comeback Mechanic into just a game mode that unlocks at halftime and made it so any of the three teams can be on offense or defense, so that while future Tricolors might be unbalanced, they at least won't directly favor one side for the entire Splatfest.
- But this only created a bigger problem for competitive players: If one of the teams has far less members than the others, then the remaining teams will constantly get mirror matches because the smaller team doesn't have enough players for all the Tricolor Turf War battles. This makes it harder for players in the bigger teams to earn clout to contribute to the Tricolor Turf War category, which is worth the most points in Splatfests. And due to being its own category, Tricolor Turf War doesn't have a lot of direct incentives that the other categories have (namely 100X and 333X battles, which also gives players a chance to ride on a float with Deep Cut if they win). As a result, many players quit playing Tricolor after suffering several rounds of mirror matches in spite of the fact it's the most important category for their team to win.
- All special modes are locked behind limited times. While Splatfests being special occasions is considered understandable, Big Run and Eggstra Work can't be practiced outside 48-hour timeframes. That's not even getting into the new Challenge sessions each being split into three two-hour segments.
