People Don't Know Top Splatoon Players & We Should Fix That

Idk who that guy is but he plays a blaster L

ProChara is a YouTube content creator that mainly focuses on Splatoon Content. ProChara's content ranges from guides to live streams. ProChara's favourite weapons are the Range Blaster and Stamper.

As a newcomer to Splatoon, the community is WAAAAY too disjointed. People gather at creators like Dude, Chara, and even Squid School because it's easier than finding the 1000 Discords people have to sift through to find any info at all. The community is way too decentralized for the average person to know deeper information about it.

I think the last reason you list is actually the most salient. I would wager that the vast majority of your audience isn't actually looking to get into the competitive scene. They are looking for easily digestible content that will entertain them and improve their gameplay. They are going to be largely solo queue players looking to climb up in Anarchy or X-rank at best. These people don't have the time and motivation to seek out specific top level players or gameplay footage. They don't have the knowledge to analyze and learn from that footage on their own without breakdowns from more knowledgeable content creators like yourself. I know I fit into that category. I'm an adult with a full time job. I was an adult with a full time job when Splatoon 1 came out. I have other hobbies and can only dedicate so much of my time to this game. If I wanted to truly join the competitive scene I would likely have to give up a lot of the other ways I spend my time, which just isn't a commitment I'm willing to make. So it just doesn't make sense for me to spend time tracking down footage of players who play my weapons. I think the vast majority of people consuming splatoon content online are looking for either lower level learning tools, or for the types of content you watch as an e-sports fan, not an e-sports player. They want to learn about the meta and the players in the type of way fans of IRL sports learn about them for their fantasy leagues. They want to see highlight reels of cool plays or get an understanding of strategies, but not necessarily so they can go out and join a team of their own.

Thumbnail: have you heard of ProChara? People who don't know: No, but we heard of ProChaira!

i cant stress how much discord itself is hurting accessibility. theres no way to get access to the information posted inside of discord servers without joining yourself, and if you dont get advertised to the right servers its all locked away and untouchable by the majority of the player base. theres no popular twitter account, youtube channel, instagram, tumblr, etc that is outright posting the links to helpful documents, advertising competitions, where to join and look for teams, etc. i want to join the comp scene so bad, but i cant spend hours of my time searching discord servers for other discord servers just to find the information i need to start using the discord. i love reading about the strategies for team comps but im not sure how im expected to find this information when no one advertises it elsewhere, even the people competing (although maybe im just missing some big accounts, but it doesn't feel like it since im still in the dark about how to go about making/finding a team and what i do once i find one)

Before watching the video, I just want to chip in, the way how the Splatoon community functions is very akin to that of an indie game community (in terms of functional size). The vast majority of the millions of players are children most of whom don’t even know how to use the internet properly. The amount of young adults well-versed in communicating with others in a genuine fashion numbers in the few hundred thousands which, don’t get me wrong is still a large number, just a hard cry from the amount of people in the actual player base. Not to mention that there is some content made by Splatoon creators that are infamous for being bad, which turns a lot of people who would like Splatoon away from the community and the game by proxy (I won’t name names, I’m just saying).

Sometimes, I also feel like competitive players can be a little callous toward the casual scene - many competitive or high-level players I see online, through Twitter or twitch, often regard casuals as ‘filthy’ or ‘stupid’. It also applies to when competitive players have to look at a mode like turf war from a casual perspective: for example, there was a video where Gem (if that’s how you spell his name) was talking about the Big Swig roller, and he was grousing about how people were telling him it’s a painting weapon and it’s more viable in turf war than other ranked modes, and he disregarded them in a way that sounded like he was being haughty. For one, the appeal of the Big Swig is literally to paint - bigger range, minimal consumption when rolling; even the Splatoon devs made nods at how it’s meant to cover turf and such via Sheldon. And two, he didn’t even bother to think about it from how a causal would see it, and didn’t explain ‘it’s not competitively viable’ - instead just saying it’s terrible and everyone who says it has some other purpose is wrong. Another user talks about how competitive turf war is looked down upon by the competitive scene in the West, while in Japan turf war tournaments are viewed highly and get a lot of praise from people who see the ‘beginner mode’ can cater to all skill levels. Maybe I’m looking too deep into it, but I still get the impression that the competitive scene will laugh us all away without taking the time to understand where we are trying to come from. And for the people who want to understand the competitive scene better, asking questions can feel like a dice roll to debate ‘how stupid will they think I am on a scale of 1-10’, or something. That’s just how I feel, of course.

The large issue that I continue stating ever since Splatoon 2 is that finding event footage is not only hard for competitive players, but e-sports fans and viewers as well, resulting in situation where you can't conveniently follow the thing as a casual observer. It's kinda hard to appreciate the players when most of the time you can't see them in action, lol.

as a pretty big fan of smash bros i absolutely love watching the many, many multi-hour long essay type youtube videos that go into detail on the story's of top level players and tournaments. And i would absolutely love to see some of those for splatoon too

For the first two official Splatfests, I kept running into team Seafoam on the opposing team every other match (before I realized who they were). This was before anyone cared to notice that 'Open' meant teams and 'Pro' meant solo. So for a long while when I kept getting matched against and kept getting crush I finally just took a break which I used to look up who this team was. At the time, very little videos I could find of them but what I did kind of had me in awe that I at least got to see them in action in real time. But mind you, when you're a mid-level casual splatoon player on a team with low-level casual players with no way to communicate/strategize during a Splatfest, the very last thing you really want to see on the other team is 'SF' before names.

I think it is a three part problem. First is that the scene is smaller and second is that that footage is harder to find both of which you mentioned in the video. Something you didn't mention with regards to the second problem is how much harder it is to find VOD's in game due to how Splatoon handles replays and how that affects how hard it is to find footage even on youtube. I play fighting games and in a lot of those I can just search for replays of matches played in ranked in game and find two top players playing against each other. This is probably also why it is so easy to find videos of top players playing for the games I play, people go online and post those matches on youtube without the players having to do so. The last problem is moreso a problem inherent to Splatoon and team games in general, players are associated more with teams rather than themselves. People are more likely to know that Sayonara had a member who used a Ttek during Nintendo Cup than they are to know which of Sayonara's players used the Ttek.

I never know when tournaments are. I only ever know when there’s a tournament if it’s on Nintendo’s social media.

I think another thing is that casters and commentators don't always know the names of everyone in the match, and there's not always player cams so it's harder to remember those players.

I think the biggest difference between Splatoon and Smash is simply the lack of local tournament scenes. It's so much easier to ask a better player for advice when you're literally sitting next to them. You can see whether or not they're busy or in the mood to answer questions. Sending a DM online often feels like you're inconveniencing someone by asking for their time. Unfortunately, the team game format makes small, local tournaments not really feasible in the way it is for 1-on-1 games.

PikaDave is sick. He's on cherry limeade and he's posted that awesome match with the perfect tristrikes you did a video on but from his perspective with comms and everything (He also threw the strikes) I also watch arashi stuff since I main wiper and I love ultra stamp :)

I think there are four incredibly important things going on: Team Game: Since any result in a Splatoon match is the providence of an entire team, individuals on that team are less recognizable. Also, weapons in this game, as different as they are, have way more similarities than characters in a fighting game, especially with how much the meta loves short range shooters rn. (As an aside, the incredibly stale Crab meta makes it harder to find top players playing the weapons that viewers actually want to see.) That, combined with the sheer number of options, make it hard to assign any one weapon choice with the same level of importance as a fighting game character. That's not even to mention people swapping their main weapons every time a new patch hits. Small, exclusive scene: You mentioned a lot of good points about this, but there are a couple more elements to this. Because Splatoon is a team game, it is necessarily much more difficult to play in a more casual venue, such as friendlies at a Smash event. This leads to any place that could facilitate these kinds of interaction having necessarily higher bars to entry, as you need to get 8 people together for a game of Splatoon to happen. Also, the mere fact that so much of this game's community lives on Discord makes it necessarily difficult to reach out beyond that walled garden. State of the game: Some constraints are endemic to how we watch this game and how we talk about it. The camera in any tournament vod is constantly hopping from player to player. This isn't how Smash works. If you are watching a set in Melee, you are watching everything the two players are doing. Most of the time, any individual on a Splatoon team is getting their perspective shown for less than a minute total, over several smaller cuts. Also, when I watch tournament sets, it feels like a lot of casters spend more time popping off then they do explaining. That's all well and good when what's happening on the screen is obvious, but I've found myself several times wondering if I was missing something with how people were reacting that made it an awkward experience. The scene you have, and the scene you get: When you describe that players have to be willing to go out and find new people to watch, that seems incomplete to me. There won't be a scene that seeks out top players to watch without those top players having more of a presence first. You mentioned some good ideas to fix this, but here's a couple more I thought of: - Cameras. Easier to connect with a player if I can see them - Individual perspectives. Please. - Focus on the players. As you mentioned, it seems like a lot of the best known players are the people making content about it. Maybe focusing content of those creators on individual players could help with the discovery problem. - Spectacle. There just isn't the same kind of personality, bombast, and spectacle surrounding the Splatoon community as there is around other communities. It's a bedrock difference, and I don't really know what to do about it. That will have to come from within the top levels of the game.

My pushback is that for me personally, I’m not trying to become a super good competitive player. I don’t have the time or energy to spend to get super good, so I play for fun. I agree that for people serious about Splatoon it’s important to watch high level play and analyze it, but for me I’m comfortable sitting at S rank. I also prefer Salmon Run so I often check Hazmy’s posts about the current rotation and tips for those, but that’s about it. All the people I play with are casual and mostly less skilled than me, so getting better doesn’t have much draw for me.

This guy ProChara is so underrated, he’s this content creator than makes videos about the game from a competitive standpoint. Most people haven’t heard of him and you should check him out, he’s really cool

I think my main problem I’ve had when I’ve tried looking for gameplay for my weapons is that it’s hard to find specific match ups for your weapons especially when there’s a lot of weapons that aren’t as commonly played at top level. Like if I wanted to learn how to play against a blaster player as a tri slosher player I not only have to find a vod with the tri slosher player but also find one where that player goes up against a blaster player. On top of that maps greatly change the effectiveness of weapons meaning I may not even learn as much about positioning or other map related specifics for my weapons since pros don’t play on a lot of the maps/game modes. Another big thing is that top level players often are playing with and against a coordinated team. There’s definitely stuff to learn from that but there’s also a lot of stuff I just simply can’t put into practice in x rank. So often times since content creators upload x rank gameplay they have way more useful footage and insights about how to play their weapons even if they’re not the best in their category because I’m actually able to put the stuff into practice.