Is The West Falling Behind And Improvement In The Scene

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[@velvet4983]

I remember when splat university used to post often in late s2 and was rlly confused on how more ppl weren't watching

[@ProChara]

yep definitely was one of the main cases where content was there but not the audience

[@shiina4826]

god i miss splat university

[@toasture9119]

Me omw to learn Japanese purely for the yt content

[@mizuukiiiii]

as someone who used to like to watch japanese splatoon youtube for fun, you don't gotta know the language to understand it, if that makes sense. i know very little japanese; i can barely say a sentence that isn't related to squids, but i find japanese splatoon videos very fun to watch. i know this was a silly joke but i'd reccomend watching some if you're bored.

[@demithefiend]

@@mizuukiiiii +1. whenever im bored and scroll yt shorts, i get a lot of japanese "splatoon technique" videos where you dont need to know any japanese in order to watch and understand (bc its shown in the gameplay). I will say, learning at least how to read katakana is very very very useful for reading japanese gaming content, since its used quite often and usually they're similar in both japanese kana and english

[@mizuukiiiii]

@@demithefiend i taught myself hiragana and katakana months ago now lol. it was fairly easy, alot easier than you'd think. but yeah, i don't go on shorts much, if at all, but sometimes the videos pop up in my reccomended and they're fun to watch.

[@punch7793]

hey chara, weapon diversity especially at high level is a problem sometimes it feels like there are only 4 weapons being played: pen shot slosher and rb (and you see some liter edit or a roller here and there but yeah), and I have a few theories and explanations of why this is the case. When you look at the top of high level about +2 if you want practice with and against stronger players it's very difficult to find them, especially when you play a "not top tier" weapon in their eyes, there are litterally some top players that refuse to play against or with players that don't play a top tier weapon (that being the only reason), I won't call out anyone in perticular but even myself for playing Vsplash which is still seen as like a top 20 weapon and very solid got some rough comments saying that "you should just play shot" when this is the mentality towards these high/mid level players then there is no surprise that people will just lean towards the safer options because of pressure. another explanation can be that people want to improve fast and rapidly and what gets easy results at mid/high level are weapons like shot and pencil since they require minimal knowladge or skill to have a good impact on the game (you see this especially with pen but that's another discussion). This deviates players from using non meta weapons, on top of that mid/high level is not really that full of teams there are a lot of players but they tend to not have a team and play in pickups adding to the pressure to playing a weapon that would help you compete more and climb up the ladder. these are just a few of the possible explanations, it's not just one thing that explains everything. it's very strange since top level players tend to go faster than they replenish, and there are again multiple reasons for that but manly it's often their own fault no allowing those players to get that pracitce to let them get experience at the highest level, meaning that they will tend to keep exploiting weaknesses in mistakes that are not made higher up keeping the verity and experimentation lower. It's a very complicated problem and there are more things I'd like to discuss but I'll round it up here. all I'm trying to say is that it's a growing problem and we need to do something about it in my oppinion because if we don't then the top scene will die out which will not be healthy for the competitive community

[@ProChara]

yeah thats a fair point ty Punchy

[@splashofazure]

the point of lacking experimentation is why i miss teams like Cherry Limeade. even if they werent the best team, they were definitely creative in their strategies and skillful at executing them. I guess we're kind of seeing that again with moonlight since Omega is trying to push Decavitator, but other than that, it is mostly just 2 handfuls of weapons being thrown against each other.

[@ProCharaVodDump]

While I agree with this, I think the best place to start with underrated weapons is actually X rank, and that's something we don't really push as much.

[@lancesleeps]

I agree with the lack of content, I’ve found myself more often than not watching japanese players on YT or twitch since there’s a lot less interaction on English content, and therefore a lack of content. I think what it comes down to is that the competitive-natured scene of the west is a proportionally smaller than that of the west. There’s simply not that many splatoon players that genuinely want to get better and go out and search resources to do so

[@vizzy_ree]

As a mid level comp player, to me it feels like top level has also been the top for so long, and because it’s been so small, a lot of the experimentation that has happened over the past 6 months to a year in mid and high level hasn’t been shown because the skill curve is so steep to the top

[@sleeplessarcher]

When it comes to innovation in the Splatoon comp scene, I think that the best solution is to suck it up and get creative. People need to be bold. They need to express their thoughts and try things out. Curiosity is what leads to innovation, after all, and if no one is willing to get creative then things are going to get stale very quickly. I believe you said in your most recent tier list vod that bucket deco has a lot of potential and you wanted someone to try and run it. But from what I understand, no one has even given it a second glance. Same with Reeflux - everyone says it has potential (or at least, a group of people do) but no one is actually trying it out. And I’m not saying it’s the fault of any one individual - entire teams need to be willing to branch out and think out of the box. Hell, I don’t think that it has to be done during a tournament, either. Merely experimenting in scrims and having top players share replays, post about their experience with the weapon, or just talking about it in general is more than enough. traction is traction. Now, I know that most competitive teams have a solid foundation they must build upon. Cooler is basically a necessity, Zooka is really good, etc.. But that doesn’t excuse staying completely rigid and not deviating from what’s ‘safe’ or what people know works the best. There have definitely been times where people look at a meta or a weapon and think, “oh, there’s literally no other answer to this strat/this weapon isn’t that good” - for the former, think of the Damage Up/Defense Up meta in Splatoon 1; for the latter, Splat Roller in 3. It took a top team getting their ass kicked by a Jp team with QR to realize that the answer was right underneath everyone’s noses and yet no one wanted to deviate from what they were familiar with. For Splat Roller, it took just a few dedicated players to completely change people’s view on the weapon into something that’s actually competitively viable. Another smaller example that I can think of is Custom Explo - not to say it’s competitively viable at top level, but people had to go out of their comfort zone and actually experiment with it in order for everyone to realize it’s actually pretty solid and could have a good Zones niche. I do understand that there’s a lot more to factor in here. Players with certain play styles will be a bit more limited in what weapons they can experiment with. The lack of tournaments happening means less eyes on the scene, which can make growth a lot harder to express. It’s not gonna be comfortable. It’s not gonna be easy. Not everyone is willing to do it. But someone has to. One last thing I’ll mention is that I don’t think Japan is necessarily ‘ahead’ of the West when it comes to the Splatoon 3 meta. Being ‘ahead’ implies that there’s a goal post that’s trying to be met, but I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. Are there some absolutely busted strats, broken weapons, and insane comps that have to be uncovered like diamonds in the rough? Yes, absolutely. But I just think the JP scene is bringing up more questions that leads to more people trying different things rather than “solving the game faster”. ‘What if we use Jr as a counter to Zooka?’ ‘What about Neo Splash?’ Different priorities n’ stuff. They’re just looking for more answers Anyway, that’s my rant. Sorry if it makes no sense or anything. I’m not a top level player lol

[@Brian-oe8dm]

I love that you brought up the concept that more people should play Splat in order to learn about the game rather than just playing to win, personally it's helped me feel better about playing soloq or scrims in which if I lose then whatever I move on and learn something but if I win then that feeling of winning feels so much better. I feel like if you have that mindset to the extreme then you can never really truly lose and always leave with something whether or not you win that game/set/tournament.

[@skyguysZ]

I’ve seen this exact same issue back in early splatoon 2 where the west is behind jpn in many areas and a lot of players copy jpn without understanding why. competitive content creation was also an issue too. It prompted DUDE to make a video on explaining why we need to make videos to make our scene interesting. I found it amazing to see similar talking points from you here. I only hope that fuzzy tweet will get people to really think about how they approach the game in the future. I don’t expect immediate change, only gradual change

[@ProCharaVodDump]

Dude is who got me into doing videos because of this same issue I hope this tweet inspires similar.

[@DesDeLaNet]

Your point about not getting burnt out because you enjoy the game so much made me realize that even at lower levels we need that core enjoyment of growth to find any reason to improve and grow Honestly great video, I might also start putting out my own videos for this game soon, since I don't think we have too many Splatling players who post gameplay, and Hedit players need someone to help them figure out more stuff with the gun

[@viscrelia]

The gatekeeping part is sooo true, My own friend who’s top 500 in X rank won’t even give me advice to improve, and we play together near daily

[@bestintown2020]

I wonder if my friend and your friend are the same person 😂 makes my playing experience quite miserable as we keep getting paired with people who are way above my level and if my friend cant solo carry then we just lose every time 😢

[@Penguitt]

Being able to think critically about the game, your own gameplay, and notice *why* top JPN players make the decisions they do is the key that unlocks so much more in your own gameplay. That's always been my experience, anyway. I've started reuploading vods and analysis of my matches to understand CRB more now that it's out.

[@gio_frank6622]

it's so weird how a single country can outweight three continents (Europe , NA, and even Oceania)

[@negativepremium4100]

people don't like how it's a shooter that's exclusive to a console

[@bestintown2020]

Bcs the shooter genre is extremely popular in the West, and if you have a choice between getting good at a huge competitive esport with $2.000.000 average prize pool and a 16hz tick rate squid game where the top prize is a funny controller then the choice is obvious for most.

[@EclipseKirby]

Hmm. That bit about the differences of High and top level has me thinking: a little while ago, you did a video showing the stats of weapon use at top level. It could be interesting to see in a future video some stats at top level, high level, low ink ect. to see exactly what the trends between levels are

[@ProCharaVodDump]

For sure but id have to find an event that has most of high level attending which is a bit tricky.

[@waffleuser]

sometimes as an aspiring player i wish there were better guides on how to become better, specifically as a teammate, not just as an individual. getting proper coaching is also really difficult and often vod reviewing and trying to improve feels like it leads to dead ends with the lack of content, so i really agree on that. also i don't expect a reply but for example my team struggles to take space sometimes despite the amount of picks and i can never find any good info on why this happens besides our comp or on how to improve on this.

[@thatwoomyinahoodie]

Traveling in Japan rn with my switch and you can just FEEL the difference in solo queue between NA and JP it’s not even the same game anymore, kinda makes me not wanna go back lol

[@hikaria9252]

Tent community have been close-knit for so long, west learning for jp and jp posting alot to study on like chikashi james vids

[@LongDeadArtist]

In my opinion we should get the merch JP does and that's the biggest way we are behind because god dangit I want my splashtag printed

[@a73cks]

i feel like the issue with top level (im not in top level so if im wrong im sorry in advance) is that one tricks and anything other than the meta isnt given the chance to shine. like you said people stick to picking shot and pencil cus its all they know and they know theres minimal counters to it that are in the meta. i feel like this then trickles down to mid and low level as these players will see the top and want to main said weapons because thats whats winning tourneys in the west. everyone now is led into fitting into the meta instead if trying to define and innovate, at least i see it that way

[@heatherr646]

I agree, as a stringer fan I have found during the japan tournament challenges I've had more teammates playing off of and with me instead of obviously annoyed I'm on their team. I'm also not a high level player though.

[@a73cks]

@@heatherr646 ive never played with jp so i cant say anything for certain about them and how they play but i play s-blast a lot and i can say that 90% of west players dont know how to coordinate with me leading me having to play to play like a slayer instead, it literally led me to go back to stamper just bc i was able to play slayer better in soloq

[@heatherr646]

@a73cks yeah solo can be so frustrating when you want to play a certain weapon, I only did the jp tournament challenge twice cause it's always at a crazy hour but I have to say they were the most fun games I've ever played. Didn't win em all but the weapon diversity was amazing and everyone seemed to be working together. I had one game where me (stringer) h3 nozzlenose, inbrush, and a slosher all beat a comp we shouldn't have all because of teamwork. I rode that high for a while, felt so good.

[@andata9631]

For me (I play splat dualies), here are some resources I use to learn stuff (if you have other ones, please add more): Jp players who play dualies: ku and kotaji (they upload x rank games). General other Jp channels: melon, chocopero, tiramisu, and area cup for tournaments

[@jarodcolbourne9988]

its kinda of hard to find videos that help explain what you should be thinking throughout a match and I love to see them more

[@Kahmie]

I think the concept of a “main” is severely detrimental to players that are trying to improve. Splatoon’s strategy is difficult to understand when you don’t know interactions and the different rhythms of each weapon. I’ve always been a far reaching flex, and I think it’s done extremely helpful things for my mechanics/muscle memory and my game sense. As a one trick or class main or even dual class main, you can certainly understand your matchups and interactions on paper, but knowing each weapon throughout your physicality makes your improvement exponential and your game sense and knowledge transcends what is otherwise possible.

[@ProCharaVodDump]

It depends, there are some weapons in the game that you definitely only want from a dedicated player but it kinda varies. If you use any non squeezer/h3 shooter you should prolly be able to play most of them for instance.

[@birb0gaming]

The west is…….. flourishing, right? Billions must……. live, right?

[@dragonstar912]

Play to learn, not to win. It's fine to want to win, but if you want to keep winning, you're going to have to learn how to counter others' counters to you, and how to counter players better than you. Don't linger on losses: learn from your mistakes and keep a good mindset around it.

[@MidX4]

I think a big issue is just having more tournaments (both weeklys and majors) because if there’s more tournaments then more people will want to play the game which is most likely cause more pick ups to be made but I feel motivation in the community as a whole is super low.

[@Rubellite-jq2kg]

Part of me wonders if this is caused by external factors (not exclusively comp scene, like end of game's update cycle and recent drama)

[@-clod-8948]

u shouldve clickbaited the shit out of this video by just calling it "is the west falling" and giving it some stupid right wing pandery thumb

[@HinbunEZ]

Yes. NA is very slow to make changes.

[@valkyrieagainsttheworld]

I definitely think there’s a huge difference not only in Japan vs West, but also top level and low level. I play in low level, my team got div 8 in this year’s LUTI (though our skill set let’s us be equal to those in 6-7) and the weapon differences is very minimal. My team usually always runs double frontline, support and backline. Because of the state of low level playing strict with the meta, it causes very little room for experimentation. My team always has to run two shooters or at least one shooter and pencil. Most experimenting we have is running sorella brella and vmini because one of our members run it (but those are rare and he often is forced on sorella tent or shot) I play the backline on the team and I’m always forced to playing pencil and sometimes vBP or Edit. I really want to play other backlines like Z+F, Eliter, Hydra, but the meta barely supports other backlines and most in low level want to strictly play it safe because that’s what works and gets them wins. It’s really disheartening that only top level can experiment because of their skills. It makes the comp experience in low level quite boring and stale ngl

[@Jin_555]

I think one of the biggest problems our community has right now is higher lvl players gatekeeping and not really teaching lower lvl players how to play the game so it makes majority of our playbase completely clueless on what to do, especially since like no one but RebornNA really makes good educational content.

[@LuddyFish_]

I've watched Latias explain the west divide from an Oceania point of view (link: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h5i6nYifjtF6aLc). It's quite sad seeing the Australian and Oceanian scene struggle due to these barriers. Latias was one of the reasons chargers became my main, and it's unfortunate that players like Nex who is known to be a rat struggles to practice against other high level players.

[@NovaBlue242]

One problem that I see a lot is that communities aren't interested in new ideas. People attach their egos to being 'experts' or higher level players, and prioritize knowing what's top tier instead of being more well-rounded. I often ask questions and try to experiment and share my ideas. Within seconds I'll have several people swoop in and shoot me down because "that's not meta", bascially being told "lol no, we're the experts, we know what's good, shut up and conform". Breaking the status quo shouldn't be a bad thing. To look at this from another angle, people will only listen when the top players suggest new stuff. If melon or kiver suggest something like thermal ink, it's a new idea to be considered(by someat least, a handful of people will laugh and brush it off with "they're memeing lmao"). If some random idiot does it, they're a noob that obviously has no idea what they're talking about, isn't worth listening to, and needs to be corrected by someone who "knows the game better". Part of me wants to say that most people are just self--absorbed, social-climbing jerks, and the scene is unfixable because everyone's too stubborn to change it.

[@GSS19945]

As an NA player myself I think that we struggle in dealing with longer range weapons. At lower levels you see long range weapons getting caught off guard easily but at higher levels the longer range weapons pose a threat to the shooter saturated meta, hence why weapons with more versatility and range like squeezer see more success. I also heavily agree that Japan plays more objective based and knows how balance it with their aggression and knowing when to apply more or less pressure and sadly I think that concept is hard for people to understand especially when they’re using more frontline heavy weapons so they have a harder time of seeing that bigger picture on how matches tend to flow and how heavily longer range and support weapons can affect the outcome of ranked. 1 thing I find interesting though is I think turf is a bad representation of casual mode because it lacks focus in what to accomplish in a match without the proper tools /resources to be able to affect the tides of battle. I think tri color does a better job at showing that you can a fun turf war match with another layer but was poorly executed in the beginning and people just got confused.

[@tomatoblate2170]

I completely agree. Experimentation and high-to-top level content creation in the west is very lacklustre, even when considering how much smaller the western scene is compared to Japan. Obviously there are many different factors that contribute to this, and other comments here have listed a lot of them off so I won’t go into detail about that. I really hope that we as a community can improve these aspects in the future. For example, I really want to push Bamboo because I think it has huge potential, but there are so many things stopping me from doing so. Most mid and high level people I play with would just prefer that I play Pencil because it’s easy and we already know that it works. There’s also basically nobody pushing the weapon at high and to top level play, and the very few that are don’t make any form of content, so I can’t study how they play the weapon. It also doesn’t help that soloq matchmaking really screws over the weapon, since it always pairs it up against Pencils, Z+Fs, and Liters (which are arguably Bamboo’s three worst matchups), so getting people to recognize the weapon through X rank is extremely difficult. It really makes me hope that the community can improve over time, so that playing the game is more fun and diverse

[@supershadow125]

This is the same in smash. Zain said that over in japan they have a grind culture and bootcamps for their games, while melee already had the bootcamp culture ingrained since the beginning. Splatoon NA doesn't have the urge or need to grind out stuff that isn't from the tip top of players

[@maphen]

there are just so many more shooter games more appealing to western gamers seeing as how the game is locked behind a console that is considered child by a lot and the aesthetic of splatoon as well, i feel like splatoon in the west is always gonna be just a niche community

[@chrisr.5647]

put respect on my dawg he was a top s1, s2, and s3 player until he chose to stop competing

[@Short..]

The west has fallen

[@JVSTG4L4XY]

15:00 for me watching other people play splatoon 3 makes me want to play splatoon 3

[@noremfor]

The west is falling behind. Time for an Old Western

[@digital.lake.enjoyer]

west has fallen 😔

[@федяконовальцев]

>west falling Didn't know chara was based

[@kaye_spl]

this is why you need to force nolan to make content

[@flutterdashie64]

the west has fallen...

[@MysteriousStranger50]

I wonder why he flicks the camera left every time he shoots an explo shot, its not like it makes it go further it just lowers accuracy indirectly

[@ProCharaVodDump]

honestly just a habit I didn't really notice (that or I had some controller drift) or both

[@BelleColonD]

I'm really looking forward to seeing you try Reeflux, it's a very hard weapon but I'm sure you can do it justice

[@ewelsgaminghub3194]

Hey Chara. There are some top level scenes still active. Dapple Productions and Inkling Performance Labs still tend to run weeklies even if I don't know how big they are

[@Celeste-ty5pb]

i think something that would help a lot, no joke, would be nationalized free healthcare in the US. ppl gotta work for insurance! ppl could get by with less hours at work more often if they didnt need to work 40hrs a week at a stressful job. if they do that they dont wanna come back home to play a stressful game! they wanna chill out n play a farming sim. just imo

[@moonlitgalaxy5940]

honestly the whole scene could benefit from being bilingual or at least picking up japanese to a conversational degree

[@Legend_Face]

I used to always watch wadsm on map layouts and cool strategies to use on different maps and I loved it! Sad he stopped making videos and kind of fell out of the community

[@crashur3600]

I think one day we'll get there. You got to remember that Splatoon is still a relatively new Nintendo franchise. Nintendo and the games they publish are renowned worldwide. West is playing Nintendo games, but it is quite difficult to stack up against the games people grew up with and are familiar with. Splatoon has done one hell of a job for a new franchise that isn't even a decade old yet. The west world is behind Japan just on the topic of Splatoon in general. Imagine how western Splatoon will be in another 10 years. Maybe we'll have at least half the player base that Japan has for Splatoon. The point is I don't think it'll always be like this.

[@dznutskong]

It's hard to say. I still feel like there's a bit of a stigma around this being just a kids game because of how it was marketed and how it looks next to other shooters, and I know quite a few people who were interested but didn't like the control scheme at all. I am very hopeful though because I'm sure a bunch of kids have Splatoon 2 or 3 and will grow up to help change both of those to some degree.

[@Rootof-2]

Hello

[@popsicIes]

hey

[@quantumaxolotl9746]

Wait why is neo splash used over ttek

[@ProCharaVodDump]

it paints more and has a bomb that paints more (ttek has more flexibility both are fine)

[@quantumaxolotl9746]

@@ProCharaVodDump o I didn’t know splash painted that much more, I was really confused cuz its 210 when ttek is 190 lol

[@Grenze_Splatoon]

THANK YOU FOR FINALLY MENTIONING THIS. I’m a (most likely) mid level player. I have one other person on my team but due to only having Snapchat, we can’t find anyone to try out. We also can’t find any tournaments because they have to be in our home state and somewhere like Pittsburgh. Please someone make a tournament in Pittsburgh with pickups allowed.

[@TorayNix]

Something that always surprises me is the difference between the meta tierlists in the west and the ones in Japan: they’re always massively different most of the time Recently I’ve seen a japanese tierlist that felt very strange and interesting because I’ve seen stuff like DFlux in C tier, VFlux in D tier, Bamboo II in F tier, Edit in B, etc And I really started to wonder what’s there reasoning behind those placements

[@ProCharaVodDump]

Honestly some of these lower rankings aren't as thought out so that might be part of it, but its also harder to rank stuff with less and less results.

[@danroman7171]

You being quiet about your racist friends doesn't sit right with me.

[@ProCharaVodDump]

I'm not close with Jackpot but I can only assume that's what your referring to. I shared Ken's video on the matter on my community tab as he had a good breakdown on what needed to be said as well as well as Adapt's thread and a few other statements about the players involved. I do not tolerate racism.

[@danroman7171]

@@ProCharaVodDump I appreciate you clearing the air. I've followed you for years and was a bit concerned that I hadn't seen anything. I was under the interpretation that you were somewhat close and had advised them a bit on choices for worlds. ✌🏼