Splatoon 3: Terrible Online is now inexcusable, Nintendo

Be gentle with me, I was in purgatory. By that I mean I played a lot turn 3 Lately in multiplayer and after unlocking level 10, the ink shooter finally let me slip into its quirky ranked modes. Anarchy Battles, as these competitive modes are called, are a good time – if you can’t sever the link between left and right, or find a match at all.

I feel silly even pointing it out because we’re in the third game of this popular franchise that is currently breaking records, and it’s not like this is a new problem. I fell out of mine splatoon Matches in 2015 and the sequel in 2017, and by god I’m still booted in the year of our lord 2022. Millions of people play this and somehow I don’t really hear masses of people complaining about it; we got used to it I think.

But even as I walk in with full anticipation of some connectivity gimmicks, I’m appalled at how abominable it is and how little things have improved between games. For those who are unaware of even someone disconnecting during a connection turn 3 Game – casual or ranked – then every single person in the game experiences a communication error and gets booted out of the game. In the leaderboard, the person who dropped out or disconnected first, whether intentionally or accidentally, suffers a loss. Everyone else doesn’t. I think this is better than the alternative, but most modern games either just keep going or try to find a gap. Having to start from scratch is crazy, especially if you’ve already been in a match.

Since splatoon Games are pretty fast, but you can kind of miss this bug, as evidenced by the fact that we’re still buying and playing turn 3 in droves, despite being a game best known for its multiplayer offerings. But somehow I’ve had even worse experiences than just disconnecting while trying out leaderboards.

After a ranked match ends, splatoon asks if you want to stay with the team you played for. If you’ve had a good time, chances are you’ll want to too – competitive modes are a better experience when playing with coordinated teams. If you won a match with a group, there’s a good chance you’ll do well in the next fight.

Deciding to stay one night on a team turned out to be a huge mistake that took up an entire night of my game time during freshman week. turn 3 put me in an absurd waiting that was contagious best lasted about three to five minutes but sometimes lasted well over 10. On one occasion I waited so long that the timer in the corner showing seconds had counted down to 999. The game didn’t stop searching after 999 seconds, the clock just couldn’t go any higher. I waited a good ten minutes before I could get out of this hell.

Since there is no way to exit matchmaking once you started it in the leaderboard, I got stuck there unless I wanted to draw a penalty. (At least that’s what I can see – I’ve been told that the exit button appears and disappears for other people.) I’ve gained about eight points per win so far, and it’s a couple hundred before I can rank up – me didn’t really want to make this grind harder than it needs to be. Maybe the drop is small, but that’s not really the point here. I shouldn’t have to lose anything because the game itself somehow I can’t connect to another player. It’s especially ridiculous when we know that at any point in time people are playing; As of this writing, the game was released just last week!

There is nothing worse turn 3 than quitting a game, quickly pressing A to cycle through the menus because you want to jump to another, and accidentally agreeing to stay on the team. It happened to me over and over again which was annoying because I couldn’t undo the matchmaking. The only thing I could do was actively hope that the game would bug or crash (!!!).

I later learned that this is a known issue that has existed with me turn 3 before launch, when Nintendo offered advice during its first Splatfest event. Back then, they told people to put their console to sleep and then try again. The answers were full of people stuck in the matchmaking lobby for so long, their characters had inked the entire waiting room. I can not.

This event was in August. Obviously they didn’t fix it because I just experienced the endless waiting issue. “We apologize for the inconvenience,” Nintendo wrote.

This was arguably an extraordinary but rare experience that doesn’t reflect what I normally do turn 3. But you have to keep in mind that things here in the context of “running smoothly” still mean I tend to separate every handful of games!

“What did you expect,” you might think, “it’s a Nintendo game.” Outside splatoonknown first-party series like smash bros have never managed to fully crack online multiplayer, although in this case the community has remained because the tournament culture is mostly local. But even this scene has its limits. At one point in 2020, the smash bros. Community trending #fixultimateonline. I’m not sure if it’s gotten particularly better, or at least a well-reviewed 2021 Reddit thread from r/smashbros is captioned: “Have you played a game with worse online than Smash Ultimate?” Meanwhile, when Nintendo has tried to get into online features, it somehow always succeeds to make the most complicated possible. For anything connected to the Internet, this is the only instance where compliance with the convention would be Nintendo’s preferred course of action.

There was a small, if perhaps foolish, reason to have hope turn 3. In August 2022, data miners claimed that the alternative shooting game would feature an “in-house server system” which would be an upgrade, but they speculated that it would likely still be peer-to-peer. This isn’t the most sophisticated kind of netcode out there, as it usually gets compromised when someone desyncs. To Nintendo’s credit, I experience fewer in-game lags while games are developing compared to previous games, or the game instantly pausing while trying to catch up on what’s going on. When it works, the action is great! But the edges are still incredibly rough.

kotaku contacted Nintendo to inquire splatoonConnectivity issues from , but the company offers a solution online. Spoilers: security experts say it’s awful. For whatever reason, the official Nintendo support siteRight now it’s telling people to open every single port on your router, which is something like shutting down your firewall. Doing this very well can improve your online experience, but it also compromises your security. Nintendo’s opinion?

“Nintendo is making this information available to our consumers, but it is up to each consumer to determine what security requirements they have for their own networks and how best to configure their network settings to meet those needs,” it said on the website.

Anyway, I can’t believe this shit was seven years ago. The worst of it all, and why can it get away with it? I’ll keep playing because no one else in the shooter space really offers this mode-centric, optional killing experience splatoon does.