The Problem with Splatfests (Hint: It's Turf War)

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Everyone talks about the fact that turf war sucks as a competetive mode for several reasons but the one no one brings up is the fact that there is no knockout feature. In the ranked modes if it's one sided and one team is getting spawn camped it's over quickly because you just ko but if turf war is one sided and one team is getting spawn camped they are getting spawn camped for a whole 3 minutes

Why the 1st 2 minutes of Turf War's aren't a waste: a short theory You use the first 2 minutes to learn how your opponents play and how your teammates play, and prepare the best you can to do the winning thing in the last minute. Thanks for coming to my ted talk - Pikachu

I felt let down seeing how tri color turf wars don't have an exclusive or super size map designed for them. Just imagine how much better that would be.

As a player who came over from Splatty 2, I do think that the “paint as you go” style of play is probably the best form to go unless your playing support or turf-painter religiously

I just want better maps. Every map right now feels super cramped, they’re extremely narrow and offer little varieties in routes to take for a more exciting and unique match. I know it just came out and obviously we can expect new and better maps as we go, but that’s my biggest hope for now.

FINALLY someone mentions overextending! The amount of times we've lost because one teammate decided to rush the enemy base and leave the rest of us fighting a 3v4 in spawn is TOO. FREAKING. MANY.

The Tri-Colors wouldn’t be as bad if they gave the Ultra Signal a 20-30 sec timer

Something that really ruined this month's splatfest for me is the amount of people that just kept disconnecting halfway into a match

I think an easy way to fix turf war without changing the base mechanics very much would be to have scoring take place at every minute mark. At 1:00, 2:00, and at the end, both teams gain points for the amount of the map that is currently inked in their color cumulatively. You still get the fun reveal at the very end to see how much the final results changed the scores at the very end.

Finally, the first person to ever say "Its ok to kill in turf war and not paint every tiny little area in the God damn map"

3 people on each team for tri color would even fit with their whole 3 thing they wanted to do. But, we already can get frame drops and lag when playing with 8 people, it is very dependent on what weapons everyone picks, all the particles from the weapons and specials would be nuts. Maybe if they somehow stabilize the game it'd work? I WISH it was 3 teams of 3 And having a new shifty station concept for 3 would have been extremely welcomed. Especially for tri colored. Story wise they could have just said that Deep Cut (bandits who I assume have been around the Splatlands), found cool new locations to fight. Desert fights? Abandoned towns? I don't know, something.

Turf War truly is one of the game modes of all time.

The faucet analogy is an excellent one to explain this gamemode. Offense is key!

Some splatfest Shifty Stations actually massively improved this by making sections of the stage unavailable as the match goes on, which has definitely made the early parts of matches more impactful.

It still baffles me that they just completely removed shifty station as a thing and didn't give us any sort of equivalent in this game. To me one of the biggest missed opportunities of splatoon 3 is the fact that still to this day you only have the 5 handcrafted rulesets for online battles, and "the city of chaos" pulling out a new version of turf war every splatfest would've been such a cool way to introduce the custom rulesets that nearly every other shooter has. Instead all we got is tricolor turf war, and as far as I'm concerned that mode might as well not even exist for how much I've gotten to play it.

Having skipped Splatoon 2 since by the time I got my Switch, I figured a Splatoon 3 was on the horizons, I had no idea Shifty Stations was a thing. It looks really fun, and now I'm kinda wondering why they aren't in Splat3. It solves the issue of the last minute of Turf War being all that matters, and I'm left wondering why they weren't brought into the normal turf war stages in 3. I wouldn't mind if that was made into a standard rule for Turf War, or if at the very least, it was just incorperated into some of the Turf Stages.

As an uncommon turf war enjoyer and strategist, I personally enjoy splatfests a lot. HOWEVER! Tricolor battles are terribly balanced. Please fix the clout system it literally gives more clout to the 2 attacking teams even when all 3 teams have an equal win rate. It's already hard enough to win as the defenders. It's even more unbalanced than smash 64 Pikachu.

Last splatfest I was so confused by the Open vs. Pro modes. Felt like a freaking idiot when I figured it out after the fact. Was getting absolutely stomped in Open, like I kind of wanted to cry. I chose team Fun because I wanted to just have Fun, yet I had very little fun losing so often.

I’m gonna guess you’re probably right about the 3v3v3 part. Maybe they could only get 8 players in matches considering that normally it’s 4v4 which explains why they’re doing 2v4v2. Tbh if they can only manage to cap at 8 players then maybe they could do 2v2v2 instead 🤷. Would def introduce more challenges