soap!! c:

@soapful.ink

226 Followers 351 Following

comp splatoon "FA" and league/riftbound enjoyer!! formerly renegades & magical cure love shot (& IVC diamond rays) they/she

#1 ALPHA BAN #2 BRAVO BAN #3 BRAVO SAVE #4 ALPHA BAN #5 ALPHA SAVE #6 BRAVO BAN #7 ALPHA BAN #8 BRAVO BAN #9 ALPHA BAN #10 BRAVO SAVE #11 ALPHA SAVE #12 BRAVO BAN #13 ALPHA BAN #14 BRAVO BAN
My MSI pick'ems showing G2 beating T1
SendouQ season 11 finals pick rate stats: Liter, 66 picks, 31.42% pick rate per team Pen, 46 picks, 21.9% pick rate per team Heavy, 37 picks, 17.62% pick rate per team Heavy Edit, 16 picks, 7.62% pick rate per team Z+F, 3 picks, 1.42% pick rate per team Custom Blaster, 85picks, 40.48% pick rate per team Zap, 84 picks, 40% pick rate per team Slosher, 48 picks, 22.86% pick rate per team .96 gal, 32 picks, 16.24% pick rate per team total games: 105
futuristic utopia
us making top 8 in the north american league with a 3-8 record
An old LoL esports screenshot from Worlds 2024, showcasing the old overlay. It has champion portraits on the side, with scoreboard, gold, item, and champion portraits on the bottom as well, and overall game state information at the top.
A mock up of a more in-depth spectator hud for splatoon 3, with a transparent minimap in the top left, team names on the top middle, and scoreboard and player information on the sides.
The 2024 G2 League roster, including BrokenBlade, Yike, Caps, Hans Sama, and MikyX
a seal with its flippers all the way out extended
The League of Legends LTA stage
my league match history showing 20 losses versus doom bots
you could probably run just blind pick with fearless rules, maybe would have to be your own picks banned instead of both sides' picks so you dont just have pencil/hedit arms race round #1. otherwise i feel like a P/B system is a lot harder to design for splatoon, with the biggest challenge just being how do you not spend more time in draft than you do in game (which is where blind pick with fearless might work better). the other major challenge is that (at least in our current understanding) second/last pick (red side) is worse than in a MOBA since splatoon metas often revolve around one (or two rn ig) specific centralized picks more than League or DOTA. counterpicking hasnt really been highly valued in our current view of the game over small weapon pools and just being good at your weapon(s), but how much of that is due to our understanding of the game being built on blind pick would have to be seen. i think this will still remain true since it is a lot easier to avoid bad matchups in Splatoon than in a MOBA, but also splatoon weapon and special matchups are generally more binary than MOBAs so we'll have to see. another potential option is Rainbow Six Siege's "Sixth Pick" (in our case "Fifth Pick" ig). it's blind pick, but after the pick phase, both teams reveal their team comps and are allowed to secretly switch out 1 of their picks. imo its not impactful enough but would be v easy to try it out
Featured games compatible with GameShare on the Nintendo Switch 2, depicting multiple games compatible with sharing both locally and online. Super Mario Party Jamboree is the only game on the list with sharing capabilities for local only.
A cropped version of the spectator minimap in Splatoon 3
tbf im not saying EVERY player that plays TST would swap to PB, some of them would likely end up finding a scrim/sq/taking the night off. and thats ok!! not everyone will play PB but at least some of them would, and the issue is that the quality of one tournament is significantly impacted by the existence of the other. again, this is not a hypothetical because ik my team would have made an active effort to turn up to PB if it could run swiss. you can go back to the first PBs before TST was a thing and find a pretty large pool of low level players. there ARE players that would be willing to go a little out of their comfort zone when they arent forced to make that choice and when provided with a forgiving format. and thats a healthy thing for the scene: larger turnouts with a wider array in experience levels means better long term improvement for the whole scene, provided the format itself allows for that. and maybe saying they were both "bad" learning experiences wasnt quite the right word, but i also wont say either in their current state are particularly effective practice for teams in the d5-6 range. if youre a d5 team challenging yourself with only lower level teams, you are gonna take forever to actually get your win or break into mid level. but if the alternative gives you soo little practice, you feel like you dont really have a choice now you asked why dont i play SOS if i wanted an open skill capped tournament, but you missed a key part of what i asked. i wanted a *swiss* open level tournament, because i dont particularly enjoy the way SOS is run. PB was one of only 2 (and now not even that) open lvl events that could give me that experience in a welcoming way for low level teams, while also experimenting with community voted map lists. i now turn the same question to you: what does TST provide that A41 & Minnow Cup (& CC:LT, Climb the Spire, FTIU, LSL, Mug Cup, Low Ink if you include different formats like in the original SOS comparison) cannot provide?
1) at least for me personally, it wasnt really ever about *not* losing. losing is learning, and thats totally fine. its a little scary going up against higher level teams, sure, but i didnt mind it most of the time. instead, it was moreso an unhealthy fixation on trying to win to "clear" the skillcap and "become mid-lvl". i didnt particularly enjoy playing against d10 teams in a tournament, its not rly useful info for us (altho its good info for them). but after you climb enough in low level tournaments, you start focusing on finally trying to get that win. it becomes obsessive almost, like in order to become better or to finally become mid level you NEED to win those tournaments. there is a fixation on finally getting that LI badge that youve been working towards for so long that you lose sight of how you actually improve enough to win: pushing yourself, being uncomfortable and staying curious. so its not really about "farming" per se (altho maybe theres a degree of it), but more so just wanting to finally prove yourself and shooting yourself in the foot doing so.
stuff like ITZ is completely understandable as a tournament for top lvl players to get more reps and experiment with meta/options, but if its being treated as a major hype tournament, then i have questions about our understanding of what constitutes major events in the scene. what defines hype isnt if the top 20 players in the tourney in their assortment of pick ups are good & competitive, hype is built FROM the community talking about and caring about these events, players, and teams before, during AND after the event. in almost any other major sport or esport, majors/top lvl tournies are just as much a product for viewers & fans as they are for competitors. why should viewers care about X tournament? if its simply to watch good players, why would i bother watching anything other than finals in a JP major, or waiting for melon to start stream? storylines are just as much (if not more) the reason people care about an event, more than how good the players competing are. the community needs to be emotionally invested in the players, where they came from, how they play, their hardships, etc. so what components create and foster these storylines? from the tournament side of things, imo its primarily two things: production and format. compare ITZ to CCA Circuit/SAC or even InkTV League, which remains one of the most iconic S3 events to this day imo. (small note here: while the question was about ITZ/SQ major and my examples use ITZ, this post is not meant to attack ITZ or criticize just ITZ in particular. this is about how the entire higher level scene is structured. as for SQ Major, its probably the best top lvl tournament in these regards, but is missing a lot of the important details imo. also ofc shoutout to TOs, its thankless work and an absolutely unreal commitment. i appreciate everything they do, this is all coming from a place of wanting a more exciting scene)
seal hug!! (as a gif this time)
seal hug !!
My dryer completely falling apart
my most played nintendo switch games in 2024
in some ways its harder to keep up with, but tbh its mostly cuz theres just more worth caring about, which is a worth trade. 4 streams at once was the main difficulty imo, but not really any way to split those up except for maybe finals😭😭 honestly though as a spec/fan i found it in many ways easier though just cuz prod was SO much more consistent due to the format (every round streamed on one day @ one time instead of whatever random singular matches can get streamed)
"ik im kind of in the minority but ive always found traditional league structures incredibly boring. they're super drawn out w/ 1 singular set a week, end of group stage can be a chore if youre already 0-2 or 0-3. and more than anything i love that it just gives a ton of games both at your skill level and across a wide variety of teams. dynamic divs and wildcard spots mean that theres always reason to keep playing, swiss > top cut format for each event means incredibly exciting games that are both meaningful but also strong practice. basically what i said in the OP where teams are playing multiple large events into one huge capstone which creates both excellent overarching storylines and individual event storylines. if you look at the hype of circuit finals compared to even other CCA finals events, there's clearly something special there. i get that the old format had more flexibility and was probably better for teams that may be a bit more casual or just not have as much time, but im glad that the CCA has created a format thats honestly more competitively engaging than any other format ive seen in my entire time playing comp splatoon"
Crab tank spots on manta maria (splatoon 3)
i agree that swiss tournaments still need proper seeding, and losing one game in swiss shouldnt *necessarily* discount you from top cut. but to say that swiss tiebreakers are unfair and that swiss is almost completely random, and then say that RR groups entirely determined by SUBJECTIVE seeding IS fair and high quality is where i disagree, and is what i mean when I say we need to reevaluate our perception of these formats. Swiss does not pair you vs a random team, it pairs you against "even" (at least as even as can be) teams to find out who is better. and that is the exact point i am trying to make: if the point of a tournament structure is to get you as good of practice as possible, then the format where the entire purpose is to continuously pair evenly skilled teams is probably better at giving high quality games. low level teams dont want to be seeded into groups where they will at most get one singular decent game. even in skill capped tournies which alleviate this problem, think back to our WL days where we would play 3 rounds RR of pure nothingness just to get first rounded. this is exactly what im arguing: small RR groups in tournaments with large skill discrepancy is a recipe for not getting quality practice, and its why Low Level players create a bubble of low level tournaments. there has to be a better way to do this.
soap's splatoon free agent post!! im looking for an active d5-6 team to grind and get LI banned with age: 21 timezone: PST/PDT playstyle: support/slayer/flex weapons: currently: splash/vshot/jr, formerly (and willing to pick back up): machine/vdualies/vRB/hedit/stamper? rank: 22-23xp avg, 2450 peak results: LI Eligible, FTIU/LSL Banned - 9th A41 #24: TC (Gold Bracket) - 5th A41 #22: CB (Gold Bracket) - 4th Beta Bracket LI Sept, Oct 2024 - 9th Beta Bracket LI Aug 2024 - 1st Gamma Bracket LI June 2024 - Hammerhead SOS #162 & #159 - 1st Mako SOS #165 - 4th Gold Bracket 988 Charity Cup - 2-1 rissa, Lux, Cyren, Meryn - 2-1 Dye Trying (penny, Zym 𐂂, Goldeb, Nub) - 3-0 Hey man, res here - 2-1 UCSD Esports Gold - 2-1 UNDERSCORE - 2-1 Chocolate Therapy (Jacob, Nexlation, swaggynbaggy, kiwi)
the stage from LCS finals
allyn's disgusting foul gruel
us being magical on the manta maria lifeboat😁 from left to right: grodd, soap, allyn, userless
our team skipping clams on the water
Diamond Rays picture!! from left to right: userless, nezu, soap (me), skull
Screenshot from Diamond Rays' team comps spreadsheet from a year ago showing a double cooler + double tri-strike comp.