Everyone is Awful! (Myself Included!)

 

            I am so over of playing with randoms on Nintendo games man. I’ve still been playing a fair amount of Splatoon and the Splatfest festivities have started so I want to play as much as I can from now to next week (started this last week), which I don’t exactly have that much time to be honest (also have even less time then I thought). I’ve been struggling hard in Salmon Run and I don’t quite understand why. When I first started it a few weeks ago things were fine. Granted I just started and so the levels were easier but as I progressed I felt I kept up fairly well then at some point I hit a wall. I know I’m not good at Salmon Run but when I’m with people who have different color outfits and such I’m guessing they’ve had to fight a fair share of King Salmonids to get them and yet we’re still losing. I was like Profreshional +3 and just could not win. Demoted myself down to Profreshional and it still isn’t going well. Why? What happened? Splatoon is a mixed bag of players. It being a Nintendo game means you’re going to get literal babies playing the game all the way to some hardcore pros. You’ll get people trying to paint every inch of the base then you have other people who just want to goof off and draw hearts in the enemy base. There’s a “pool” I’ve found that I might try to play with but my social anxiety is kind of stopping me. Even though there’s no voice chat I almost feel like that’s worse, I can’t tell them “I’m bad I’m sorry.” Salmon Run can be so hectic I feel like it needs voice chat.

            On the other side is playing Turf War and I don’t really care if I win or lose but sometimes the people I’m playing with, ou boy. I played one game where I had my bucket, there were two snipers and a guy with an NES gun. I start off trying to get to the middle, figuring the snipers would kind of follow, and I’m doing my thing, sloshin’ some ink around, get a kill, get killed, respawn and I’m looking at the map. The whole right side of our base isn’t painted at all and I’m like “What the hell?” I look around a bit, I see some sniper shots had gone off you know, long streaks of ink but not very far out of our base and I look to the left and I see the NES gun guy meticulously going back and forth painting every inch of our base… Okayyy. Again, you get all kinds in Splatoon. As a whole I feel like the community and content creators are generally quite nice compared to other games and I’m just down here in my little cave screaming and swearing during Salmon Run.

            Pokemon is another one. As I’ve mentioned before in my other post about tera-raid battles in Scarlet and Violet, playing with other people fucking sucks. They have the Walking Wake/Iron Leaves event going on for the next two weeks and everybody is just fucking awful, myself included. Been trying to do the Iron Leaves one. He’s a psychic tera-type, has a grass move, okay whatever. Try going in with a group with my little ghost guy, dying in one hit from a psychic move. After a few more tries I try Azumarill, she’s got a lot of health, no stupid you forgot about the grass move, fuck. Try Blissey, she’s got STUPID amounts of health, gets one shotted, what the fuck?! I stop, go find my Walking Wake raid because NO ONE is doing that online, find it, start looking for players, got three dudes with the Violet cover Pokemon, fucking destroy that thing. Easy. Go back to Iron Leaves, try using Decidueye since he’s a strong boy from a previous tera-raid fight, he’s grass, has a ghost move. It goes better but still no. Try and try and try. No, no, no. I’m done. I give up. And I can’t try Iron Leaves on my own because he’s Violet only because again, like I said in my other post, the timer on the raid goes down whenever the raid Pokemon knocks out a player Pokemon so when all four of you are getting slaughtered there’s really nothing you can do. And what’s with everyone trying to use Kingambit for Iron Leaves? He fucking gets destroyed and I’m pretty sure hurts himself to no real benefit but yet time and time again I’m seeing Kingambit, Kingambit, Kingambit. Half the time I think people only join tera-raids to show off their shiny Pokemon they got. Like fuck off, I don’t care about your shitty shiny, get out of here.

            Anyway, that’s my rant today. Oh, I could rant a bit more, hold on. Ahhhhh, so… I hate that I keep coming back to live service games because that means they’re working as the company intended. I’ll sit here, board and be like “Hm… I’ll check in on The Division, see what’s going on in there” and nothing interesting is EVER going on there. It’s the same objectives again and again with maybe a new NPC to shoot at and maybe some new gear or abilities. That’s another thing too, the “meta” but I’ll try to remember to come back to that. I just hate that when I think of something to do it’s always the same things I’ve been doing for years. The Division, Apex, I’d even group Monster Hunter and Splatoon in there too. Of all the games I could play I always go back to these games and they take up soooo much time to get anything done because again, that’s what the companies want. Like in Splatoon, like a month ago when I jumped on for a minute I saw a new pose in the catalog that was kind of cool, level 24, not THAT hard to get to, I’ll play for that. After a while I see a life jacket that you get in Salmon Run for a bunch of scales, okay, I’ll try to do that. After a while play some guy wearing three bucket hats and am like “what the fuck?” Look it up, it’s a catalog reward for getting to level 100. That’s a lot of playing friend. So for most of my “game time” I have I’ve been pouring into Splatoon to try and get these things but I just do not have the time to do these things. I just don’t. Don’t get me wrong, like I said, I like the game, I like turf war but playing with randoms in Salmon Run is just terrible. I was doing a little bit of Horizon 2 lately, just doing the stuff and I look at the clock and only an hour has gone by. I feel like I’ve done so much in an hour in a single player game whereas I could spend two or three hours playing Monster Hunter and not get the materials I had been grinding for. (I blame Almudron and his cousin for having too many cool weapon designs.)

            The other thing I brought up was the “meta” of games. I play a game, get familiar with it, leave it for a while, come back a month later and the gear I once had isn’t as good as it was or the character I liked to play has been reworked. If you don’t read the patch notes, or even know that there WAS a patch you might never know there were changes. In Division 2, a while ago, there’s probably a new meta now, they added a weapon skill called flatline. With the skill whenever you hit an enemy that has been “pulsed” you get added armor and possibly do extra damage, not sure. So, okay cool, more armor is cool, I like having bonus armor but the pulse skill isn’t something I’m interested in. I like my shield and something to heal me but then the meta comes in. The technician specialization has a special laser sight that when you aim at a character they get pulsed. So you use the technician specialization, put the laser sight on the games version of an AA12, which I like to use anyway, with the flatline talent and now you’re racking up armor like there’s no tomorrow. I play rather tanky on Division 2 so this is a good build for me but I like my other builds. I like my other specializations but I feel like I’m being pushed towards a certain play style. Splatoon also had a rework of an ability called Opening Gambit. It wasn’t that great before, from what I hear but now if you can get an assist or a splat while it’s still active it adds another 15 seconds onto the buffs and they’re good buffs and don’t go away if you get splatted, as far as I understand, so that makes it pretty powerful. When it comes to competitive or I guess live service games that I’m really into at a given time I’ll follow a handful of people on YouTube that understand these things better than me and that actually keep track of all the minutia of the patches just so that I’m in the know.

That’s just me I guess. What do you think? What team are you picking for the Splatfest? I went with Wisdom, I’ll try to play tomorrow and if I have any time at all on Saturday. How do you feel about live service games? What are you playing right now? Let me know and I’ll try to be less angry in my next post. Bye bye.

@AztecSauce