BIG MAN GOT BIG SCREWED BY TRICOLOR! - Splatoon 3 Splatfest World Premiere Review 

I was on team Scissors, and I honestly couldn't believe it when I saw we lost. The times I got tricolor turf wars, we were able to consistently crush our enemies, so this was a surprise for me. I found it quite easy to keep our turf tbh. either we were amazing or our enemies sucked.

The way they fix it is by adding an incentive for the two smaller teams to fight each other, I was team rock, and we got a victory even if team paper won.

Yes, the Tri color splatfest was heavily against team scissors. I am a part of a group called the Misfits, and we play Splatoon together. We chat on discord to try to work together in this game. And at the beginning, we were losing these left and right. We were literally treating this like a Turf War which is the completely wrong way to handle this mode. Once we realized that we needed to defend the Ultra Signal in the middle, we started to win matches. The best approach with this mode is to treat the Ultra Signal like a splat zones match. Protect the zone. Ensure that no one gets that signal. Because as soon as they get two or more, it’s over for the middle team. Literally at that point, doesn’t matter how good you are, there is no turning back. But if you protect that signal and don’t let the other two team get them, and then you turf a bit here and there, the win is in the bag.

The thing is, when you select tricolor as a losing team, it doesn’t give you the 100% chance it just improves the odds

Issues with tricolor turf war when you’re on the winning team 1: some kits are good for turf war but bad for Tricolor turf war. 2: if one side gets the ultra signal, you practically lose. 3: some people want to play open games but others just want to play tricolor turf war. 4: Tricolor turf wars can’t have 10x or 100x multipliers, so the chance of 10x and 100x matches also stacks with the chance to get tri color turf war, giving the winning team an even less chance to get what gets you the most clout 5:the team to the left of scissors spawn has a ledge that leads right to their spawn area. The only way for scissors to access it is to go to the left and climb a specific inks level wall and jump to their spawn area. 6:the ultra signal gets collected faster as the game goes on, so sometimes if you’re not camping with a one shot/automatic weapon as soon as they grab that signal they’re gonna get it.

One thing that would probably make the tricolor more balanced is if those giant sprinklers were tuned down a bit, destructible, and had a limited duration. Cause any game where I got even one was basically an auto win.

It's so funny that the optimal strategy for splatfests is to intentionally throw your games as to not be designated defense

I was on Team Rock and even though I would queue up for Tri-Color I was still able to get matched into a normal turf war match

As a fellow Big Man enjoyer and supporter, I also got steamrolled in the Tricolor Turf Wars :(

I think the thing im most mad at is that the attacking teams get way more clout than the defending team even though its harder for the defending team. The attacking team who wins gets 6000 when they win but the defending team gets only 3000

I started out liking tricolor turf war. While I won the majority of my tri color matches, I don't like it now and I think it should be rebalanced and given it's own unique map. The way I won my matches was by bullying one side and spawn camping them. I'm team scissors.

Another thing that makes TriColor difficult is the fact that the winning teams Spawn is easily accessible. I won a game by letting Scissors take the middle cause they were good and were Splatting everyone so I completely covered their Spawn point and they didn’t even realize cause no one was able to splat them. All I had to do then was focus on keeping my area covered.

I FELT THE OPRESSION DURING TRICOLOR ITS BECAUSE IM RED THATS INKIST Not being able to queue for triclolor sucks and if you didn't have teammates with eyes on the back of their heads playing their mains then you basically had a zero percent chance of winning also your chances of winning go down like 80% if a team even gets one sprinkler of doom

The defending team requires a ton of map awareness. To me, it became much easier to win after matching with a good team of randoms and equipping a weapon kit that can hold chokepoints.

The other teams also didn't know what we were going to be playing mode wise. When you selected tricolor turf war as rock or paper it was random whether you got regular or tricolor. Also I think tricolor is definitely easier for the two losing teams but scissors was barely winning at halftime. They could have easily lost in the end without it anyway

I played it and i loved it. Going in I thought it would be too hard for the losing teams to win since they have to fight 6 opponents with 2 people. I think they need to add 2 more dialogue options on the d pad to help with communication. Since left and right both do nothing. Also it would be cool if they had 4 maps every 2 hours or switched the maps every hour maybe

Speaking on time gating, i think they addressed salmon run by having it run 24/7 now. But i can still see frustration in being restricted to maps and weapons

I really like how you brought up how the winning team can’t choose tri color only. My load out for regular is the tri stringer but, in tri color I use the dullies cause any long ranged weapon on tri color is a death sentence.

A lot of people lost their switches after this splatfest

It was so unfair team scissors should've won so hard

I was scissors and trying to stream snipe someone on rock, and I noticed that in tricolour that when defenders won they would get around 2k clout for each victory, while the attackers got 8k clout for each win (first place). And with the odds stacked against defenders heavily, you can see how scissors somehow came dead last

I loved the splatfest world premiere, and imo being able to play splatoon 3 was a win, but the second half was 100% rigged, tricolours being more difficult for the defending team, and the fact that most games that team scissors queued into were tricolours, yet people on team rock and scissors could literally just choose not to queue tricolours, meaning they got almost all the 10 and 100x battles at the end. edit: but gg to the other 2 teams, as much as I could rant about how dumb tricolours are all day, it was still really fun. edit 2: also I think a cool way to make tricolour more fair would be something similiar to the ultra signal for the other 2 teams, but with a weaker sprinkler, that spawns near the enemy spawn, because the main reasons why tricolours were unfair, was because it was almost impossible to paint near the enemy spawns, and because the sprinklers were just op.

The real problem is that nobody has fun in this mode. If the attackers get the ultra signal once, you have to really step up your game to even try to win, and forget if both ultra signals were list, then two thirds of the map are completely off limits. What it boils down to is a tower defense with as little wiggle room as possible, and the dev intended strategy is farm kills, and make sure the enemy team doesn't have fun. I just ended up always using tri slosher since that was the best weapon to kill with. (Plus it felt like people didn't know what was happening? Though that might just be the case with these types of game "My team sucks" kinda stuff.)

They made tricolour not an option because they knew that the defending team wouldn’t want to. It also means using a Charger or Splatling will make you lose in tricolour, yet may end up viable in normals, however, you can’t choose, which especially targets backline players.

I have to disagree. Early on into the tricolor phase scissors was getting steamrolled yes, but then I noticed scissor teams using weapons much better for defense, like the splatling guns for example. The problem is that this was the first mode where a team was exclusively defensive, so players weren't playing like they were supposed to. In the later hours, I noticed scissors start to dominate matches much more often.

I was team rock. Wasn’t a fan of the fact that it only lasted one day because I worked most of it and had like 1 hour to play. Wasn’t a fan of that one super tiny map, it felt too cramp and there was no space to mount a comeback

Good old rock nothing beats that

Just a note, Salmon Run will actually be open 24h now! They mentioned it on the game's website. Besides that though, I totally agree with you on the tricolor battle issues

Couple of things: They already said that Salmon Run will now be available all the time. As far as the Tricolor mode goes, it's also kinda random for the attackers. At least in my experience, when you queued up for Tricolor, there was a good chance to be dumped into a regular game. As you already said, though, Tricolor is meant to be a catchup mechanic for the losing teams. If you could opt out, it'd be pointless. Also, you actually can opt out of playing tricolor with the winning team by using the pro-queue.

"if scissors wins ill cut my switch in half" -that one guy literally everyone saw during splatfest

I was on for all 12 hours, and I got disconnect messages a LOT. Also, I think it would be more fair if the Tricolor Mode ink sprinklers could be destroyed.

Yess, I was on team scissors. Not being salty but that was not balanced at all in the 2nd half

I don't mind tri color but would've been nice to get the option where once the opposing team gets the ultra signal, give us the option to retrieve it back

I think if they moved the second Sprinker of doom out of the middle it would be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less rigged for Scissors because it literally just denied my team its main base

As a fellow BIG MAN lover i found the slosher useful. I'd usually go on to the gray blocks at the center or on the moving parts if they are up. use the bomb and special for defending the signal and the slosher was able to go over the bump/bridge at the middle.

Sorry, but I was on Team Rock, so of course Rock was going to win. They gave me a katana weapon. It was Fate, it was Fated to happen, it could not but happen.

As a part of team rock I just wanna say that team scissors should’ve won

I agree with a lot of points, I think samon run will be open all the time in spatoon 3 so thats a thing. Im sure things will change some what for the next spatfest but yea for the first hour or 2 of tri color it just wasn't fun. Tords the end I did win a few games but it was rough. A biger base to ink or an eazyer way to get to the other teams bases. I didn't have any friends on scissors so I didn't notice you couldn't came up with friends in tri, but thats infuriating. The mode you need comunicashion in and you can't have it! I did like tri, but at least being able in infuse your chances of getting into a notmal or tri battle. Like you go for notmal and your waiting but if its been __ amout of minutes and nothing happens then maybe you in a game no matter the mode but at least that influences your chances. I got so confused and frustrated when I wanted to play normal but keeped geting put in tri only do have that win steak end

I played for all 12 hours and got to scissor ruler+4 but the tri battle was so unbelievably unbalanced. In the 13 or so games I played of it I only won once and that was because my 3 team mates all were in the top 500. Also maybe I just got unlucky but people disconnected constantly. But I had a blast playing it!

I think it’s probably going to be rough for the next few splatfests but I think we’ll eventually figure out the best way to play tricolor and though it will always be hard it won’t feel impossible

I was on team rock and when Tricolor matches were on, I really tought the two other teams would be struggling, I haven't won a single one of those, so now I'm really surprised Team Scissors actually struggled a lot on that even tough they had 4 players

As someone who had a near supernatural ability to pick the losing team for Splatfests in Splatoon 2, I suggest people stop caring so much about which team wins, and care more about their personal performance, if anything. The difference in rewards is negligible (extra 3 sea snails), and, of course, zero in this demo Splatfest. That said, I understand your points. I was on Team Rock myself (finally won one, haha, though maybe only because of the Tricolor), and while you can queue for Tricolor Battles, the matchmaking system takes that as a "suggestion", not a rule. I'd say 50% of the time, got thrown into a regular match. One thing for the losing teams is - if I queue for Tricolor and end up not getting it, it would be nice to choose whether I'm playing Pro matches or Open. Every time you miss a Tricolor while queuing for it, you end up with Open, so I barely got any clout in Pro mode.

My childish gay brain giggling everytime i see "I LOVE MEN" plastered on the battle map walls 😭

Scissors wasn’t doing very well in the beginning, but they were getting the hang of it even though it was hard. However even when they finally started getting into the whole rhythm of things it was too late.

I mean this is why they do the test fire anyway, so they can see what needs balancing

I think people don’t know how to play tricolor yet especially since we’ve only had it for 6 hours. Backliners are extremely powerful as the team in the middle and being able to ink the turf of the 2 other teams can distract them from the ultra signal enough to regroup if needed.

I definitely know what you mean about those time gates modes. They also announced the big run for salmon run, where you play on the regular multiplayer maps. This seems really cool but it's only available every few months. Hopefully tricolor and turf war eventually become weekly or bi weekly events once the big events are over.

honestly i agree with the randomness issue, i would pick aerospray to prepare for the tri-colour battle but end up getting a regular battle and lose, then i would play roller in anticipation for the normal mode but then get tri-colour and lose, which was so annoying that i just ended up playing pro battles and nothing else

whenever I actually got into a regular turf war match as a scissors player, I sometimes had someone who would purposefully disconnect just so they could play tricolor, and that would end the whole game.

“Skill issue” -every rock player’s response to team scissors saying that tri color is unfair

If the winning team keeps losing tri color battles, then I’m going to have to choose the team that I think won’t be winning at half time instead of the team I actually like :/

I was also Team Scissors. I was unfortunately busy in the afternoon, so couldn't play Tricolor at all. My friends and I had coordinated ahead of time to be on the same team, however, and they told me every single time they matched for Tricolor our team lost. Contrast to the morning regular Turf War time window, when I was able to play with them. We were doing so much better! I agree, I think the current balance is unfair. It's a great idea to give teams that are falling behind a chance to catch up, but not at the expense of completely taking away any chance at victory from the team that's ahead.

yeah i was on team scissors and another problem with tricolor being random is that it means overall team scissors players would get matched in each mode less frequently. the teams in second and third can choose to just play regular and then accumulate wins from that, or just play tricolor and accumulate wins from there. where team scissors randomly gets matched in either tricolor or regular which would split the overall wins. also, the points you get from winning as the defending team are less than you get from winning as the opposing team in tricolor, so even if scissors wins games in tricolor (which is very difficult to do) the win is overall worth less than it is for the other 2 teams. i was team scissors, i loved tricolor i found the chaotic nature really fun. but i can admit it really was not very fair to the defending team. it took what was nearly a 3 way tie with 1 point differences between them all into a landslide defeat for scissors. they should rework it.

Salmon run has been confirmed to not have time sessions and will be open all the time

I have to disagree with many of your points on tri-color turf war. When the halfway point came and the leading team was announced the game was very close with each team being only 1 or 2 percentage points apart from each other. And when the announcement of the winning team came the rock ream won votes narrowly from scissors with paper far behind. Then came the clout rankings which where very close as well, it was within a few percentage points in both open and pro. And yes scissors lost everything, but it was not as bad as it seems, the way these splatfest are scored is all or nothing. This means you could win a category by a tenth of a percent and get ten points and the other team gets nothing. This makes the ending score results rather useless. We also don’t know the size of these teams and that could also affect the results in a way that is unpredictable. We also have to recognize that this is a new mode and people are unfamiliar with how to play it. This certainly isn’t helped by the leading team not being able to choose to play or not play tri-color. Which yes is stupid on Nintendo’s part. I think it’s just to early for anyone to tell if this is fair or unfair. If this becomes a pattern then we need to investigate this more. Right now it’s to early to tell in my opinion.

We *rocked* your world!

I was working all weekend so I didnt get a chance to play. However I am going to pick up the game when it releases and I cant wait to play it.

I feel like the ultra signal was a little unfair considering you are getting attacked from both sides. At least this is a test fire and the least Nintendo can do is nerf the ultra signal, that would make me a little more comfortable.

as team rock every tri color battle i lost to scissors..

I would like to note, even if you pick tricolor mode as rock or paper just could be put into an open game, it’s just a roll.

Was playing the splatfestwith some friends who had never played before. We all groaned when we got a tri-color map. Everyone was struggling. There’s also the signal in the middle and none of us could figure out how to use it. I think giving an option would be good so we could just ignore this mode.

I was usually able to win all my Tricolorbattles by attacking one of the teams before they could attack our team. But it’s still unbalanced because Team red didn’t even have a Spawn area to paint People who say that’s "suppose" to be a comeback for the losing teams didn’t see that in the Splatoon 3 direct the person said the leading team is suppose to have a advantage not the losing team

"I wish Big Man was real" Me too little buddy, Me too

Tri colour literally sucked The two other teams advantages -more base to ink -ultra signal -mainly only one team to aim at (middle) -can pick whatever mode they want -middle team has to focus on 2 different sides -better communication and preparation overall Winning teams advantage -4 teammates Sure giving losing teams some advantages to help would make it better but this is just ridiculously imbalanced if you’re on the winning team halfway you may as well stop playing and give up as it’s almost impossible for you to even get a chance at winning Each team should have equal chance at winning but that’s not the case at all and I feel like Nintendo aren’t gonna change much

I was on scissors and believe you me, tri color just ended up being beat up on scissors

Ima buy this when it comes out in a few days

As someone on team rock, I will say that everyone put up a good fight. The Splatfest was a lot of fun

Why's everyone acting like rock wouldn't win? Rock always beats scissors ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was on Team Paper and I was super surprised to see that we beat Scissors.

I didnt play for the 2nd half of the fest cause i was out, but man tricolour sounded rough for scissors- I was team rock but I still have respect for scissors for bein 1st at half time, ggs yall sorry you had literally all the odds against you-

Scissors won most of the time whenever i played Tricolor matches

7:50 LMAO LOOK AT THE FACE OF THE INKLING 💀

I was on team rock and found that when I queued for tricolor battles I would sometimes get put into normal battles.

I joined team scissors, but wasn’t able to play the splatfest until the evening, WAY after tricolor battles had started. My first battle was a tricolor battle and I got my ass kicked, after I was done playing for the night I had won 5 battles and lost 15. It definitely left a bad impression on me.

Hope that guys switch it waterproof he'll need it now

I personally was really surprised when I heard people were struggling with the tri-color battles, I probably won 2 out of 3 of them and thought they were a blast.

I saw it was gonna be available for the weekend so then I got high got ready to play on Saturday and the shit was already gone like wtf I got straight ganked

Literally can't play Splatoon 2 anymore since I have gotten used to 3's weapons and mechanics XD but being on team scissors was very hard at tri turf even though I have played 2 for 1000+ Hours

My brother has been hyping this game up and so have I, we both love the spaltoon series and one of the new weapons, splatana. It's like a katana but kt throws ink , really cool he played the splatfest and told me about it , I'm veryvery hyped he pre-ordered the game and i might too

I think whether or not the tricolor thing is a choice is less about if your team is winning and more about how many people are on that team. So there needs to be enough people on the winning team to make a 4:2:2 ratio. If the winning team is twice as popular as the other two teams, then it’s not going to be difficult for the lobby to fill with tricolor on the winning team and so it becomes more optional on what kind of turf war you want to play. If there’s not enough active people on one of the teams, then the lobby would also have problems making tricolor matches, meaning to make more tricolor matches available, the system would have to force the two most popular teams into more normal 4v4 and the least popular teams into trimatches to reduce how long people are waiting in the lobby. I think every splatfest would run into this problem to varying degrees unless people wait to join the leading team. I also think as we get more accustomed to the new battle style, people on the leading team will tend to pick one side of the map and stick to it as a strategy, where it kinda turns into two separate 2v2s happening on the same map, which I also think is interesting

TRI color is meant to change the tide of the game.

I was on team rock and when I would try for tricolor I more often got standard turf wars than tricolor and I think it was because there was so few paper players, so at any point I’d have no idea if I was about to do standard or tricolor. I’d prefer if the game has a way to choose a load out before a match starts after you know the mode.

My thoughts on how to fix Tricolor to make it more fair: Since the two teams opposing the leading team get WAY more turf space to cover via inking their spawn, the leading team has to struggle under the pressure of not only protecting the Ultra Signal, but also inking away enemy ink. The leading team can't both defend the Ultra Signal AND ink over the enemy's turf at the same time, and if even one side gets the Ultra Signal, it's practically already a loss for the leading team. To fix this, I feel like: 1. There should only be one Ultra Signal per Tricolor Turf War 2. The leading team starts with said Ultra Signal affiliated to them (as in they start with their own Ultra Signal sentry) and 3. Any team, including the leading team, can capture the Ultra Signal to switch the position and ink color it shoots to the team that captures it This allows the leading team to focus on inking enemy turf a little more, with less Ultra Signal defense required, and also doesn't mean the leading team basically already has lost if they fail to defend the Ultra Signal. I get that kind of the point of Tricolor Turf War is for the two teams in 2nd and 3rd place to exact their revenge on the leading team, kind of like an underdog boost, but it certainly felt unfair. The underdogs got WAY TOO MUCH of a boost.

The tri color has to be one of the most unfair shit I've ever seen in gaming. RIP miiverse

I was team paper and got to play tri color battles as much as I wanted. I played them for 4 straight hours. The benefit of being the least picked team!! They need you to fill try battles

Tri-Color needs a serious rebalancing

I understand the frustration of random tricolor matches but also think of it like this, if youre on the winning team would you opt in willingly to possibly lose the lead? Most people wouldnt so its a necessary evil, but i do think it sucks the winning team has no option to play it willingly cause theres the argument that the winning team will lose a lot of those and rng isnt making enough of those matches

Get Rekt. Rock Crushes Scissors.

At least salmon run is no longer limited and we can play it anytime in 3.

“People dont want to play this mode” Then you dont play Splatfest. This is Splatfest. That’s like saying “i showed up to a baseball game, but I wanted to play football, and it wasn’t fair”

pure chaos just how i like it

Salmon Run is 24/7 now. Which is good.

The only thing i disagree with is there is only a small window to play tricolor. The full game will not have a small window to play it. The splatfest will last 2 days and the first day will be only regular turf war. The second day will have tricolor and turf war.

Dude, I hated tri-color battles and I kept getting them. It was, like, a 2/3 chance I would end up in one of those stomp fests, and it put me off of the splatfest, and I only won one of them the whole night. It's so stressful. You have to paint since it's a turf war, but if a team caps even one ultra signal, it's a guaranteed loss. If they capture both, it might as well end in a knockout, like it's rainmaker. I guess the idea is that they don't want the winning to team run from Tricolor battles, and if that's the case, you might as well make it a permanent replacement for Turf war for the duration. The new splatfest Meta is wait until the splatfest is half over and tricolor battles are up, then pick a losing team so you can have fun.

Yea when tricolor battles were out i had a hard time match making because team scizors cant do tricolor and everybody is doing tricolor so we couldn't get many points

I picked rock and got consistently curbstomped by enemy scissors all throughout the 2nd half. Y'all fought so well! More often than not, if we won the tricolour, it was because Paper was able to carry at my expense. ...how the hell did my team win, I'll never know, but somehow rock won and Paper came in 2nd. Makes me wonder how indicative my experience is for beginner players experience in Rock.

i played tricolor alot, and i found a strat that made us always win, just spawn camp them, its hard but it helps alot there was a ledge you could jump on and attack blue or yellow, but the sprinkler of doom was kinda dumb lmao it doesnt despawn and you cant break it

salmon run is now open 24/7!

For your point about the other team getting to pick between tri and normal, that’s not even fully the case. It’s true that we theoretically have a higher level of choice but around 70% of the time it just puts you in a normal battle even if you picked tri because there weren’t enough players of one team for a tri battle. So it’s basically the same result both ways but with a different beginning

So just gotta say for those of us on team Rock we would queue for tricolor and sometimes get stuck in regular turf, sucks just as much