Here's How the Nintendo Treehouse 'Splatournament' Will Go Down

11am PST? I'm in Europe and will be too busy sleeping at that time.

Edit: Never mind, I subtracted 8 hours instead of adding them. That's 7 pm here, or 8 pm elsewhere in Europe, so it's a very good time. I'll try to watch it while coming home from work.

...Wait, we can't go up against them? :c

well no, I'm gonna play the game instead... smh

@Megumi would have been great to see them play against other players, especially those Japanese players lol

It's just the Treehouse team members going up against each other, no regular players? Why?

Does anyone actually care what the Treehouse is doing?

Might watch it.

Will they be forced to sit in sound proof booths and play without communication like we have to at home online, or will Nintendo troll us by showing us either 1. How great this game could have been with 4 player couch co-op or 2. Really good with voice chat.

They aren't really playing Splatoon as it exists if they get 4 players in 1 room and talk to each other.

Maybe afterward they can show a video for Zelda U that is fully voiced acted, even Link.

I'd much prefer some actual PLAYER tournaments.

I'm only interested in how to setup such a tournament, I don't care about the Treehouse tournament itself.

@rjejr: What are you ranting about? Voice chat doesn't really help in this game if you know what you're doing.
Also, 4 player couch co-op is impossible unless the Wii U suddenly supports 4 TV's at once.

If Bill or Reggie don't win, I'm officially calling nonsense on the whole business.

Since most of the US will be working or in school, I hope to see an uploaded video afterward.

Ok, have fun playing videogames, treehouse. I'll be doing the same.
@shani Have you never played split-screen?

Hopefully, they've gotten better over the months. The last time I watched the treehouse members play it was aggravating - one girl kept super jumping and got splatted upon arrival, like the whole match

@JustJulyo it's an interesting dynamic playing with my fellow westerners and Japanese. It's always funny to see, let's say, an American go in guns blazing like Arnuld only to get stealth assassinated by a well timed and smartly positioned Japanese player, like a xenomorph coming out of the walls in Aliens. You only see them after its too late.

@shani I disagree, mainly in rainmaker, the other modes, I kinda agree with you. Rainmaker, I would love to let my team know I have kraken charged, so I can activate it and have them follow in my wake to the endzone. Plus, when you have a teammate who insist on always taking the rainmaker only to back pedal and keeps shooting it at nothing. You just want to let them know, "move!, there's no one there!"

I've found the most success in Rainmaker is to keep leapfrogging to the zone. Whoever has the fish, just move forward as much as you possibly can, but always move forward ahead of your team - youre gonna die, but your team will have formed a barricade behind the fish and you can keep pushing it forward incrementally, sort of like NFL football. so, I think voicechat would work greatly in this mode, there are way too many different strategies you can adopt rainmaker.

@shani "Voice chat doesn't really help in this game if you know what you're doing."

Guess we'll see, won't we. If the teams are talking to each other then your'e wrong, if the 4 players are each in separate rooms then I'll admit I was wrong.

"unless the Wii U suddenly supports 4 TV's at "

Guess you've never heard of a little thing called "split-screen". Pick up a copy of Mario Kart 8, that can explain it better than I can.

My guess is 4 monitors side by side, we won't see the 4 Wii U hidden away somewhere, and the players will be talking to each other. Which isn't how the game is actually played.

That's what I'm ranting about, false representation of a game.

But as I said, I'll be back to apologize to Nintendo if need, be, but I probably won't have to.

They haven't promoted this, we don't even know the teams. I wish they would allow us to create tournaments in game fully equipped with invites to friends or tournament registration codes. I doubt this will happen though

@rjejr Are you serious? Split screen with Splatoon? That would'n work. Even on a projector, each screen would be too small, the resolution too low. You wouldn't see what's going on. In Splatoon it's extremely important to see the small details during battle. That's why I wrote "unless the Wii U suddenly supports 4 TV's". Think about it before you post such unfeasable nonsense.

Besides, voice is more of a distraction than help (trust me, I tried - I always play better without it). Voice chat can only be helpful if you have four incompetent players. Four experienced players won't need voice chat, because they already know what to do and - more importantly - to which little signs and signals pay attention to. That's far more useful than voice chat. In the time when someone says something on voice chat until it's processed in the recipient's, it's already too late. Besides, in the heat of battle, voice chat would result in everybody just shouting in shambles, you probably wouldn't even understand what everybody's saying (and if you tried, you would get even more distracted).

Plus, I'm pretty sure Nintendo won't use voice chat in their event if the game doesn't support it.

@Blastcorp64: A good teammate will hear when your special attack is ready - in case you haven't noticed, there's a sound for that - and he will also notice when you activate the Kraken (yeah, it also has it's own activation sound).
That's exactly what I'm talking about. You don't need voice chat at all if you know the game inside out, because everything you need is already there.

Everyone should stop pretending the devs just left voice chat out without adjusting the game accordingly. Splatoon is deliberately designed in a way that voice chat is useless. The maps are too small, the timelimit is too little, you can see lots of things on the minimap (not only things that are shown, but also what's not shown or little ink changes on the minimap).

"Plus, when you have a teammate who insist on always taking the rainmaker only to back pedal and keeps shooting it at nothing. You just want to let them know, 'move!, there's no one there!'" That's when you have to hit the "to me" signal ("come on" in the US), so that he follows you.

"Whoever has the fish, just move forward as much as you possibly can, but always move forward ahead of your team - youre gonna die, but your team will have formed a barricade behind the fish and you can keep pushing it forward incrementally"

I can only partly agree to that. It really depends on the situation and assessing the situation right is the key part. Making the wrong decision can easily cost you the game in rainmaker.
So I disagree on always moving forward and counting on dying. I would only do that if you're behind in the last seconds or overtime or when you see a small window of opportunity. I've done so successully and managed to get a few wins with a one point lead even.
But there are also situations where just dashing forward is wrong. It's like football (what you call soccer), you can just easily give posession away and if the enemy is lucky, most or all of your teammates die and then they can secure the win. The tide can change really quickly.
So there are definitely situations where it pays off to wait until an opportunity opens itself up.
Also, dashing forward alone gains nothing because you need at least one teammate you will ink the way for you.
Also, from my experience almost no one builds a barricade behind the RM-bearer. I actually wished people would put more attention at defending the back of the RM-bearer, because the enemy can always sneak up from behind and the RM-bearer can defend himself against enemies in the front.
Whenever I have the RM (and I take it a lot, mostly because of success rate and because some players just don't want to do it), I only get splatted from behind or from the side. The enemies in front of me I usually splat easily with the RM.

tldr; Playing well and paying attention is far more useful than any voice chat.

@Sonicman In Splatoon? No. Where would I do that?
And how is that even supposed to work? The screen would be too small to see everything and besides you wouldn't have the minimap on the Gamepad.
What an awful idea. Why would you guys want to destroy this beautiful game with such bad ideas? Then you could just as well suggest we play Splatoon with our feet instead of our hands. That would actually make more sense than Split-Screen.

We're not talking about MK8 or some other casual title here, we're talking about competitive Splatoon battles.

@shani you make fair points, and I enjoy it just fine without voice chat, but there are times in rainmaker I wish I could communicate beyond the two presets. I think a nice addition would be to have two more preset calls on the d-pad. Like, defend the base, or fall back, and they can change according to the rank mode. You likely experienced this situation, I've even did it myself a dozen times, where the "back door" is left open because the team got too far ahead of themselves and charged the enemy base, but without anyone bothering to pick up the rainmaker, so you can sneak in, grab the fish, and coast to the overly ambitious teams endzone untouched and finish the match in less than 30 seconds.

Edit: Yes, I'm aware of the different sound cues, but doesn't mean the other guys are aware. Plus, it would be nice to be giving and receiving recon throughout the match. Still, my favorite game of the past decade.

Question, why did the English stop calling it soccer? The English, not only invented the sport, but the name "soccer" too, right? I'm aware this is a British site so I try to be courteous and will never refer to football as "soccer"...the FIFA kind.

@Blastcorp64 Yeah I'm totally for additional signals on the two remaining d-pad directions! "Defend/fall back" is actually something I wanted to have for a long time, for example when you have a close lead and want to stall at the end or in the situation you described. I think I requested such a signal somewhere here in an article-related or forum post.

Lol, I didn't even know that "soccer" actually is a British term. Don't know why they stopped using it, maybe "football" just established itself as the dominating term among people.
A little excursus on the term "football", which was very interesting for me because of the 12 different meanings this word can have:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/football

@Blastcorp64 That is one way to look at it, I just always find that Japanese players always have a leg up on the competition. But that's just me complaining that I'm not good enough lol

@shani @rjejr There's a decent compromise which would be having 2 TVs with 2 player splitscreen per team and announcing on the stream that there will be a Wii U system update in the near future that supports 2 Gamepads being used at the same time in a variety of games (Japan can buy Gamepads on their own). Don't think it would happen (maybe NX) but it would work.

Arent they going to announce tournament mode for splatoon after it

@Grumblevolcano NX will be a Wii U 2 that supports 2 Gamepads, maybe even 4, but is sold without any.

OK, they wouldn't be Gamepads per se, they would be the 4DS. If they could do it w/ Gamecube 10 years ago surely they can do it w/ NX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_Wireless_Adapter

Had Nintendo not gone all-in with the motion controls and stayed the course w/ the Gameboy Player and home-handeld connections we probably would have been doing this already with all of their games.

@shani "Even on a projector, each screen would be too small,"

You do realize that doens't make any sense right? People probably play this on 19" tvs in their dorm rooms. If you have a 55" tv in your living room a 2-way or even 4-way split screen would still be plenty big.

Also, in the dojo, where you can play 2 player - 1 PLAYER PLAYS ON THE 6" GAMEPAD SCREEN. Are you saying a 55" tv split 4 player would have a screen size smaller than the Gamepad?

And how can you argue that you can't have a small screen b/c there is too much to see, yet at the same time argue that you don't need voice chat b/c the game is so easy to play without it? If you had voice chat you wouldn't even need a screen, the other people could just tell you what to do, so there.

@rjejr I find it even hard to play MK8 on a 55" TV. On my projector it's fine, but MK8 is less demanding.
I also never play in the Battle Dojo, only tried it once to see if the Wiimote-strapped-to-Pro-Controller-solution really works. I could never play Splatoon on the Gamepad.

Yeah but the solution small screen + voice chat is inferior (for me at least) to big screen without voice chat.
Voice chat really distracts me and I always lose a lot more games when I'm speaking with someone and have to listen to them.
I mute voice chat in every online game because of that. It's really annoying and exhausting to listen to people shouting in disorder all the time. The listening part alone takes up too much energy.

And I stand by my point that you can get all the info needed by watching the battlefield and the minimap closely. And for that, a 55" screen should be suffice (as long as you don't have to share it with someone).

@shani I'll give you this - voice chat may not be necessary to be successful in Spaltoon if you have a team of good players, but I have exchanged NNID info w/ several people on this site for the express purpose of playing Spaltoon with them, and I would very much prefer it if voice chat were there, b/c I think it would be more "fun". And for me that's what videogames are all about, "fun".
You don't really need voice chat at all in 3 minute turf wars, too short, an dit wouldn't help me playing w/ 7 japanese players, but I would like if voice chat were avaible in the "friends" modes. Not to make it more competitve, but to make it more fun.

I would also be willing to play 4-player split screen b/c I game a lot w/ my 2 sons, and sometimes w/ my wife, so the 4 of us coudl play together. The Wiimote and Pro does actually work fairly well in the 2 player dojo battles.

OK, lets say you convinced me voice chat isn't necessary and split screen wont work b/c its too small. Can you then explain to me why Nintendo left out friend matchmaking from Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash? I was going to buy it for my out of state nephew to play w/ my kids, but no matchmaking means no purchase.

@rjejr Of course I see that some people would want to use voice chat and that it could be fun for you. When I was trying to make my point, I forgot to mention something: My argument comes more from the fact that Nintendo wouldn't have implemented voice chat anyway because of the known reasons (insults and because it's harder to adjust to for players who are inexperienced in online games). So what I was really trying to say is this: They wouldn't implement vc but instead made the game in a way that you can do without vc just fine.
It's just a coincidence that I'm not a big supporter of vc in general. ^^

Regarding Mario Tennis: They left that out? Wow, that's really strange. I mean, every mayor Nintendo game with an online mode had this so far. Seems to me like Ultra Smash is really just an overhasty developed game, no wonder it got bad reviews. That's not what we expect and are used to from Nintendo. Maybe this was one game too many, they probably should't have released it I guess.

@shani "Mario Tennis: They left that out? Wow, that's really strange."

Yes, its been one of the biggest complaints against the game, only random matches, you can't even play the same person twice in a row, the game just kicks you out after each match.

From the review:
"Annoyingly, though, this is a blast from the past - and not in a good way - in terms of the online feature set; it rather resembles the limitations of Nintendo's earliest online efforts. There's no option to setup matches with those on your Friend List - no, we're not making this up - and you can't even jump into a rematch with the same opponent. We've had some fantastic matches and wanted nothing more than to go another round, but the only option is to 'Find Next Opponent', which is randomised."

https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/wiiu/mario_tennis_ultra_smash

But go back and read your reaction to that news, that's how some people feel about no friends voice chat in Splatoon, just to put things in perspective. It's really all just about opinions after all.

@rjejr Of course it is.
I forgot to mention: The only use I would have for voice chat is to shout not-so-flattering-words to incompetent teammates. I sometimes really wished I could do that. But then again, that's exactly why Nintendo didn't do it. For all I know, it could be some kid who played so bad. So Nintendo did the right thing to protect kids and inexperienced players.
Me shouting at my teammate wouldn't do any good for the game anyway, it would just act as a valve for my anger. And honestly, I think many people would use it the same way.
I can totally understand why Nintendo would want to guard young/inexperienced players against people like me (I think anyone with kids can understand that). And I'm usually a really peaceful person, not somebody who regularly shouts at people! There are definitely worse examples.
Play an online session of GTA V and you can see/hear the absolute worst in people. Or an even more extreme example: games like LOL and DOTA (luckily I don't play them).

@shani Did you get to watch any of the Treehouse Spaltournament? The teams were pretty quiet at the beginning so I started thinking maybe you were right, but near the end when it got to rainmaker they were certainly giving each other directions and advice. That's probably the one mode where voice chat is the most useful - turf is short, just ink everything; splat zone you just go ink the zone; tower control just follow the tower; but rainmaker you can run left, right or straight ahead, and when the other team has the rainmaker it's good to be able to tell your teammates which way they are going with it.

You may be right about the issue of obscenities at home, nobody curses more than I do playing videogames, just ask my wife and kids, but I still feel for rainmaker to work the way it was intended, as a team sport like soccer, it requires teamwork, and teamwork requires voice chat.

As for Mario Tennis - the Amazon reviews mostly paint a negative picture of the lack of online matching, nobody even bothered to bring up the lack of voice chat.

http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00ZV1C600/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1S6X3CXHUY9C9&coliid=I1W4HO97A2ZVFT&psc=1