Poll: What Did You Think Of Tricolor Turf War In Splatoon 3?

I love the chaotic nature of the tri-color. Not sure I like it better than standard turf war, but it certainly spices things up in a nice way.

seemed the defending team got smashed most games

Team Scissors were first halfway through, so yeah this needs tweaking.

@BenAV I agree, I kept trying to make our 2 player team's percentage the highest, so I would go capture the other team's area for a victory. Only figured it out once us attackers won and I saw we shared the victory.

I was having a blast with them. (As team paper.) Until my sister (team scissors) came in talking about how imbalanced it was. Tbh, I'm not too sure what the ultra signals do.. All I saw was a big sprinkler appear covering the stage with your ink. I watched her play a match as the defending team, and yeah. It's way skewed against the defending team.

This mode is a complete misfire as is. It succeeds at it's design goal, the level is pure Pearl approved Chaos (we should have let Marina win) but balance is way off. If you asked a someone to design a map where one team would have close to a 0% win rate, that's what you would get; the spawn for the 4 player team leads to a pit with nests on each side, and the only way out is a ramp that gives high ground advantage to the other teams. Even if you manage to get out of this death trap, your only two options are to take a blind corner on either side or fight another ramp vs. high ground advantage.

It's BRUTAL, and like that wasn't enough the other team gets help from the "you just win" totems. There is literally no winning strategy for the team that's ahead. You can defend the totems, in which case the other teams can just ignore them and ink the map, or you can try and ink the map yourself, in which case they get both totems which means you are now basically in a 6 v 4 match. Based on data collected in the reddit group, the win rate of red was in the single digits.

The reaction to these levels seems pretty consistent; if you were yellow or blue they were chaotic, fun, a great change of pace, and a welcome addition. If you were red they are the worst thing that's ever happened to Splatoon. I used my many switches to get a chance to play as Yellow and Red and I pretty much agree with that.

I think for SOME teams who have the 4 players in a tri-color turf war, defending the middle of a map will be too tough. I think it requires an extra level of coordination for a team of 4 to defend the middle of a map while being attacked on both sides. At least in a normal turf war, you push towards the middle of the map and try to push beyond or defend from that same side. For the team of 4 in a tri color turf war, they have to defend from two different sides. So that can be extra difficult until players get on the same page.

I also didn't realize the rules of the tri color turf war until after the first match. But that is my fault and I should have read the rules. I won a lot of tri-color turf wars and was winning a ton of clout. It seemed like Team Scissors had a hard time defending the middle area from attacks coming from both sides.

By the way, what is the point of leaving friendly fire on for the two teams of two? I had a splat roller equipped and I couldn't count how many times I went to attack the middle and support Team Rock (I was on Team Paper) only for me to splat both members of Team Rock with my roller as I painted over them. In fact, I took the opportunity to splat Team Rock every chance I got because it was fun to run them over. Are they leaving friendly fire on because it makes the teamwork aspect a little more complex? Maybe they should turn it off since it is so easy to accidently (or intentionally) splat our own "teammates" from the other team.

Played 2 matches of 4x2x2, on the 4 team both times, reading this I now I guess that was b/c I was team scissors?🤷‍♂️ I have NO IDEA. I felt like nothing was explained, at all. Both times my team got utterly obliterated. Both times we lost like 40, 38, 12 or some such, just barely had any of our color on the map at all. First match I barely made it off of the launch pad, 2nd match I did get up to where that thing was in the middle, radio antenna maybe, and it was all the other teams color and I inked it but nothing happened. Really, I had no idea what was going on.

In contrast, I played 4x4 about 4 times and I think my team won all 4 times, I know what to do in those, even though I never played Spaltoon 2 so after all of those hours of Spaltoon 1 on dual screen Wii U I had no idea how to fire, land or move, it was weird. But it was still Splatoon and I played fine and we won, even not knowing the small changes from S1 to S2 to S3, b/c it was still basically just a turf war. In 4x2x2, still no idea.

Dammit Monster Hunter! I missed the Splatfest because of you! Really wanted to see this, but the grind is real in MH. I’m on a mission to get every Afflicted Glaive. Well, looks like I’m waiting for the 9th to play Splatoon. Rats! Hope it was fun.

It was, as I expected it would be when it was first announced, a balancing nightmare for the lead team. I'm afraid no matter what Nintendo does it's always going to be unfun for someone by the very nature of it being 2v4v2 rather than simply a 4v4v4 mode with larger maps.

But since they likely won't change that, a few tweaks need to happen:

Ultrasignals are too powerful. Essentially once either Rock or Paper got one, it was almost always a loss for Team Scissors. Those need some changes. Placement changes, or design changes, or a timer limit. Something.

If you're on the lead team, you don't get the option to queue specifically for tricolor matches, they're completely random when queuing for any of the "open" playlists. Meanwhile, the other two teams could completely ignore the tricolor matches if they wanted to because they had to queue for them individually. That doesn't seem right. It should just be random with "open" playlist queues for all three teams OR all three teams should be able to queue for tricolor only. Of course, again, being a 2v4v2 mode, this will be an issue for people who group with full teams of 4 on the second and third place teams. On discord, friends on Team Scissors were posting that they had discovered they could avoid Tricolor entirely by queuing for the pro splatfest playlist, which is also a problem.

And finally, since the game clearly keeps track of the scores in real time to determine the leader at the half, it needs to reevaluate the "leader" every 2 hours during the map rotation switch. It seems very unfair for the team in the lead at halftime to be put into defense for the ENTIRE second half. Especially since there's no transparency as to how big their lead is when halftime hits. If Rock had surpassed Scissors in wins and clout by the next rotation, they should have been swapped into the center, and so on. That seems to be the only really fair way of doing this. And this was only a 12 hour splatfest, imagine if it was a regular 24 hour one and Scissors had to defend for a full 12 hours... Ouch.

I got in a few regular battles, and it's as fun as ever! I like the new starting system where you can aim at a landing spot. I did not play the Tri-Color Turf War mode and didn't even know about it.

It was a cool idea but I didn't really enjoy it.

-would rather have seen the Shifty Station concept developed more, those gave each Splatfest something unique

I never got a chance to play. The game wasn’t matching me up correctly. Every time I clicked the tri-color turf war option I ended up in a regular open match, sometimes against other players from my same team (rock). I couldn’t decide if the game was glitched or something

i wasnt on the defending side but they need to rebalance it. ive have too many matches where team scissor ended up with less than 20% turf inked

maybe make ultra signals easier to keep for them? we need more close matches

At first I thought the mode seemed highly in favor of the 2 opposing teams, until I realized that the defending team only needs to have more ink than either of the opposing teams, not their combined amount. So, they can win with something as low as, say, around 30% or so. Especially if the opposing teams have no synergy and are covering each other's ink or splatting each other, since there is "friendly fire" (either accidentally or intentionally).

After playing standard spaltfest for a couple hours, I didn't have the mental bandwidth to learn, or try, the new Tricolor Battle mode. I suppose I'll try it after the full game releases.

I just didn't play, Splat3 look less and less fun each time I see it.

About 65% of the people who voted on this poll chose Team Scissors… that doesn’t surprise me.

The matchmaking is as bad as I remember it being. Won my first match of the day then lost the following 10.

I was on Team Scissors and I love the chaotic nature of the tricolour turf wars. But actually playing as the defending team? Not fun at all. Not having a choice of regular turf and being constantly thrown into tricolour was frustrating.

Then just the thing itself? It's clear that this mode needs it's own unique map and using Sturgeon Shipward was a poor choice to test this out on. Team Scissors spawn areas could be completely covered by the enemy teams, no cooldown on the ultra signal after it had been successfully defending, the reach of those sprinklers that can't be destroyed just to name a few things that drastically need overhauled for it. Probably the biggest flaw is how when telling us about it is that they focused on how you absolutely had to defend the middle of the map, but then forgetting that you actually need to ink the rest of the map. Took me a few games to realise that lol. It defo hampers the experience since I was playing alone, if it was team matches where you could discuss what was going on then it might of been different.

Did anyone else find it weird that they placed a big focus on how the team in the lead halfway through would then defend in the tricolour turf wars didn't get anything in the final results for it? I thought being in the lead halfway through would net at least one point but we got nada.

In all, the concept of it is cool and there is fun in the chaotic nature of it (Pearl would be proud). But it drastically needs overhauled for something to benefit the defending team because child that was not a good time.

Tri-color was rough since there wasn't really any explanation. Also tough coordinating with randoms.

When I did play a couple rounds with a full team of 4 friends with voicechat, it was a much better experience. We could have one person get into the Rock base, and another player in the Paper base to distract them, and then the other 2 defending the ultra signals. At that point we finally started winning some rounds.

I was Team Rock. I liked being able to test out weapons in the lobby, but that was about it. The Splatfest Turf Wars were the standard fare (I only ever did the two-team battles), but my team kept getting creamed.

There was even one match where the opposing team had us right up against our starting area, and kept splatting us as soon as we landed; we didn't even have the time to fire off any shots!

But going around the plaza, I wasn't big on how they had Deep Cut play their song and dance. You couldn't see them on the tops of their floats, and you could barely hear the music. And the television screens scattered throughout Splatsville didn't do them much justice.

I hope the full release can make it up with a better campaign mode, and an expansion pack like Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion. I'm more of a single-player gamer anyway, so the Turf Wars and Splatfests are largely something I only dabble in than sink a ton of time into.

Defending in the tricolor splatfest was a nightmare. I probably ended up in 10-15 tricolor matches and only won 2 of them. That's pretty rough.

An idea would be to make the ultra beacon useable by any team and make it equidistant for everyone, or maybe make it more like a capture the flag type ability that attaches to your player so you can move it around the map. It would stick to you and create a spray of ink, and you can still use your normal weapon. Sort of like tower defense, but once the player running around with it dies it has a brief time where you can pick it up before it respawns back at the central location for someone else to pick it up.

Something has got to give, it's way too unbalanced against the defending team in a way that makes the game unfun and frustrating. Maybe a custom map that has some advantages for defense, or is more designed for defensive teams in mind instead of reusing a map designed for 2 team battle.

As a casual Splatoon fan, I'd rather play ranked battles than defend in tricolor turf wars again!

@jcboyer515 Were you on the defending team?

I think saying Scissors lost because of Tri-Color don’t quite realize how much more clout you can get from Turf Wars with 10x, 100x and 333x battles.

@Captiosus

To be clear, I didn't like them over all and already wrote a very negative take, so this isn't "defending" ... but some insight from what Nintendo has said to the Japanese media that might change your mind on the fact that they are optional for the losing teams.

It's supposed to be a risk / reward thing. If the defending team wins, it's a huge boost. In a spread of, say, 30/30/40, the teams are getting almost no clout unless they win. At the same time, your personal team is only getting half the clout anyways because half the players. So if you play a tri-colour and lose, you've done basically nothing for your team, while if you stick to the safer 4 v 4 at least you can contribute clout by inking. In a normal game, where the winning team gets, for example, 3000 clout to the winner's 6000, here the losing team gets 600ish while the winning team still gets at least 1000 a player.

So tri-colour matches don't really HELP the two teams that were behind at half time, they just HURT the team that was ahead. So the idea here is that you need to balance between your confident players doing tri-colour, while your less confident players do 4v4 to get the clout you are going to need to get the overall victory.

It actually is a pretty good design, in my opinion, although it plays a little to strongly into the game-a-facation of social responsibility that only really works in Japan. Doing what is expected and required of your social group is SUCH a core value in Japan, that being forced (as red) to play a map where everything is against you and you're probably going to get owned is actually something most people are going to "enjoy" or at least react positively too. The idea of knowing your place, if you are a defender in 4v4 or a attacker in tri-colour based on your skill level is also a really positive thing for a lot of people. Not me, I think it sucks!

Still, I think at the core it's just a balance issue, not a design issue. If red was losing 60% of the time it would have been fine, but they were losing 90% of the time, and that's not any fun for anyone.

@BaeYoobin I can attest to that. (Seriously My team didn’t win a single round)

@HeadPirate

Yeah the victory numbers completely diminishing for the defending team is something that should easily make them go, "Okay, we gotta fix some stuff." but we'll see. I agree with what you said, the design is completely there and can work. They just gotta adjust balancing. I wouldn't mind unique maps being made for tricolours. If the Shifty Stations existed just for splatfests in Splatoon 2, then tricolour can have their own maps that best suits their needs.

Was on defending team and thought it was the most fun I’ve had with splatoon in years. Just an insane experience

@Big_Fudge u just had to keep playing turf war. The tri color matches were peppered in

@Crockin That's only if you were defending. If you were on team paper or rock, you had to choose tricolor turf wars in the lobby.

P2P Killed the Splatfest. We played with four people within one room on fiber via LAN and got constant disconnects because the foreign team played on wifi.

It would be more suitable when Nintendo would group LAN and wifi players into separate lobbies or ditch P2P. These players and their frequently disconnects are annoying and ruin the entire game for all others.

@Geit_de I'm wondering if it was a connection issue on Nintendo's end because I got tons of disconnects, not something I ever really have an issue with in Splatoon 2. Wondering if it was overloading something on their end. Maybe my internet was just crap yesterday but I have been seeing a lot of connection issues overall.

I was team paper and i honestly felt kind of bad for team rock. The Ultra Signals are basically only for clout and turfing was pretty easy.

Another online fail by Nintendo!

It was great. I enjoyed it with my daughter for a few hours then went to bed because I had work in the morning. Fun game, Nintendo!

it's an ok mode they should include it in private rooms on release so you can set up tricolor battles whenever

@Lord you must of not played the same demo bro because the online in Splatoon 3 is actually amazing

I was on Team Scissors and honestly loved defending. It would definitely need more communications or people understanding the concept. When people where focusing on defending and only 1, maybe 2 people were going to ink the enemy territory we won fairly consistently. But when people were just inking anything and not defending we would easily lose.

Defending also seemed to favor weapons like sloshers, blasters, and snipers.

Maybe if they had a way that if the defenders where able to push into enemy territory they could have their own ultra signals. That way there is a little more push and pull rather than just defending.

Or if ultra signals could be stopped or depleted by the defenders once they're activated. If someone got 1 they could easily win off that by just playing decently and if they got two there was no way possible to win as a defender after that.

I downloaded the demo with every intention of playing it but I guess I misremembered how long it would be going on for. Saturday night I was just puttering around in Xenoblade, figuring that I'd jump on some time Sunday. Whoops!

@Specters
Yeah, besides the ultrasignals staying around too long, I think the balancing of the mode is pretty good, since the defenders have twice as many players as the other teams to work towards their ink total. A lack of communication is just more evident on bigger teams.

The offensive teams are at an advantage compared to the defensive team. I was always on the offense and never lost. It's a cool idea that needs better balance.

I wish the “defending” team was random instead of only the leading team at halftime. I played later in the night (team paper) and defending/ attacking team wins were pretty balanced. I wish there was more instruction in the 3-way battles… I still don’t know what I was doing.

There's still time to fix the problem

I loved it……But my god does it need a rework.

@Thoughts Oh Tri-Color defending was super fun. Totally unbalanced mind you, but super fun. Every win felt so dang good, and the absolute chaos of defending required tons of split second decisions.

I'll have to wait for release. I obviously missed the option to pick a tricolor battle. I think I played thinking it was an automatic option and never got to participate in one

Team Scissors! Played and enjoyed some games of the regular splatfest in the morning. Played a few games of the Tri-color later and decided to go play some Splatoon 2 instead after a while.

Did I just miss an explanation of the rules of the Tri-Color battles, or was it not included? I had no idea what the Ultra Signal was or what I was meant to do about it.

I was playing for Paper.

Early Tricolour Battles were easy wins as Scissor players stood in the middle and got smashed from both sides allowing for easy steals.

Late Tricolour battles involved more tactical Scissor players who would leave the middle and take the fight to Paper and Rock which kept us off the middle and would win matches as it was harder to get in there.

I think they have some deeper strategy to learn. Certainly I could see more frequent switching or maybe stages built around it. I certainly think hiding the tricolour rules in a menu wasn't ideal but it is an interesting twist.

The defending team needs something substantial, but also not broken. I think this is one case where the Rainmaker might be a decent weapon to give.

@ModdedInkling honestly I think by next time the strategies will be there. I was on defense and started winning every match just by popping defensive specials at just the right time. Big bubbler and wave breaker are absolute musts, especially if you have multiple of each, it’s unstoppable

They should have tricolours turf wars be separated from turf war matches. Give players a choice or at least give a smaller RNG of tricolours.

@BenAV I also had to explain to my husband, who is the much more experienced Splatoon player out of the two of us, that the Ultra Beacon doesn't guarantee victory. It just inks a fair bit and gives you extra clout.

@krystress Tricolour was a separate option you had to select in the lobby.

I feel the Ultra Signal needs a bit of tweaking but other than I didn't mind the Tricolor War, and I was on Team Scissor.

I think it’s clear that Nintendo thought the 4 player team would have a bigger advantage than the two player teams. In pervious splatfests my worst experience was going up against a coordinated team that was clearly communicating with each other, and I think tricolor is meant to balance against those types of teams. If I recall correctly you can’t play with friends in the Pro queue so if you are playing with friends and you also happen to all be really good at Splatoon you’ll clean up against teams of 4 randos who avoided the Pro queue because they wanted an easier challenge. I think tricolor is an interesting way to tackle that problem, and when we start playing real splatfests for people who purchased the game and not just everyone ona free demo tricolor will start to feel more balanced.

I could never play the Tri-Color turf war, I kept on selecting it, and it would only match me on normal matches. The game was fun, but the same amount of fun can be found on the first Splatoon game as well, so...

@Eeros

Nah, its the default Wifi. Wifi is loosing packages all over the place when getting interrupted.

These interruptions can be anything. A fridge/freezer activating cooling, non LED light tubes flickering on, power tools and so on.

And since Nintendo is using P2P all players are connected directly, so I one player drops packages the data of other players are lost and when a player is loosing connection he also pulls other players into disconnection, which makes the stuff unstable like hell.

When using real servers this isn´t happening. In case of a disconnect just the one player would be getting lost and could be easily replaced by a bot.

Not providing a LAN adapter by default (until the OLED Dock) is the first problem. Most people use Wifi and don't even think about it. "Why buy an adapter just for Splatoon?" Well, yeah.

Secondary the mobile aspect is triggering the Wifi-usage which causes even more problems, when people play where they usually don't play online (garden, own room).

Nintendo saved money and did not implement a LAN port (which is a general issue in the industry. Even streaming devices need adapters these days). Also saved Nintendo Money by not providing servers.

The new lobby server technology works great. Matchmaking is much faster in Splatoon3 compared to older Splatoon2, but it falls flat when your game gets terminated due disconnects several times in a row after 2 minutes of game play.

This mode really needs a lot of reworking. The way the matches are set up really favours the attacking team, and pretty much ensures that the team who is in the lead at half-time ends up losing. I wonder why Nintendo couldn't have done 4v4v4; after all Mario Kart can support 12 players in a lobby at once!

@Geit_de A great explanation, thanks! I would have just assumed that your own connection effects only you, the person with the connection issue. Just making you drop the match leading to 3v4 matches. Not sure if they changed it at all between the two games, but Splatoon 2 seemed much more stable overall.

Whoever is playing Splatoon in handheld is a better man than I, can hardly see whats going on in all the action on the small screen. Thanks for the break down, I'm more apt to consider doing LAN in the future.

@Tom41

Because it is possible to interpolate missing data packages and get a relative solid result.

If a cart is driving, it has a direction and a speed. If packets are missing you can assume where it is. You may have seen karts and even weapons jumping. That's because packets got delayed or lost and the software assumed where it will be at the time. This is the reason you sometime see a red shell miss you and moments later you get hit by the very same shell.

That's because you or the shell where at the same location in the past, but at time it wasn't possible to detect.

While on MarioKart you only have 12 players and a ton of weaons, with Splatoon you need to sync the entire map as every weapon, every shoot and every movement of a player is changing the color. Together with P2P, this information must be transferred to any console and depends on all players upload speed and overall network quality, so it takes time till all data is on all players consoles.

You need to swap to real servers as the current P2P has its limits and 8 players is already at its limit with 8 players and barely works.

Tricolor felt horribly imbalanced in favour of attacking, but when you're not getting splatted every 2 seconds being defender isn't that bad. Though I do wish the defenders actually had some way to... defend

If I were defending, I wouldn't stay in the middle. I would be all over the map in the nooks and crannies inking spots unnoticed... LOL. 😎

@BrandyBongos
That's what I thought but someone told me it's forced in turf matches. Whatever the case, it shouldn't be pushed. A lot of people are relatively new to the game, so I think tricolours was just intimidating. I hope they make the battles somewhat rare, like 100x and 333x battles.

This mode actually feels like the biggest innovation in this game. Considering the amount of team members, it feels like a quality vs quantity option.
More than just improvement, I can see a lot of potential for expansion.