S3 Lobby
Image: Nintendo

Here at Nintendo Life, we're big fans of Splatoon 3 — as if you couldn't already tell from our glowing review — and while the lobby wait times can go on a little, being able to ink your surroundings and zip around is better than staring at a board while you twiddle your thumbs.

An update is on the way which should address any lingering connectivity teething problems players have been experiencing, but however zippy they may be, you're still going to find yourself waiting in the Splatsville Lobby at some point. Seeing your fellow players in force-ghost hologram form is all well and good for the first few seconds, but what do you do when you are 100 seconds in? What about 200? What abou— well, you get the picture.

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Predictably, the internet has been making the most of its wait times in the match-making lobby. These have ranged from the creative to the funny and the outright sanity-questioning, including reenacting a match of Pong and recreating screensavers.

240 seconds in and @MotovationYT took it upon themselves to entertain those waiting by becoming something of a bouncing screensaver on a nearby inked wall:

This level of boredom was turned up a notch in @Failboat103's Lobby, where — along with two cooperative squids — they transformed a splat-zone into a classic game of Pong. With two players as the paddles and one bouncing between them as the 'ball', who said that watching ink dry needed to be boring?

It wouldn't really be a Splatoon Lobby if there were no attempts to paint the town red, so to speak. Perhaps the most common way to pass the time in Splatsville's Lobby is to see how much of the area you can ink before being added to a game. @CherriBlitz took this mission to a whole new level and inked the entire area. Clean up in lobby one.

Finally, we thought it best to demonstrate that not all of these wait times need be ink-focused. More of a pacifist in the Lobby (before unleashing splatty hell on your opponents on the battlefield)? Then perhaps you could benefit from transforming the waiting area into a wholesome game of Leapfrog (or should it be Leapsquid?), as is demonstrated by @SkyeRoxy_ below.

To be clear, wait times suck and we would much rather not be stuck in the Lobby in the first place. However, if these tweets have taught us anything, it is that a little bit of pre-match creativity doesn't hurt every once in a while.

How have you found the Splatoon 3 lobbies thus far? What do you do to pass the time while waiting for a match to start? Drop your tips for match-making time management below.