HOLD UP
WHAT

TEAM KETCHUP WON THE REMATCH SPLATFEST???
I lowkey wanna make a mini thread about my firsthand experiences #Splatoon2

So real talk

I've participated in every Splat2 Splatfest ever, including the World Premiere Splatfest (Ice Cream vs Cake) and now this encore Splatfest for Mayo vs Ketchup

And on top of that, I've made result art for all of the main Splatfests

I'm no master of Splatfests, nor would I be the first to point out what I'll be talking about

But the outcome of each Splatfest for the first year they were active were PAINFULLY predictable as soon as you saw which side won the popular vote

I'll make result art for the encore Splatfest, but I digress

You know what really sucked about Splatfests when Splat2 launched?

Losing the Splatfest even when your team has the popular vote.

To be fair, I might have kept playing the game regardless of whether I won or lost

It's the first Splatfest in Splat2's release, so who would figure things out that early, right?

Eventually, I'd learn to maximize my victories, minimize my losses, and jump off of the Splatfest as soon as I lost about 10 matches or so

But there was still something that may/may not have been beyond my control, much less anyone playing this game

So I made the b o l d ™ claim that you could predict the outcome of the Splatfest based on the popular vote...

...which is that if your team has the popular vote, you're more likely to lose the Splatfest

Of course, this didn't happen ALL of the time (including the World Premiere Splatfest!) but when you look at March 2018 to August 2018, that's when you may think "is Splatfest ACTUALLY rigged?"

It seemed that for eight months straight, the team with the greatest popular vote was destined to lose

And here's the other thing that really sucked, especially in Mayo VS Ketchup: the Splatfest matchmaking system

Every match in Splatfest pits a team of four from each opposing side (i.e. 1 Mayo team vs 1 Ketchup team)

Which is very different from standard Turf War where any player in a lobby of 8 can be shuffled on one team or the other

So if you have more players on one specific team in a Splatfest, what does the lobby matchmaker do if it cannot find a team from the opposing side?

You get matched up to a team from your own side and any victories or losses are all for n o t h i n g

So you had to cross your fingers and hope that you don't run into teams from your own side if you wanted to feel at ease about not losing because of the popular vote

The 1st time that Mayo VS Ketchup Splatfest rolled in, Mayo had 27% of the popular vote while Ketchup had *73%*
(You saw that earlier in the thread, but )

Needless to say, there was a lot of in-fighting for Team Ketchup

The 'popular vote curse' more or less started here

So you can only imagine that over two years ago, I had to not only think about minimizing my losses so that the opposing team doesn't score wins, which is manageable

But I ALSO had to think about which team is the most popular and consider joining the 'unpopular' team