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Apparently different clothing brands are weighted massively towards specific associated sub skill rolls. So say you want tenacity. The obvious choice is that 3 star gas mask, unless that brand isn't going to give you the sub skill rolls you want. The option you have is to look at the lower rated tenacity pieces and see if their brand matches up with the sub skills you want on that tenacity hat, then you can upgrade those pieces to have just as many slots as the 3 star piece. List of the brands and their effects. I answered this in the thing you responded to. If somebody has 0 points, they dropped mid-match. KDR's appear to be preserved though, so it's less obvious when somebody drops in ranked. I'll add that the problems seem most common during peak hours for north america. Late at night, the game seems fine.

I have had a string of random disconnects in ranked and have lost a ton of ranking points because of it. I am mad at you, Splatoon. The netcode in this game kind of sucks, especially obvious with how prevalent disconnects are. Either you start a match explicitly a man down, or you find that two people on your team have zero points on the final score card, indicating they dropped mid-match. It happens constantly. (Since their KDR's are preserved on the score card, it's not as easy to discern in ranked when somebody drops.) I've even been killed by people on the complete opposite end of the map with no visible attack happening. No inkstrike, no killer wail, tons of walls inbetween. If i give people the benefit of the doubt, i'd assume the game failed to sync the visible portion of a killer wail attack, but still hit me with the result. Harder to reconcile is stuff like the ranked game i had where the game froze at around 20-30 points for my team. I die from an invisible and out-of-sync roller that i had killed seconds earlier and subsequently witness from the death cam every ally that was around me explode in rapid succession. The game syncs back up with only 5 points left to win for my team, but now with both hills controlled by the enemy. What the fuck? (Happy conclusion: We retook the hills, worked through seventy penalty points, and still won.)

As far as i'm aware, all of the skills that can show up as randomly rolled sub skills are stackable, and keep in mind that all of the sub skills are just stat buffs, it's just that some of the stat buffs happen to cross important thresholds. People generally seem to feel that the movement buffs are the best ones, and i'm inclined to agree. I mean, but yeah, shoot for whatever you want. Also, more stuff is apparently being unlocked tomorrow. (Today?) This weird fuckin` crossover is also happening. That sure made me laugh.

Skills definitely do stack! There's a few things i've sorted out on my own, and a few things i've read online, but there's a lot of ambiguities and the finer specifics of it are still being sorted out by the community as far as i can tell. In general, it seems like each successive addition in a skill stack has reduced effectiveness over the last, and they seem to cap at three, and a lot of them seem designed to only really do something useful at a full stack of three. (Ignoring the one-off mechanics-modifying skills that can only appear as main skills and which probably can't stack, like ninja squid and recon.) So yeah, about those full stacks hey? The "special duration" skill, i ended up with two of those on one build, but it wasn't enough to get an extra shot out of my inkzooka despite a ever so slightly longer active period. I assume having that third instance of the buff might have been enough to push me from six shots to seven. There's something similar going on with defense buffs, i understand. That a full stack makes it generally take one more hit to kill you. (While a full stack of attack buffs apparently can't quite achieve a similar effect in reduced shots to kill, but does apparently quite effectively counter defense buffs.) If you want to see the effects of the defense buff, three of the target dummies in the weapon test level are marked with the varying levels of defense buff stacks.

I felt like i had way more money than i knew what to do with in my first few days of playing, it doesn't feel like the game's currency system has really been much of a limiting factor. I know Spyke's prices are inflated, but my first few 3 stars that i got through him were still only around 10-15k, which were easily afforded. However, I didn't know about there being a hard limit on when Spyke will first sell you 3 star gear, but i was definitely still pretty early on in the progression when i started getting my first 3 star pieces. What exactly is the limit? I have no idea exactly what level i was, i think it was still only the second day of the game that i placed my first 3 star order, but you blow through those 1-10 ranks so fast. That makes a ton of sense, i stand corrected. Also, i am shamed, i'm only C+ in ranked. I just haven't played it as much as turf war, i swear! Lastly, i hit 20 and can confirm first-hand the details about the services Spyke offers at the cap. (Upgrading 1 and 2 star pieces with more slots, and rerolling 3 star pieces.) Cool kids wear maxed one star gear.

I've seen people use the ink mine primarily as a way to cover escapes. I have close to fifty hours on the game and am almost level 20, i generally manage to be the team's points MVP in almost every match i play, and virtually never with a negative KDR. I'm not going to pretend that i'm a top tier player, i've definitely been just absolutely worked over, but i feel like i have a solid grasp of the game, so i'm just going to start throwing out some thoughts and strategies for anybody who might feel they're useful. General advice: When just starting out, before you've played a lot of matches and are still at low levels, look around your hub area and find Inklings with 3 star gear, then order that stuff and get it from spyke. 3 star gear will start showing up in shops when you level up, but you can have gear that lets you close the progression gap almost out of the gate by going through spyke. Now you're in matchmaking and playing: Spread out, permanently stacking up with team mates is actually a really bad idea in this game. I mean from moment one, don't follow people down the same path in your base when moving out towards the map center, spread out that coverage. Also, by sticking together, not only do you reduce your paint coverage, but big centralized conflicts will invariably be game-ending for somebody, and if it's looking like you're not getting back any ground against a team that is deathballing towards your spawn, branch off and loop around them and take enough territory that they have to respond and break up their cohesion. If nobody on your team is doing this, you should do it. You will make comebacks happen. Learn to use the motion control, the accuracy you gain is worth the adjustment period. Right stick for broad turns, motion control for fights. You can even mix mashing the x button to bunny hop while still aiming with the motion control to be a particularly annoying asshole, but i have better experience with abusing the squid form to setup kills. Speaking of which, use the squid form constantly, juke around your opponents if you're fighting up close. You might not even want to aim at them directly for the opening shots of the fight, but paint the ground around them so you can swim up and get behind them to score a largely uncontested kill. (This is mainly for the short range splatterguns, the long range stuff is more about finding an advantageous standing and abusing the hell out of it, while the roller tends to benefit most from surprise attacks out of squid form, or tricky flanking maneuvers around the corners of level geometry. Be careful around corners and random patches of enemy ink when dealing with rollers, they want those uncontested up-close insta-kills.) The inkzooka is amazing, i've carried out successful team-wipes with that thing. I feel it's probably the most powerful of the supers, and it's an especially powerful tool for clearing out people who think they're safely camping out on a higher ledge. I see people freak out about the kraken, but it's over-rated. As long as you have a path, you can swim faster than it, it's easy to juke around. The inkstrike's post-game "fuck you" might make it appealing, but it's largely harmless in-game, as is the killer wail. Other than the inkzooka, the only super i find particularly threatening is the bubble shield, which is extremely frustrating to deal with when it's in the hands of a good player. The grenade spam supers are also quite decent. As for the echo-locator, it's harder to pin down the value it has since it's informational rather than direct, so it's up to the individual as to whether they like it or not. Spamming grenades out of squid form is an effective tool for locking down or clearing out choke points, and if somebody is doing it to you, don't try to fight it, flank them from another path. Don't aim at the ground when painting with snipes or splatterguns/blasters or the tap attack on the rollers, projectiles all leave trails of paint behind them. Additionally, with the snipes, only charge half to two thirds of the way. You can get the same coverage while only sacrificing shot power. More shots faster = more coverage. Also, excluding the rollers, get used to the loop of painting the ground ahead of you, swimming up through it, and painting more ground ahead of you. Be so careful when super jumping back into the fight, pick your partner carefully. If you get wasted just as you land, you've dramatically extended your downtime. Seems simple, but i see people make that mistake all the time. (Your landing destination is visible to the other team.) If you feel like you're struggling to make the snipes useful, play ranked. They are incredibly dominant there. Also, regardless of what weapon you're using, don't be afraid to kind of hang back as a spawn beacon for your team, just hurling ink at the hill from a safe vantage point. You may not get the most kills, but you will probably win the game for your team. You're keeping the hill contested, you're letting allies get back in the fight quickly, and you're forcing the enemy to take up a risky posture where they have to deal with somebody in an advantageous position. Clearing up common misconceptions: - You can super jump at any time, from any location, to any allied player or spawn point. (Including the one-use spawn beacons that you should totally make a point of destroying if they're hostile.) - The walls do not earn meter, score, or coverage for your team. Only floors, ramps, and half-pipes do. - That little LCD lookin` thing on the matchmaking screen is your "vibe". When it hits higher levels, go talk to judd to cash it in for a small cash bonus. You can do this daily. (If you cash it it at a lower level and hit a higher level, you can cash it in again for a portion of the higher level.) Gear: So there are main skills and sub skills. Main skills are locked in for each piece of gear and encompass a range of both the basic skills and a bunch of one-offs that can't appear as the randomly rolled sub skills. Also, yes, the sub skills are entirely random. What do you do if you get bad rolls? I mean, the shops won't sell you anything twice, hey? Well, some options open up at Level 20, i am led to believe, but before that if you order the same piece that you have through Spyke, he will replace the one you have with the one he finds. (Which may have a fresh batch of open sub skill slots, or may randomly retain one or two of the sub skills from the version of the item you initiated the order with.) At level 20, you can apparently just have him reroll any piece of gear you have, and also upgrade 1 star and 2 star pieces into 3 star pieces. (All for either a large sum of in-game currency or apparently with unique items earned through the splatfests that Nintendo plans on doing, the first of which is on the 20th, i believe.) Aside: I've been seeing a lot of intermittently janky netcode, and i'm having a hard time deciding if it's just Nintendo servers getting hammered, or if there's a prevalence of network manipulation hijinx going on. (Which is what it feels like to me.)

I was playing online with a friend and just saw ranked battles go live, and at the same time a new map was introduced and new guns were unlocked, and all with one of those squid sisters cinematics to introduce the changes. It was kind of cool seeing it all happen seamlessly and with a unique introduction. Deep down inside i know it's just on-disc stuff being artificially metered out, but part of me is really digging Nintendo's vision for how to handle this stuff. Also, joining friends definitely seems to break any skill-matching going on, i suddenly found myself in a string of matches where i was going like 15/0 with the highest score and was feeling kind of terrible about it.

The game does a lot of weird things with how it unlocks and categorizes quests, so i have no idea what specific circumstance is happening in your case, but i'm probably 99% certain that there are no missable quests. It's something i've looked into and double checked when i ran into some odd circumstances in my own playtime.

I can't really agree with the notion that there would be no place for voice chat in this game, for me that seems like it could go hand in hand with arguing that it's a dumb game with a low skill ceiling. Splatoon is super accessible and everything, but at the bare minimum there's a lot of shit that happens very quickly and people lose sight of things or get caught up on things they should disengage from, there is absolutely benefit to be had from the game allowing for some spoken coordination. At the other end, people fulfilling different roles with different builds could coordinate on more complicated strategies. The simple pre-mapped barks don't give you the fidelity of communication needed to convey some of the points you occasionally want to make and they certainly don't facilitate broader strategies. I mean, but i'm saying that while also believing that Nintendo probably made the right choice by not having voice chat in the game as a matter of the intended audience and the mood the game wishes to engender, part of that being that it may not really want to be a game about precise execution on complicated team strategies. (Whether or not it actually is, and just isn't giving you the tools to do so, is perhaps something that needs to be further considered.) All that said, if i really feel like coordinating with people, i'm actually just going to set up an external voice chat anyways and play with friends. (Well... The randomized teams complicates that some, but that party matchmaking is coming!) Also, as an unrelated aside, all of the skyboxes in this game have been standing out to me as especially lively and detailed. This is such a great looking game.

It feels like Nintendo probably dropped the ball on how few rollers are available until deep into the progression. At level 14, while i have tons of snipes and machine guns, i still only have access to two rollers. (I also only have two blasters, but nobody uses the blasters. Seriously, how many of you even realized there was a fourth category of main weapons?)

I'm still bummed out about that third Chibi-Robo game never seeing a release outside of Japan, it was the only one that tried to be a real sequel to the first game. Just one of very many Nintendo published DS and Wii games that never left Japan for whatever reason. Safe bet is that this is another iterative update in the 4 line, i talked about it a bit more in the 4U thread. It probably won't be released outside of japan until well into 2016, and if it is an iterative update, it'll probably allow for a save import from 4U.

I'll correct you on one point, hiding in the ink doesn't actually seem to really affect your hitbox, it still seems to sprout upright from the spot you're hiding in just as if you were standing. You're just largely hidden and much more mobile. (I really like the dynamic this creates in multiplayer, flailing paint around a target to cut off their escape avenues and flanking opportunities to pin them down.) I touched on it in the Wii U thread, and it's continued to stand out to me the more i've played the multiplayer: My impression of Splatoon is that it's a game that takes the "fighting for ground" map control dynamics of other competitive games and makes it explicit and literal. Splatoon gives you incredibly broad and powerful traversal mechanics, but they're reined in by the fact that they only work on ground on you control. It's, for example, the most explicit and easily understood form of needing to control the rocket spawns and any advantageous sightlines in a Halo map. Simultaneously, it's also a really elegant solution for implementing consistent frontlines that ebb and flow throughout the match, much more so than games that have you simply fighting through a chain of map nodes. It's sort of terrific. I've seen "paint the ground" mechanics like this in other games, but it's never really coalesced into something special like i think this has. It's not a perfect game, there's a lot of things i think i'll probably come to nitpick more and more, but i really do think there is just such a solid foundation there and i hope Nintendo is rewarded for taking a chance on this game. Edit: I'm also going to add in that i think their implementation of motion control here is probably one of the best uses of motion control that i've seen out of Nintendo, it's such a measured and discerning application of the strengths of motion control being used almost seamlessly in conjunction with a familiar dual analog control scheme. It took like a solid day of constantly reminding myself to use the motion control to fine tune my aim, only using the stick to turn wide distances, and it just feels so good and natural now. It offers a combination of both responsiveness and precision to a degree that is wildly unfamiliar in a console shooter. Did the game need this weird ass control scheme? Probably not, it probably could have worked just as well with any number of other alternatives, but it is nevertheless there, and it's kind of great.

To be fair, i was probably going to lose that game anyways based on the minute or two i had with it, but i definitely got DC'd. Also, I just realized something neat: On the playlist screen, hit Y and you can choose to wander around empty instances of the maps available in current rotation. That's a cool way to let people familiarize themselves with the maps. Also also: When you win a string of matches, you'll notice a small rating bar fill up on the matchmaking screen. You can cash that in with Judd for extra currency, it turns out. (The cat, Judd is the cat.) It resets if you ignore it for too long, so don't. (It seems to persist for as long as the game is running, as far as i can tell.)

Does this deserve a topic? I think this deserves a topic, it's kind of overwhelmed the Wii U thread. (This generally seems to be the start of that conversation, if anybody wants to go back to it.) I think i've settled on the aerospray mg as my preferred weapon of the moment. The homing grenade is a good tool for rushing two opponents at once, killing one with the grenade and using the remaining ink to normally finish off the other, or forcing one into a distracted posture that's easier to catch off guard. The main weapon has massive paint coverage and rapid enough damage that rollers are easily defeated before they can get close, and i've been using the ink bazooka super as kind of an anti-sniper tool, attacking people who are just kind of hanging back up on ledges. (Since it fires a tall projectile that breaks apart and continues on whenever part of it impacts against a surface, the highest part of the projectile easily continues up over ledges. On the other hand, since it kind of only fires straight ahead, it's complete garbage for hitting enemies below you.)

Dammit Teg! Argh! I guess one of our threads will have to die, probably mine since yours has a punny title. There, now we don't need mine. I don't know what you're talking about. You joined a game i was in, right? Is this about that? I got DC'd in the middle of that. I've had some connection issues today, seems like. Also, i'm going to say, this game has a big problem with idlers. It seems to happen almost once every five games, and i've even had games where two people on my team are idling. Unless the two things are related. When people drop, do they still look like they're in the game? I've had matches where i'm definitely an actual man down, 3 against 4. The matchmaking is probably still normalizing for you, i would suppose? I had probably like 12/13 wins in a row before i lost my first match online.

I have been getting dropped from a bunch of games today in Splatoon, has anybody else had issues?

I think the solo game is very good, it's the thing in the game that is most stylistically in synch with Nintendo's traditional design sensibilities, it plays like a spiritual successor to Super Mario Sunshine by way of Galaxy. It also takes Splatoon's mechanics in some admirably cool directions and has some terrific boss fights. It's not as long as a Mario game though, and there are some shortcomings such as excessively repeated mini-bosses and multiplayer maps being lamely repurposed as filler levels. I can't recommend Splatoon purely as a single-player experience, the game's focus is absolutely in the multiplayer, but if a good singleplayer mode is just that little extra push you need to play a game that you know is primarily multiplayer-centric, there you have it.

If you turn down the brightness of the tablet display, it seems to dramatically improve the battery life. (That backlight is probably the primary power drain on that thing since there's likely very little else in the way of power-intensive hardware in the thing.) Splatoon maps: I dislike the skate park and arowana mall, those two maps have been very frustrating to me. They're super awkward to navigate and... I mean, well... They also just heavily favor snipers, so maybe i would like them more if i played snipe. I love a lot of the other maps though, the warehouse has a ton great sightlines and the underpass makes for a lot of really frantic chokepoints and close-range fighting. The fight for a few centralized blocks of land in the oil rig map is also super entertaining. Also, i'm sure people have realized, but some of the solo levels are based on retooled versions of multiplayer maps, several of which have not been present in matchmaking rotation yet. Nintendo did say they were going to hold back some of them for a bit, but i assumed that they would be later downloads and not just in the game and inaccessible. - I'm really torn on the supers, i've had a lot of cheap deaths to those, but i can also realize that a lot of those cheap deaths are for those people probably actually really inefficient uses of those abilities. - I continue to feel that the .52 gal is probably a touch op, especially the deco variant. (i've had games where upwards of four people were all using the .52 deco.) - You don't run into a lot of snipers, but good snipers are terrifying in this game. - In the ways the game evokes so many other shooters for me, just in bits and pieces, i feel fairly confident in saying that Nintendo has made a "real" shooter, but it's super weird playing this bright and colorful kids game and intermittently having flashbacks to playing Gears of War online. - People are definitely sleeping on the ability to teleport at any time, because in the games i've had against people who are able to effectively use that ability, i've just been demolished. It's clearly meant to be a big part of the game, beyond just teleporting out into the field after a respawn. (Also, If you see an enemy dropping spawn beacons for their team, please destroy those. Holy shit, i'm terrified of those things now.) - I feel like i'm having this weird disconnect with the wide visible spread of projectiles from the splatterguns, and seemingly needing to have a very precise aim to actually land any damaging hits. As it is, i'm not really at all clear what the mechanics of the projectiles are, if the damage is dealt separately from the visible paint projectiles as a hitscan attack or something. It's entirely possible that i'm just overthinking it though. It's probably worth making a Splatoon thread at this point. Also: Check inklings in your main hub area and order any rarity 3 items you find. The stacking benefits from gear buffs are enormous and high-rarity gear is worth pursuing as soon as possible.

Reading this was quite a roller coaster of emotions for me. Sidescrolling platformer, hey?...

Caravan quests, right? There's a prompt right on the screen that will let you swap between low and high rank quests. There are no missable quests. (There is unique gear that you can permanently lose though, mainly quest reward weapons you can only ever get once, and even that auto-block talisman you get at the start of the game, because there are no other auto-block talismans ever.) Also, if you still haven't made progress in the gathering hall quests with other people because Monster Hunter is primarily a multiplayer focused game, you're eventually going to start getting locked out of solo progression because you haven't progressed far enough in the multiplayer. On the upside, with high rank gear and a couple good palicoes, low rank multiplayer quests will be largely trivialized and easily managed solo, even despite their significantly higher level of difficulty relative to equivalent solo quests. Also, Capcom just announced Monster Hunter Cross, which is looking to be like it's probably another update to the 4-line. There's some fairly bonkers looking new special moves, there's new areas and enemies and weapons, with some of it apparently integrated from the Frontier mmo. (Which has, up until now, just kind of been a weird divergent evolution of the series, as per my understanding.) I haven't looked into it too deeply at this point, there seems to be a lot of debate as to whether it's a spin-off or a real followup, but based on what i saw, i think it's probably another iterative release of 4. It looks cool. Few things to consider: I completely understand that it will feel somewhat deflating to be mid-dive on 4U and hear of another upcoming game set for winter of this year, so keep in mind that we're a solid year behind Japan on this series because of the slow localization cycle, and if it is an iterative follow-up on 4, there will probably be a save import. (Cross is going to be a 3DS game again, and i believe there was already a save import from 4 to 4g, the latter being the japanese version of 4u.)

I have every ship unlocked in FTL, which one was giving you trouble? (Mostly out of curiosity, i've been away from the game for long enough that i'm not sure i can offer any advice.)

I feel like i've played enough of this game now to be perceptive of when my team is going to lose, and i do kind of wish voice chat was in there to push things along in the right direction. You very often run into people who are just bad at maximizing their ink coverage, they'll often try to obsessively paint in every corner of a small room, while missing an unclaimed path off to the side. Like, i get not being able to accurately shoot, that's hard in any game and this one has a weird control scheme to learn on top of that, but i can't help but be a little frustrated when a game concludes and two people on my team have contributed virtually nothing to claiming territory. The big game ender though, is when people on your team get caught up trying to track down one determined opponent who has successfully locked down a small part of the map, engaging in a lot of hit and run tactics with your team. Those situations are horrible, because long fights are essentially dead weight, and when those fights are lopsided and the other team has more guys going around painting, you are absolutely going to lose. I wish i could tell people to just disengage from fights like that. Map control is way more important than winning an individual fight. (It's funny to me that this game is ostensibly doing something different, but kind of isn't, as most good competitive games are about map control dynamics, this one just makes it super explicit.) That all said, it's just... Man... I can't hold it against Nintendo, not having voice chat was the right choice. It's obvious that this game is skewing towards a way younger audience, and you definitely don't want to expose that crowd to the incredible toxicity of competitive gaming. Other further thoughts: The progression ramp is super steep, those stacking stat buffs have a massive and noticeable impact, get high-rarity gear asap. (It is, at least, easier to do than the slow level grind, but it all honestly seems so antithetical to the game being an accessible and easily engaged experience.) Weapon balance feels all over the place for me. I've tried a ton of different unlockable weapon packages, but i've just been getting destroyed with anything other than the initial few splatterguns, it's been the difference between leading the match and falling in last place for me. I see people doing extremely well with other weapons, so perhaps it's just down to playstyle. (The .52 gal seems especially popular, if anything seems overpowered so far, there might be a case for that.) I have to keep reminding myself to use the motion control to adjust my aim, it's been another "lead the match or fall in dead last" factor for me. It's sort of a brilliant control scheme, combining the analog control to which everybody is most familiar, with carefully selected strengths of motion control. I feel like a few of the multiplayer maps are potentially duds, but on the whole, these seem like extremely solid competition-minded map designs. I like these maps a lot. I am genuinely surprised at how good the solo content is. I think i'm just on the wrong side of being able to recommend the game purely for its solo content, this is definitely still primarily a multiplayer game, but Nintendo has created a pretty terrific solo game to go with it. It's the most distinctly "Nintendo" part of the game, and quite evocative of certain 3D Mario games, specifically Galaxy and Sunshine. Thoughts on the Splatoon amiibos.

Wait, really? You can't get it by itself? That's freaking devious.

The store i bought my 3 pack from had probably like five of them out, and probably a dozen more individual splatoon figures. When i got back and started reading that they're generally proving to be very limited in availability, i very briefly contemplated heading back and grabbing another for a friend or resale. Heh. I can't say i was surprised to hear about it though, the Amiibo craze is still in effect and these ones significantly tie into Nintendo's big new game. (Also, the store i went to which is usually pretty quiet had like ten people lined up buying amiibos. This is like some 90's collector's fad shit happening here.) As an aside: If anybody's really digging Splatoon, those amiibo might be worth it. (With the usual caveat of "Don't buy amiibo if you don't also like collecting toys, the value proposition is ridiculous otherwise.") There's... I think fifteen-twenty levels on each? They remix levels from the solo game with some new rules, and the ones with the squid amiibo are the most interesting. There's a mix of different goals with the squid amiibo, but the coolest ones are time trials with unlimited use of the kraken super. If you just want cool bonus levels, the other two only ask you to complete solo levels while swapping out the single-player splattergun with a snipe or a roller. (Rather, that seems to be the case so far.) The special gear you get out of those levels appears to be of the two star rarity, so maybe don't expect to get awesome stuff you stick with for a really long time. It'll be good up front, but the progression ramp is pretty steep and better gear makes a huge difference. Basically, if you don't care about amiibos, but want to play around with the feature and don't want to miss out on Splatoon content, the squid amiibo gives you the coolest stuff.

There appears to be a crude skill-rating system that swings back and forth quite wildly after each match, so keep playing and it might normalize and put you in more appropriate matches. I had a win streak of around 11 matches before i lost my first game online, but now i feel like i'm playing against people who are probably more in my skill range, so i'm fairly certain that there is some measure of skill matching going on. I've also had multiple matches where the netcode just implodes in the final minute. I suspect some old network manipulation tricks are already in use to deny people comebacks in the turf war mode, so that sucks. Also, i'm pleased to see that it at least does the "join friends" thing like Mario Kart, so... I mean, for my purposes, i can make that work. It'll be a little troublesome to get party matches going, but it should work out. (Also, there are no private matches.) I'm also pleased to see that the character builds are somewhat reined in by packing weapons together as pre-defined and presumably carefully balanced bundles just like they were in the testfire, though i'm still concerned that the stat modifying gear equips could be a bit of a run-away issue. I'm enjoying it. I still think the core game is really solidly playable, but i still have concerns about some peripheral issues, though the game feels good enough right now. The lack of voice chat doesn't actually strike me as a huge issue, the pre-mapped character barks and the super jump feel like they're enough to coordinate with randoms. I mean, and when i play with friends, i'll probably just set up a voice chat on my computer anyways. I understand that the solo mode is quite good and quite lengthy, i want to dig into that some, i've heard that it feels like a bit of a spiritual successor to Super Mario Sunshine. If anybody wants to get together in some multiplayer matches, let me know and i'll add you on my wii u.