So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Well, this is hard. Basically I'm here, and I'm not. The moment Salmon Run: Next Wave was announced, I got the idea to put a hard stop at the end of March and then take my time with enjoying some other games (a lot of them, ideally but also impossibly lol) until Splatoon 3 releases. The closer I got to this date, the less I actually wanted to stop. I'm still going to, it's the right decision and how I'm feeling about it is secondary. Every previous time I've taken a break from Salmon Run, it was a consequence of some major setbacks that I needed to mentally recover from. This time, it's the polar opposite. While there is still a lot of room for improvement (there almost always is, no matter how good you are), I can say with confidence that I'm leaving at my :peek:, I mean peak. Sounds like the dumbest idea to leave exactly when you're better than you've ever been but yeah, the decision has been made a while ago and no result in the world would change it, because it's just kinda not worth, unfortunately. Splatoon 2 is on its last legs and while I would certainly have unfinished business, it's not the kind of unfinished business you finish easily or quickly. It's just better value to have a go at a few other things in the memetime and then just do another derust week or three shortly before Splatoon 3 releases, because nothing sounds more exciting than starting fresh into the new game while already being the master over all of my actions.

This will already be wordy no matter what, so I'll spare you of a retrospective of the last 5 years. It's rather boring anyway. And it's readily available just fine on my YouTube. Go subscribe to youtube.com/c/Dreykopff by the way, I will be uploading a lot more fish game content in the next weeks. That being said, I will also leave out a summary of my last 2 rotations. They have been absolutely fantastic, and the yard rotation with 16 hours worth of overfishing was just my favorite and best rotation of all time, full stop. Little fun fact about it that won't be in the video: I've slept for less than 4 hours total between the start and the end of it. I have no idea how that didn't completely massacre my gameplay by the second day, especially with it being the first marathon of that kind that I've ever done. I was just running on disgusting energy drinks and dumb snacks to grab while gaming, that is all, and that made it so I couldn't even sleep at night. Well, and I guess I also had my stream's mic off the whole time to save some additional fraction of brainpower. It was a blast, but it's absolutely not sustainable for future rotations, haha.

I've always touched on Freelance as well during those rants, so I will do it again here, just shorter. It has been fun too, I guess, but I'm just so disconnected from it, it's really whatever. A year ago, I would 10/10 most rotations and get most of my best 999 runs too, but now I'm just inconsistent as fuck -- no day is the same as the next, I'm not kidding. Just to give you an example, I 10/10'd the Dynamo Grounds (but with a high death average from 2 pretty chaotic games in it), and then I lost my farmyard run as early as in the third game on a normal tide day. Both of these should just never happen, but things just are as random as that for me right now, haha. All in all, I'm definitely playing better at overfishing than ever before, but nothing of that translated to Freelance, where it appears that I've been instead regressing. I guess that can be considered a natural result when thinking of Freelance strictly as a means to up my rank before sessions so we get instant HLM, but yeah, doesn't look great, haha. Here's something I wish Next Wave does for us: let us just select the difficulty or make a permanent max rank of some kind so that we can always play HLM with our squads, no rankup chores needed. There happen to be a number of offputting things around overfishing for sure, and the thing with the fucking rank requirement that takes over an hour per rotation for a full squad is easily the biggest one. I would happily pay for a second subscription of Nintendo Switch Online if they gave us a better ranking system so I would have one account for squads and another account for pure Freelance, both never getting in each other's ways again.

Let's talk unfinished business. While some PBs would be improvable, and might actually be improved in a later derust week if I'm really lucky with everything, it's not at all something I ever want to focus on at this point. Instead, there are two other big challenges looking to be solved: general positioning in pretty much all waves dependent of weapon, and all things rush.

Positioning, as I see it, is more or less 90% to ultimate mastery. Movement, managing your ink well and all that stuff is obviously simpler, you learn all of that eventually from playing thousands of shifts. That should be true for positioning as well, but it's just so generally unintuitive and non-linear, you don't always get immediate feedback when your positoning is actually bad, and thus you build bad habits over the years that are pretty hard to get rid of. I may or may not be getting it down faster in Splatoon 3, I have no idea. As of now, it's pretty weak at times. The reviews of my footage that sev initiated the other day have once again shown that repertoire is still pretty lacking when it comes to taking optimal positions. It's a very complex topic, and it's absolutely vital because only with the best positioning you can make the best plays, have the best awareness and everything else.

Rush is a hard wave, probably the hardest wave for most players, really. Desync memes can throw you off a lot, game situations can change drastically in a matter of split seconds, and there's also a lot of stuff you can do inherently wrong because again there isn't often good intuitive feedback as games play out. Rush has always been a big weak point of mine. When I tried to improve at it last year, I think I made the mistake of wanting to do too many things at once. It is of course ideal to know every single spawn direction the moment it appears, while also being immediately there if my weapon wants me to be there. That is a fucking lot to take in, and definitely not at all a good starting point. It did not help my gameplay at all trying to do too many things at once. It should really be done the other way around -- work with good positioning and teammate awareness, play what you can play cleanly without demand for omniscience and perfect timeliness, and just from that eventually the missing pieces will be found naturally. So, what I now did in my preparation of farmyard, is different: I mentally flowcharted the whole thing out. Unfortunately can't present you an actual diagram or whatever because it would be its own challenge to make a good one, so text will have to do. My core idea is to just do a thing that I'm either good at with my weapon (filtering with a blaster, running eggs with a charger, catching stragglers with a roller etc.), do that for as long as I can do it and while doing it read and constantly re-evaluate the game state. Starting with filtering, there only needs to be 1 or at most 2 filters at any given time. If I see someone else filtering, my job isn't to filter as well but to just catch what they miss, kill Goldies, run eggs or whatever. So far, so simple. Eventually, there will be an aggro change and possibly a spawn change coming with it. Knowing the times helps (and I'm using the timer when I can afford to move an eye over to it, which I guess isn't always, just when I'm on autopilot) but is actually not even necessary, as it turns out. It's necessary mostly for the filter because the filter needs to retreat from their aggressive positioning before the glowflies have a chance to flip onto them, but then again, half of it can be done by pure estimation of how long you've been sitting out there. For everyone else, it actually suffices to pay attention to the glowflies. It can be hard to see who gets them when players are too huddled together (try to not do that, shots will be body-blocked), but the dissolution and reassembly of the glowflies is easy enough to see and that's the main cue you need to go get a quick view of the map. The filter retreat is a critical time for the players behind to catch even more missed enemies, but also identify the full details of the next cycle, because they will have it easier to figure them out simply due to not being fire/camera-locked forward. So, let's say there is a new spawn direction coming, and what that then means is that the new filter will likely be a different player -- one who has faster immediate access and a mostly unclaimed ink tank. That way, the old filter can happily stay on the remnants of the old direction and once that's done change to a different role. Repeat that cycle until the wave ends, spread out specials for best value and there you go, that is a cleanly played rush. Now, about the rushes I actually played on yard...mixed experience, most of them were still bad. Even with that flowchart in mind, there are still many things happening very fast and it still doesn't save me from putting myself in bad and vulnerable positions. Teammate deaths turn into chain reactions more than anything else because no one really wants to expect teammate deaths. That has been a remaining problem for me, along with occasional bad ink management on filtering. But then, as chance would have it, I also got that 74 NT rush (an excellent score!) with E-Liter (possibly the worst weapon for rush in the whole game mode, lol), which I've made plenty memes out of at this point, because there's just not much you can fuck up when you can't even do much in the first place. Thanks for carry, teammates with the 3 real weapons!

And that is really all I have to say here. Again, go hit that YouTube button, I'll be uploading the rest there. I'm finishing this piece with a plain old summary of my likely final overfishing PBs and world-record involvements. For the unrestricted full-game category, I'm putting my best 3 scores to the extent that I can remember them. Pluses indicate I don't know the exact number but it's somewhere in that ballpark and I'd probably have more of them in 4th, 5th and so on, just not a thing I'm normally tracking.


SPAWNING GROUNDS:
~ 179, 170+, 170+ (all golden: 196)
~ no night: 172, 171, 160+
~ current record: 73 HT seeking all normal

MAROONER'S BAY:
~ 170, 170, 160+ (all golden: 178)
~ no night: 147, 140+, 140+ (150s only with Cohock Charge as only night, never lucky!)
~ current record: 86 LT fog all golden

LOST OUTPOST:
~ 190, 180+, 170+
~ no night: 162, 150+, 150+
~ former record: 67 NT rush all normal (now 72)

SALMONID SMOKEYARD:
~ 205, 195, 189 (all from this one rotation)
~ before this rotation: 185, 179, 179 (all golden: 189)
~ no night: 175, 172, 160+
~ current record: 75 NT Grillers all green
~ former record: 81 HT rush all golden (now 87)

RUINS OF ARK POLARIS:
~ 205, 204, 190
~ no night: 173, 169, 160+ (all golden: 185)
~ current record: 72 HT day all golden
~ former records: 185 no night all golden (now 195), 70 HT day all normal (now 72)


Once again thank you to everyone for the fun games and the experience and everything else. No names, would inevitably forget people or whatever. You know who you are. I will probably still be staying around in Discords and streams for a while, rooting for everyone and answering questions, on the odd and rare occasions people would ask me instead of someone better, just because I'm finding it so hard to fully leave so fast. I love this game and its community! I will be seeing you all again in the Next Wave!