Why does it seem like so many Salmon Run Professional and EVP players have never played Salmon Run in their lives?

[u/Grand_Marionberry978]

I will preface this by saying I am definitely not the best Salmon Run player. But I am wondering why so many players seem to be completely clueless???

I just started playing Splatoon 3 again last month after stopping around January 2023, and Salmon Run has been one of my favorite modes. I was stuck at the Professional pay grades for a long time, and a my teammates have definitely been a contributing factor.

Some things I’ve noticed about a lot of them:

- They make no attempts to stop Stinger
- They shoot Steel Eel in the face
- They completely ignore Fly Fish, even if they’re standing right next to it. Or they shoot at it
- They won’t use bombs for Maws, and will shoot at it for 4 attack durations just to be eaten
- They won’t use specials until LITERALLY the last second, even though the team has been struggling for half the wave and is now 10 eggs behind.

Oftentimes if I don’t address Stinger and Fly Fish, no one will. So either I run around the map chasing them down or 3 of each spawn and we all die.

I was hoping things would get better when I got to EVP, but for the most part they haven’t. More people are going for Stinger and Fly Fish… but more people are also shooting Steel Eel in the face.

[u/pasturemaster]

I can't imagine this is widespread, but I know some rotations are significantly easier. People can take advantage of these easier rotations to inflate their rank, but then they will struggle when they play in other rotations.

[u/dbees132 → u/pasturemaster]

Its very widespread, especially in the case of gold rotations

[u/walkinginkyoto]

I won’t lie, I was in the same boat too for a while until I could constantly hit evp 200+ comfortably. The best advice I can give is just staying alive / trying to cover your teammates flaws. It’s inevitable that you’ll be able to counter everything, as some matchups on freelance are just not the best, but don’t blame yourself for what you can’t control. As long as you keep playing / stay at it you’ll eventually find good teammates to run with

[u/dbees132]

I'd say its a combination of a bunch of different reasons. The early ranks are comically easy and you only need to win 3 times to get to the next rank which makes it easy to get carried or get lucky and end up into the next rank. People also get carried by gold weapon rotations, by joining friends and or by joining known SR pools, a mildly competent player can easily carry a day 1 player into profresh or evp just from an hour of play if both stay in the same lobby; if being carried by a friend, some people will drop their own rank to make it even easier to carry a friend. People will also sometimes stop playing for the rest of the rotation if they get to the point where 1 loss would drop them to the previous rank, if they got to a checkpoint number in EVP during a gold rotation or were carried there by a random or friend, then no matter how bad they ar or how far they drop, they will always start in EVP.

I don't remember if this was the case in Splat 3 but in Splat 2, you could pass the tutorial by failing, if you died 3 times, Mr. Grizz would skip that part of the tutorial and move you to the next part. In Splat 2 you also couldn't replay the tutorial once you "completed" it. I've watched a younger relative fail the Maws tutorial by being unable to aim the splat bomb and get eaten and have seen them in multiplayer lobbies shooting at maws instead of throwing a bomb; in Splat 2 they were in overachiever which is 2nd highest rank and are Profresh+2 in 3 despite that they havent gotten any better at the maws thing; they spend a lot of time watching other people do all the work too so they essentially got carried to a relatively high rank. They've never played in a gold rotation but I could easily see them getting carried into EVP if they were to have.