Splatfest: Naughty Villainy RISING!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Looks like the so-called good guys keep losin'.

I think it's about time to observe the beginning of a trend. Sure, we only have two data points and you need three to become a trend, but who knows if there ever will be a third data point. New content for Splatoon will stop come January 2016 (so really soon) according to an interview with some Splatoon developers done by Game Informer. However, producer Hisashi Nogami specifically points out that Splatfests will still continue after that point. Still, we can surmise that they won't go on forever, and for whatever reason Japan is now repeating their own Splatfests. Which is even worse than Europe just taking America's.

Anyway, what I'm talkin' 'bout is this: In the Team Autobots vs. Team Decepticons Splatfest (which KoopaTV was solidly on the side of Team Decepticons), Team Decepticons won easily.

Team Decepticons had 42% popularity, but had 56% of the wins.

Meanwhile, we just had the Naughty vs. Nice Splatfest, and I was solidly on Team Naughty. The results?

Strangely symmetrical.

Team Naughty had 41% popularity, and 59% of the wins.

What happened in the almost four months since those two data points? Team Naughty was 1% less popular than Team Decepticons, and got 3% more wins. Assuming the total player count is static is probably a bad idea, so we'll say a slightly disproportionate amount of the new Splatoon purchases in that time (we'll say fueled by the brilliant Black Friday deal) think being nice is better. And those new purchasers disproportionately suck, which makes sense because they have much less experience. I'm assuming that no one quit Splatoon, or if they did it'd be proportionally.

Obviously the basis of where I'm going with this is that a very high % of the people who would join Team Decepticons (which drew its support from being a collection of villains) would later join Team Naughty (which drew its support from being opposed to niceness). Team Autobots, of course, were a bunch of heroic goodie-goodies. And Team Nice was all about being a goodie-goodie. You could say a % of Autobots would later join Team Naughty because they were the same shirt colour and you might really like red pink, but since popularity went down, I doubt that was significant. There's the fact that Marie supported Decepticons and Callie supported Naughty, but contrary to some in the Splatoon community, I really think picking based on your favourite squid sister is also a negligible factor.

I don't think you can seriously dispute that the fanbase for Decepticons and Autobots would obviously flow directly to Naughty and Nice. And there appears to be no evidence that this coalition of anti-civilised-society folks is any closer to being defeated, especially because they—we—are only widening our dominance. Having more recruits is only weakening the nice cause, which is a solid reason for why quality beats quantity. I also said in that article that evil will eventually lose to good. Which is why I tried so hard last week to say that Naughty isn't evil. And if Team Naughty's fanbase isn't evil, and it's equivalent to Team Decepticons, then through that logic, Team Decepticons ain't evil either.

Guess our anti-society coalition ain't gonna lose! I wouldn't have it any other way.

Of course, this means that there will be a bandwagon. More and more people will see the coalition win, and they'll join it themselves. While that might dilute the quality, it will mean that more and more people will believe in the values of tearing apart the current societal order. And those are the people I really like, anyway. (Plus, they're more likely to be KoopaTV readers!) Apparently Splatoon happens to be ripe for these kinds of folk to begin with.

Thanks for creating a platform to encourage my way of thinking, Nintendo!
 

Ludwig wants to topple society, unless that society is Koopa Kingdom's. In that case, he's the most pro-society status quo guy you can find. Don't point out this hypocrisy, please! In the meantime, join the next incarnation of Autobots vs. Decepticons, and Naughty vs. Nice!