art credit: aqua
an attempt to explain my approach to mentality in competitive Splatoon by zyf
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bsky: @zyfetc.bsky.social discord: @zyf_ twitter (inactive): @zyfetc
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last updated June 25, 2025
I received a question recently asking me for tips on improving mentality, and I wasn’t sure how to give a concise answer. It’s an essential early part of my layers of Splatoon skill, but I’ve never had any success truly changing someone’s mentality, other than small adjustments for teammates who were already most of the way there and who I played with for years.
As such, I’ve never really bothered to write down or explain my perspective on the mentality I think is needed to truly scale the mountain, or even just have the right mentality toward improvement needed to reach full potential (even if, due to external factors, you don’t think you’ll ever reach the top of the scene).
Given that I've never felt very effective in directly changing mentality, the best I can think to do is simply try to explain the full scope, origins, and reasons for my competitive mentality from the ground up. Hopefully, then, you may be inspired to adopt it if it makes sense for you.
As a reminder, this is a mentality that I think suits the goal of becoming as good at Splatoon as possible, where "good"-ness is measured by the ability to win serious, organized competitive matches consistently. If you seek to reach the top of the scene, I believe this is the healthiest and most likely to succeed approach; if you're more in the game for the social and fun aspects, this may not fully apply to you, though I find that it helps make the game more fun, so perhaps there is still something you can take away. In any case, without further ado: here's an attempt at explaining my approach to competitive Splatoon.
Toward the beginning of my exposure to Splatoon, before I had even begun thinking about playing competitively myself, I was fortunately introduced to David Sirlin's e-book "Playing To Win." it has definitely made its rounds in competitive gaming circles, but I mention it here because I think it is well-articulated and foundational to my perspective on competing in general.
In his most well-known chapter, "Introducing... the Scrub," he argues that many players fundamentally ruin their chance of ever being good by creating self-imposed rules that have nothing to do with playing to win. In summary, no strategy is too lame, no tactic too boring, for the true competitor to use, because the only thing that matters is pursuing the win. If it's the most reliable way of winning, getting the rainmaker past the checkpoint and then camping mine for 4 minutes with bombs and specials is based. If it makes pushes reliable, chaining 2 crab users back and forth infinitely is based. There is no such thing as too "lame" or too "meta" or too anything else. All that matters is trying at full-strength to win.
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Small caveat: by full-strength, I refer to things that are tournament-legal. Cheating, alting, and playing with formally-banned players are obviously not cool. Abusing the rules (e.g. intentionally disconnecting within the allowed DC period, trying to time out a set, etc.) is a bit cringe but in my mind is an issue with the tournament rules and not the players; rule-booking people legitimately is perfectly fine to me. Things like avoiding scrims to prevent your opponents from practicing or sandbagging to provide false information are not things I would do personally, but I have no formal problem with others doing it.
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As an example, I think Hagglefish zones is a terribly boring map, as it can be rather hard to force through or stop the opponents’ plan. However, if needed, I am more than happy to simply sit on the zone and paint it endlessly until the enemy forces me to do something else, and I have certainly had games where most of my POV just consists of sitting top left, holding ZR, and painting the zone.
Hearing this as an initial section may seem jarring to some, given that my team and I run a non-meta strategy that is arguably sub-optimal (we don’t use cooler). However, we do this not because we want to “push” the strategy but rather because we simply believe it currently gives us the best path to winning long-term.
To keep a long story short, the composition arises because to me, mentality was the first criterion in selecting teammates, and our standards are rather high; furthermore, we have a weird scheduling situation that reduced our options. The team we ended up with just so happened to function best without cooler, based on the level of experience we had on different weapons. We have maintained our course rather than switching because we believe that mastering in-game decision-making and building deep weapon knowledge takes precedence over (and is harder to achieve than) using the best composition for a given patch, as swapping would mean we’d have to spend time learning weapons rather than understanding the game better.
We fully expect that playing more to the meta is the right decision at some point, given that we are good enough to switch weapons. “Good enough” would mean that the upgrade in composition is worth the hit in individual weapon mastery; it’s just that currently, we believe that trade-off is not yet worth it.
However, in some sense, I used to take this too far. When I started in comp, I purposely chose to play “easy” weapons so that I could focus on shot-calling for my team; I think this held me back for a long time. That being said, I had no desire or belief that I could reach anywhere near the top of the mountain back then, so I was fine being mechanically limited. My perspective nowadays has shifted, but I just include this remark for those who might think similarly, as a warning that if you want to go all the way, at some point you can’t be lazy with your movement and aim.
Before I formed HDFG in 2020, I poked around in the competitive scene a fair bit—trying my hand at coaching, subbing for scrims, and playing in squid colosseum and semi-competitive PBs. I can say beyond a doubt that I was clueless back then, and while I don’t remember much, I do remember regularly thinking I was losing because of aim when in hindsight, it was my decisions that were terrible.
By the time HDFG was formed, though, I think I understood that understanding the real reasons for losses or failures is critical for both growth and sanity. By growth, I refer to my natural conclusion that the most effective way to improve is to get better at the things I know are actively harming me. By sanity, I mean that in my experience, diagnosing why you actually lost prevents a whole host of detrimental behaviors: incorrectly blaming teammates (which can lead to team squabbles), feeling hopeless that you are doomed to be bad/stuck in a rut, or feeling helpless that here was no way you could have won. The words “we’ll look at it together later” have nipped the bud of many arguments internally at HDFG, and every time I’ve gotten a vague feeling of helplessness after a tournament, reviewing to understand what actually happened has always renewed me: there’s always been a clear, straightforward path to getting better and winning more. In many ways, it’s like getting a medical diagnosis: it doesn’t fix the problem directly, but it sure does help bring peace of mind.
Thus, I firmly believe that having the desire and ability to gather high-quality information is a critical step in reflection and growth. In my case, before I truly knew all the other aspects of mental it takes to become your/the best, I had a natural curiosity for understanding how the game worked. However, in hindsight, I can state with great confidence that my information was not very “high-quality”—especially at the beginning, I was missing the actual problems with my or my team’s play, at least partially because low-level play is so chaotic that you end up getting away with a lot of terrible choices, and your execution is so unreliable/imprecise that good decisions may appear bad.
As a result, at some point, I think it is much more efficient and reliable to reach out to people with a better understanding than you. In my case, I got a ton of help by pestering FLC over the years. (To anyone reading this, I invite you to reach out to me directly with such enquiries, either in DMs or the general QnA thread pinned to my bsky.) Personally, my trust in someone’s advice is only as good as either their level in competitive, or the level of the best people they’ve meaningfully coached—I have no logical reason to believe someone until they can prove their mettle. (For reference, while I don’t know the details, I do know FLC provided coaching for FTWin that directly helped them become the FTWin we know.)
FLC shaped my perspective on this game in a lot of ways (including the core ideas that ultimately led to the big doc series I wrote about improvement), but here’s just one example of him correcting my perspective (note that this is from Splatoon 2):
