I had 21 splats yesterday in a match my team couldn't push the rainmaker past the RM spawn zone. This video title feels way too relevant 😂.

Personal anecdote, but one medal related thing that I think has helped me improve is that I noticed that I very commonly would get the "#1 Popular Target" medal. It made me consider that I might be playing too actively and too much on the center line of the stage rather than taking off angles. I think being aware of certain trends in your own gameplay is useful so you can recognize and potentially break down habits, and medals sometimes can help show you these.

I'm really concerned if your team can't win with 88 splats on one player 😭 most of their team is getting wiped every 10 seconds

I'm sorry, but the philisophical questions of "Why do you Play Splatoon? How does it make you happy? Do these numbers match up with your reasoning?" Followed by the cheery outro music was funny as hell

Video suddenly became deep for the last 30 seconds

Some of my best K/D games as a backline are ones where we're in a constant state of losing and it's all I can do to just keep us from getting KO'd. On the one hand, it's good that I'm able to keep our team from getting knocked out. On the other, it's not great that we can't seem to transition from defense to neutral, or neutral to offense. Similarly, I've had games where I just wind up the designated objective runner, and that can increase my death rate in a game especially if I need to be aggressive to retake a lead. Sometimes those deaths are worth the extra points. Other times, they lead to a counterpush that wins the game. Then there's timing. You might have an amazing 4 minutes where you go like 20-2, but then the opponent wins because in the last minute or in overtime you go 0-4. The resulting 20-6 looks great on paper but the actual game shows a rather alarming collapse under pressure...

In other words, raw K/D means very little in the end...Some kills can be low value, and some deaths can be high value.

2 things that weren't mentioned but are also good to consider:
1. You may be the #1 player in the whole match, but the other team might have the #2,3,4,5 players in the match.
2. You also have to acknowledge when, in the match, the paint & splats were scored. If you got 10 Splats and 1000p of ink in the first two minutes, that's good, but you might have struggled in the latter part of the match.

For me the end screen is about expectations. In general, I feel that at the end of a game you should know what to you expect to see even if you don't like it. As Gem noted, there are a lot of reasons why big number doesn't equate to a win, but if I see a number I don't expect (big or small) on an end screen, that tells me to look into why my expectation doesn't meet reality.

From my more casual perspective, but who's still played the game a LOT, I think sometimes, it just doesn't work out. You've done your utmost, and it just wasn't enough.
Maybe it means you still have some way to go, but there's always quite a lot that is out of your hands. Your teammates' skills and decisions, the enemy's plays and reactions, the game lagging, a simple flick of the aim that can make a pivotal suction bomb stick itself on your cover instead. It just happens, even to the best of the best.
I agree with the end message. Find the reason why you have fun, and go from there. Don't give up, or move to something else, it's all up to you. Just don't stop trying.

Eyy thank you for answering the question. And I completely agree with the game theory section. I thought about going back and editing my comment about saying that its likely due to passive non objective focused play

Thank you. Yeah, this is basically what I was thinking about the medals. Probably can't completely be ignored but has to be contextualized. Good to have confirmation.
Also, yeah I'm not really trying to get better at PvP and I already know that, I was still wondering about the medals though, since I had a discussion about it with someone.

Well maybe I'm trying to improve very slightly by learning new things but I already knew that I don't really want to practice toward a certain goal. So I'm really these small things out of interest/curiosity, rather than actually trying to get stronger.

This was ridiculously timely,

I usually am not the person to blame my teammates, but after losing 4 series in clams in a row with me playing well, I began to feel like it was always on my teammates. But today I had a realization that I need to work with my team better, and watch what they're doing, and I am consistently able to help my teammates win fights and I am thinking more about the fights I am taking, as well as my positioning, and suddenly I win a series!

So that was a very long winded way of saying that this video has helped my mindset a whole lot.

Thanks Gem!

I just wanna say splatoon is a TEAM GAME no one should have to carry the whole game WORK TOGETHER

While I have many games where I am statistically the best, perhaps more than the inverse, I remember there are plenty of games where I don't get many or any splats, but say the objective like a Rainmaker is available, I take it and we take the lead despite not adding to my total and I feel like a sneaky little squid breaking the defense. This can perhaps apply to Clam Blitz, too, less so, and basically any mode where a late game push is in part contributed by someone who may have lacking splat stats, but comes through in the clutch. I think Gem had a short video on how even a player with a weapon like a brush at the end of the game can push people back without splatting anyone.

Everage 5.0 vshot endscreen in the thumbnail

Some games in solo just aren't winnable sometimes and it's also a learning experience to accept that. Sometimes no matter how well you shark or flank a blaster they will immediately direct you without fail. Sometimes a weapon on your team is just getting hard countered by everything on the other team. And sometimes the netcode can give an aoe weapon double its blast radius.
You should always try your best but sometimes it's fine to accept that things just happen.

even more about the medals, sometimes what's good and what's bad actually depends on the kit you're running. If you're running wiper you want to go in deep and get a lot of splats, and likely get splatted yourself, so most overall splats and popular target are typically good medals to get. if you're running charger, tho, those 2 r typically a sign of pretty bad positioning and not focusing on the actual objective you should be defending

i'm new, been playing turf war for like 3 months now and just started anarchy battles recently, your videos are really nice to watch and it really helps. You also have a great teaching sense.

I recall one of your earlier videos where you mentioned that each battle is a puzzle to solve. They really are. Splatoon is such a dynamic game, and end-of-match numbers really won't tell the whole story; they can only contextualize to an extent. Getting splatted 10 times as an anchor is a lot worse than as a slayer running QR, for example.

I love when squid school is all happy go lucky with the video and randomly just becomes deep and poetic in a random 30 seconds