Nintendo has launched Splatoon 3’s Tournament Manager feature, and it’s quite a doozy.
As shared by OatmealDome on Twitter, erstwhile tournament organizers can access the feature using Splatnet 3 on their smartphones and tablets, or they can use a web browser link. As explained in Nintendo’s official website, though, even if you don’t have the Splatnet 3 app, you need to own Splatoon 3, with online play save data, a Switch Online membership, and the Switch Online mobile app.
That’s certainly a lot of hoops, but it has all been set up in such a way that you can organize tournaments without the technical knowledge that the whiz kids needed to set up those Counter-Strike LAN sessions from twenty years ago.
More interestingly, it seems that the limit Nintendo has placed for participants in these tournaments is 512 teams. 512! And given that teams can have as much as four players in it, you can be looking at giant online events where you have over 2,000 players participating.
If you are audacious enough to want to go even beyond the community tournament guidelines, you will have to contact Nintendo and acquire a license number.
As for the tournaments themselves, you currently only get to choose between a round robin format or an elimination tournament. There seems to be enough modifiers in the elimination ruleset so that TOs can choose to shorten the event, or give the players as many chances as they want, as it suits them for the moment.
As for the round robin format, named in the app as League, teams play each other in turns. The order of their matches is determined using this stacked ranking:
Matches Won > Battles Won > Battles Lost > Head-to-Head Matchup > Registration Date (Entry Number)
Thankfully, League will have ten teams participating at maximum.
Rather than assigning specific Switch accounts to be participants in these tournaments, the TOs will get a shareable online link after going through the tournament creation process. It will then be up to them to share those links around the players.
There are other safeguards to ensure uninvited players just come rushing in. For example, each players has to register to a specific team. Furthermore, the team captains will have to confirm their teams are ready before they start playing.
It’s all very exciting to learn about, but we have yet to see how Nintendo’s often maligned online systems stand up to the challenges of hosting these tournaments. We look forward to learning about the tourneys that the community comes up with, as well as if Nintendo can add more tournament types and options in the future.
