I've only played the first game and am curious if the following has changed. If a player disconnects and the lobby is not full, they are removed from the lobby (in any case I've seen the lobbies get smaller). If a player disconnects before the match has started on the pan-out of the spawn point you see the disconnected players instantly die before the match begins and the map shows their death point as the spawn point (these matches usually take a while to load). If they disconnect during a match they instantly die and death point is also the spawn point (which otherwise makes no sense due to the barrier surrounding it).
I'm one of the afk'ers and it ain't my shit. I've tried to play at least 10 matches tonight and I've only completed two. All the rest of them I'm been disconnected. Immediately when the "Connection is Unstable" message pops up, I hit the home button and I usually have 2 bars. Just tonight after these baffling disconnects I went and played both MK8 and ARMS. Both ran perfectly online for me.
Nintendo needs to do something about Splatoon 2.
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If this is the case, I'm envious. Because I remember the first week of Splatoon 1's launch was, for me, nothing but frustration with "A Connection Error has Occurred". Even after it the initial burst of popularity died down, connection errors and lag were regular occurrences, especially in non-Splatfest Turf War since it was a truly global matchmaking lobby.
The first splatoon did initially have problems of ink and players sometimes being very laggy. I'm talking ink not updating for 10 seconds, being able to unload of whole tank into an enemy and them not being splatted, taking cover and spontaneously dying from a corpse.
They released an update that fixed that at the cost of stricter bandwidth requirements which kicked me out of the game as my internet at the time was not good enough. I'm fine with that. What I was not fine with was Nintendo having no useful information regarding this for several months (not even in their fairly extensive update notes for the game) and never providing a simple stress test.
I'm guessing the same is true here and this makes me wonder if Splatoon 2 upped the tickrate* (a few testfire users were critical of the tickrate being 15). Though splatoon tracking more than your average fps due to the ink probably causes problems too.
That basically gets down to why a 1 on 1 fighting game can work as can a 12 player racer (if you ignore occasional gremlins like teleporting cars and players taking time to react from shells hitting them) while an 8 player shooter crashes and burns.
*-The amount of times the game gets info from the server. Splatoon 1 was 30 (there were some issues seen with this). Overwatch used to be 20 but it is now 60 (which most fps are).