That's me. I jumped on the Mumble a couple of times. While totally dead when I was there, the few people there were pretty friendly.
Splatoon 1 seems to be a mess. Everyone is smurfing, everyone knows the ins and outs of every level, know the chokepoints, understand the meta far too well, use splathax, and use instant special charging hacks to spam kraken when they're outnumbered, and use infinite ink hacks to spam splatbombs and suction bombs(no it's not bomb rush most of the time). I've never personally seen anybody use the hack where it inks the entire map or the hack that lets them hit somebody from across the map, but I have seen videos of them in action. The game is an absolute mess, and I have no idea how any newcomers could enjoy this game when there exists virtually no balancing for matchmaking, whatsoever. How could there be with smurfs anyway? Levels and rank mean nothing at this point.
With that said, I'm still having a lot of fun. Despite only having played fairly casually for over a month, I fit in fairly well. I'm not the best player out there, but I'm usually a decent contributor to my team, and I'm not resorting to using brushes or Luna Blasters like the rest of the no talent scrubs fucks out there. My roommate, on the other hand, is not enjoying himself very much. He couldn't adapt to the strict learning curve. I've offered some advice to him, but it's hard for him to learn. Also, sometimes he gets some legitimate breaks that I never see in the game. For example, I watched him play today for about two hours, and he was matched with actual, real, inexperienced, low level people. I went from chaotic, bullshit, high speed, smurf having, cheating, highly meta Rainmaker to watching him play extremely low level, slow, Turf War with what I imagine is mostly children who haven't quite grasped the game yet. I had seriously wondered if we were playing the same game. It's really a matter of when you play. My roommate plays during the afternoon, when the kids are up. I tend to play extremely early in the morning, when the Japanese players are out and out for blood.
I'm still out there. I'm trying to jump on the Mumble regularly, but refused to this last weekend because I was fired from my job, and I can't stand to confront anybody right now due to the shame and confusion. Even if it's complete strangers on the internet.
Only on the inside.