TO Life: Organising Ad-Hoc Pick-Up Teams
I run casual LANs for my local Splatoon community, where people can just rock up on the day and I put them into pick-up teams. Rather than just assign teams randomly, I usually take 20-30 minutes to try to make semi-balanced teams. This post gives an in-depth explanation of why and how I do this.
This post is very much aimed at tournament organisers (TOs) and LAN organisers, and gets rather technical, for lack of a better word. That said, if you’re curious about the kind of insanity TOs get up to, you might find this interesting.
This is also just my way of doing ad-hoc pick-up team formation. I’m sure there are many others, and I’m sure some of them work better. I’m posting this because I couldn’t find anything similar when I first started running LANs, and I hope it might help someone who is in the same position I was in back then.
A quick note:
I have a bad habit of saying “quadrant” when I mean “quartile”. I’ve used quadrant in this post for now, but if you want to look up the mathematical concept this is based on, you’ll want to look up quartiles instead. Maybe one day I’ll switch all the “quadrant” references to “quartile”…
About Sunshine Squids
The Splatoon community run by Jim, Phil and myself is called Sunshine Squids. It is a community for Splatoon players in Queensland, Australia and at the time of writing has over 100 Queensland-based members. We run meetups every few weeks, with a mix of Splatoon LANs and casual hangouts.
Because we get a mix of competitive and casual players attending the LANs, I don’t tend to let people sign up in teams beforehand. Rather, everyone signs up individually on the day and I put them into ad-hoc pick-up teams. This helps level the playing field, allows us to avoid having overly-stacked teams and ensures no one gets left out. It is also more friendly to our newer and more casual players since it allows them to just rock up without having to find a team beforehand.
I used to ask players to register for a LAN beforehand using a Google Form, but that came with many problems. One problem was that there were always people who would either register and not turn up, or turn up without registering. Since we’re more about building a community than being competitive, requiring formal registration also gave the wrong impression since it made the LANs seem very competitive and serious. This sometimes scared off some of the casual players who wanted to attend LANs just to hang out or disappointed the very competitive players who were expecting something different.
Therefore, we stopped using pre-registration and now just hand around a clipboard with a registration sheet at the start of the LAN. I don’t have proper statistics, but I believe this has indeed increased the number of casual and new players who turn up at our LANs.
Player Information
Our registration sheet asks for the following information:
Level
This is probably the least useful piece of information I ask for, and I don’t mind if players give approximate answers. However, I do find that a player’s level can be a good indication of how well they can adjust to different teams and situations, due to having played the game more.
I don’t use a player’s level for deciding how “good” they might be though — I use ranks (and personal knowledge) for that.
Weapons
Where possible, I try to give each team a good mix of short- and long-range weapons, and painting and slaying ability. In order to do that, knowing what weapons people play (at least generally) is vital.
Ranks
This is my main measure of how “good” a player is at the game. Though from knowing most of the regulars fairly well, I also who is better than their ranks (mostly just because they play more turf, league or Salmon Run than ranked). This is where I start when making teams, as I’ll explain below.
Anyone they would like to be in a team with
This is an odd one because I don’t always use this information. The main problem is that the players who answer this question are usually the higher-ranked players and giving them the teammates they want often stacks the teams too much.
In comparison, I do try to give new attendees their preferred teammates, since I believe that helps them enjoy their first few LANs (provided it doesn’t hurt the team composition too much and therefore handicap them).
Generally, though, I try to alternate this each LAN — one LAN I’ll give people one or two of the teammates they ask for, and the next LAN I’ll mostly ignore it, especially for whoever won the last LAN. This seems to keep people happy, but also means the teams are different enough each time that it keeps things interesting.
Forming Teams
I think how I make teams is roughly based on something a friend once called “the quadrant method”. The basic idea is that if you want to make teams of four that are approximately equal in skill, you should order the players by skill then divide the list into four “quadrants” (a quarter of the list, from top to bottom), and put one person from each quadrant on each team.
Of course, judging skill levels in Splatoon is hard, and it isn’t everything when it comes to team composition. Plus, in practice, creating teams is quite a bit harder than just that. That’s why I ask for so much information.
When we did pre-registration via a Google Form, having all the responses in a spreadsheet made this quite easy since I was able to sort the data by various things. These days, since we use a paper sign-up sheet, I take a couple of highlighters with me.
One bonus of the sign-up sheet is that people tend to list fewer weapons because of having to write them out and usually list them in order of preference and/or skill level. When I used a Google Form the weapons question asked players to checkboxes for weapon categories (e.g. “short-range shooters). This meant that the responses would just list a bunch of weapon categories in the order they were in the form. Therefore, if you use a form of some kind for this I would recommend either allowing players to type in their weapons, or list weapon categories as I did but ask them to number them by preference, not just checkboxes. The extra information about weapons can be very helpful when composing teams.
To demonstrate how I form the teams, I’ll be stepping through my whole process using registration data from a past LAN — completely anonymised of course.
Note that this is example ignores requested teammates and my personal knowledge of the players, which I would usually use for certain decisions.
General Rules for Team Compositions
First, here’s the team composition rules I try to follow when making teams:
- Each team should have as close to a dedicated short-range shooter as I can give them.
- Each team preferably has at most one splatling or charger player.
- Slosher, brella, brush and roller players should be spread between the teams as much as possible.
Deciding the Quadrants
Making teams just by looking at weapons doesn’t work though. Most of it is actually based on ranks — hence the quadrant system.

The first thing I do is find the x top-ranked players, where x is the number of teams I’m making. In the example above this worked out well, because I needed 5 teams and there were 5 players with at least three X ranks. However, when there are too few or too many players of equally high skill, I start looking at other options like:
- If there are one less than x X ranks, I’ll give one team two S+ players instead. Though not necessarily the top two S+ players, if I think that might stack the teams too much. More on that below.
- If there are too many X ranks, I’ll start pairing the players with most and least X ranks (e.g. I would pair someone with 1 X rank with someone with 4 X ranks). The teams without an X rank pair would get higher-ranked players for the rest of their team (e.g. an S+ for the second person in the team, where the X rank pair would get an S or A player).
Pairing high ranked players like this works well for us because of the rank distribution amongst the players who attend our LANs. It might help to see it like this:

Though this data is only from one LAN, this is a fairly typical distribution. Half the players have mostly S+ or higher ranks, skewed towards X rank. Half the players are in the C-S ranks range, though half of these players have mostly A ranks, and half have mostly B ranks. This means that there is a clear divide between the top two quadrants and the bottom two quadrants. There is also a fairly clear divide between quadrants 3 and 4.
Second Quadrants
From there, I look at the second quadrant.

This is also where weapons and knowledge about the players come into play.
I generally start with the most “inflexible” players — that is, the players who list the least weapons.
I started with the first quadrant charger player (team 2) since I wanted to pair them with a short-range player, preferably a shooter player if possible. I tentatively chose the short-range shooters, blasters and sloshes player as the easy choice. However, if I had hit problems later I probably would have looked to this pair first to switch someone out, as short-range players like this
Next, I looked at the second quadrant splatling player, for similar reasons. I didn’t want to put them on teams 2 or 4 because that would create a team would have two splatling or charger players. Since I don’t have information about their playstyle, I decided to pair them with a flexible player. The first quadrant team 5 member does list splatlings and chargers as weapons, but they have also listed everything else, so I figured that pairing these two players would be fine.
After that, I looked at the first quadrant “brushes and/or rollers” player (team 3). Since they only list one weapon class, I decided to pair them with another flex player from the second quadrant.
That left teams 1 and 4, which were already assigned a sloshers, brushes and/or rollers player and long-range shooters and chargers player respectively. One of the remaining players in the second quadrant is a brushes and/or rollers player as well, so I paired them with the first quadrant long-range player. That just left the remaining two, which worked out decently with a long-range player paired with a fairly flexible player with some long-range options.
At this point, I checked the teams for problems, particularly regarding ranks. And quickly noticed that I had paired the lowest-ranked players in the first and second quadrants together to make team 4. This isn’t ideal, so I consider ways I could switch the pairs around to fix this.
- Team 1 has the highest-ranked second quadrant player, but switching the team 1 and 4 pairs would create a team with too much reliance on brushes and/or rollers.
- Same problem for switching up teams 3 and 4.
- Switching the pairs for teams 4 and 5 would create a team with only long-range shooters, chargers and splatlings, which is also not preferable.
Therefore the best option is to switch the pairs for teams 2 and 4, though it does only make a small change in the overall ranks of the teams, unfortunately. This does also leave the new team 2 without a shooter player though, which I made a note of for later.

Next up is the lower quadrants.
Third and Fourth Quadra
Usually, I find it easiest to assign teams for the lowest quadrant next, since then I can use the third quadrant to do final composition and rank balancing. In this case, thankfully the lower quadrants are fairly easy to assign to teams since all but one have listed multiple weapon categories.
I decided to start with the fourth quadrant player who listed just sloshers as their weapons. I don’t want to put them with team 2, as I want to assign that team two shooter players, but every other team already has someone who listed sloshers as a weapon. Therefore I choose the team that has the most flexible player: team 5.
Next, I looked for the most flexible players left in the lower quadrants.

Side note: This is where my old approach of using a registration form was a problem. Most of the players in the lower quadrants listed a lot of weapon categories, but I don’t know what they actually prefer from those categories. However, from experience, I tend to assume that if someone lists what I call a “non-standard” weapon category like sloshers, brushes, rollers, or particularly brellas, those weapons are probably fairly high up in their weapon preferences. This is because most players seem to learn to play shooters to some degree, so many players will list shooters even if shooters aren’t their preferred weapon. But if someone is willing to list a non-standard weapon category on a LAN registration form, they are probably quite comfortable with that weapon class.
Back to figuring out teams. My main concern at this point is team 2, which currently has very little flexibility and no shooters. Another consideration I’m keeping in mind is that team 1 currently has the highest ranks, followed by team 3.
Looking at the fourth quadrant, I assign the most flexible player to team 2 in an attempt to balance that team a bit. However, that player is also fairly low rank and their combined weapons still overlap a lot, so I decide to also assign team 3 the most flexible quadrant 3 player — who also happens to be the highest-ranked.
My next most inflexible team at this point is team 5, who is still missing a quadrant 3 player, so I assign them the other flexible quadrant 3 player.

After looking at the teams so far and the remaining players, I note that:
- Team 1 doesn’t have any shooter players yet, but lots of brushes and/or rollers.
- There is one brella player in each of quadrants 3 and 4, and none on the incomplete teams.
- The second player remaining in quadrant 4 lists splatlings, on top of both shooter categories, so probably prefers long-range.
- The last player in quadrant 4 doesn’t play short-range shooters.
- Team 4 is the lowest-ranked incomplete team.
The last point is the easiest to act on — I assign the highest-ranked remaining player in quadrant 3 to team 4. Thankfully, this should work in terms of weapons too.
I decide to assign the quadrant 4 brella player to team 1 since I prefer to put brella players in the more flexible teams, and its individual players are slightly more flexible than team 3.
I assign the remaining quadrant 3 splatling player to team 3 since they don’t have any yet.
But then I realise I’ve messed up.

That leaves me with one quadrant 3 player and one team that needs a quadrant 3 player — team 1. Placing this player on team 1 would give the team three brushes and/or rollers players though, which isn’t a situation I want to put them in. So I decided to do some switching again — put the remaining quadrant 3 player into team 4, move team 4’s old quadrant 3 player to team 1 and remove team 1’s quadrant 4 player (because otherwise they would have 2 brella players).

At this point we have 3 quadrant 4 players left:
- A brella player who shouldn’t go in team 1 because of the other brella player.
- A shooters and brushes/rollers player who should preferably go in team 4, as the other teams already have a couple of players with brushes and/or rollers listed.
- Someone who probably prefers long-range who therefore shouldn’t go in team 3 which already has a charger and a splatling player, but preferably should go in team 4 too.
This leaves me with a dilemma — I have two players who should probably go in team 4. Time to do some switching again! I switch the quadrant 4 player in team 5 for the second of the remaining quadrant 4 players and place them in team 3 instead (since it currently only has 1 other slosher player).

That leaves me with a brella player for team 4 (since team 1 already has a brella player) and a long-range player for team 1 (which only has one splatlings/chargers player which should work well).

Side note: Exceptions
Sometimes we get players I call “exceptions”:
- People who have never played ranked before
- People who are arriving late or leaving early
When we have exceptions like these, I try to put the relevant players on a team with either myself or one of my two co-organisers. That means the other teams are stable throughout the tournament, and we can deal with any problems personally. This doesn’t always work of course, and it sometimes means that team’s ranks or weapons are skewed, which means choosing the other members team carefully based on who I know will be able to deal with that. However, I don’t want anyone to be left out and this is the best way I have found to manage such cases.
Final Notes
Making teams like this isn’t a science, and the teams will never be perfectly balanced. Even in the example above, team 1 theoretically has a slight advantage in terms of ranks. This example also doesn’t account for who the players requested as teammates, which can further complicate decisions. It also doesn’t use my personal knowledge of the players, which I usually lean on heavily these days. However, at the beginning that wasn’t something I could do, so this example is closer to the very clinical way in which I did team assignments when I was starting out.
Another thing to note is that this method works particularly well for the LANs I run because of the rank distribution. The divide between the top two quadrants and the lower two is often quite clearcut, which means I can often create pairs within each half, then create teams of two pairs. However, sometimes the divide isn’t as clear and due to the rank distribution, I may work with quadrants of different sizes, or create teams with two players from one quadrant. In this situation, I often end up relying more on weapons and gut feeling.
In the end, I think that as long as the teams are approximately balanced in terms of weapons and ranks, such that each team has a chance at winning a game off another team, everyone will enjoy the day. Especially if the venue has other options for hanging out together while people aren’t playing Splatoon.
Do you live in Queensland and play Splatoon? Come join Sunshine Squids to hang out the rest of the Queensland crew! We have a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Discord server.
