The way Nintendo handles their online services is lackluster at best, and this is nowhere more prevalent than in the online multiplayer. Shortly after the release of Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, Japanese players were bombarded with bans just because they decided to play as Peach (obviously nobody in Q&A played as Peach, then).
Missing out on a good character there, that float can be a life-saver.
But now things have just gotten silly. Like an Insane Clown Posse convention, Nintendo is handing out traumatising experiences to its customers. However, instead of it being through horrid music, they are issuing full 136-year bans for online play! It’s-a-me, Ban-Hammario!
Wow, just look at all these bans!
So, what’s causing this glitch? Right now, nobody knows. All players really can do to avoid the ban completely is to stay away from online multiplayer altogether. Smash Bros. has three major checks it does for foul play: Attacking one player exclusively, disconnecting during a match, or somehow bringing an item into For Glory (where items are not permitted).
The third check is what caused all the trouble for Peach players, because the game saw her turnips as items, and pulling one at the start of a match registered as a fault.
However, the first two, well…if your battery cuts out, or you accidentally close your 3DS during a match, that’s a fault. Doing so means you have effectively rage-quit and you could receive a ban. As for targeting one player exclusively, uh…what if they’re in the lead? What if a Free For All match turns into two 1-VS-1 battles, is there a chance all players could be banned?
Normally the bans wouldn’t be huge, but for some odd reason, the ban time has recently started being registered as “-1″—which therefore (without going into a deep programming explanation) places it at the maximum of “4,294,967,295”. If you take that in seconds, and convert it to years, you have…you guessed it! 136.2 years. Is there going to be a fix? Is Nintendo going to unban all players out of good faith?
I don’t imagine so. Iwata is too busy counting all those yen bills that selling 3.2 million copies helped generate, and Sakurai is, well, posting stupid pictures.
Wait…what!? Automated banning sounds like a terrible idea. Isn’t that something that every other multiplayer game in history has let the players regulate? I mean, if my friend pulls a turnip out of the ground in MY game of Smash Bros., *I* want to have the satisfaction of kicking them out of my house.
Well, a cheater may be doing something that no one bothers to report, or isn’t readily visible to a player, or can’t be pinpointed to one.
For example, many people cheat on Grand Theft Auto: Online, either by giving themselves unlimited money, stuff they shouldnt’ have, making themselves invincible, etc. While people can report peopel for being offensive or cheating, you’re never left with much confidence that it will do anything, nor does it do anything in the immediate to get rid of the person. Kicking requires a group vote becuase you dont’ want a sore loser to evict you becuase you’re winning a race.
Automated banning / punishment was implemented for cases of someone having too much money compared to how much they should have. So, if you have millions of dollars, but only played enough to have thousands, you were flagged. Sometimes though, people would complain and say they were incorrectly banned.
So, what I was trying to get at is that I think auto-ban is fine IF it’s tested thoroughly, as should any piece of software. And, if there are errors, you fix it ASAP and remedy any tarnishment made. This is an online game community, and people can very quickly pack up.
Infact, I’m surprised people are even going to Smash Bros online another shot. The Wii version of Online was downright UNPLAYABLE. You can’t have huge timing delays in a fighting game. Unacceptable, Nintendo.
So, is Smash Bros 3Ds a pay-to-test version of what’s coming out for the Wii U? I would have thought they’d come out at the same time.
I fondly remember the 1990-1991 era where a game came out for NES, SNES, and GameBoy and was essentially the same game (with things removed or graphics modified to fit the platform). Perhaps that’s what’s being done here, but I think people would be more wanting to buy it for multiple platforms if it didn’t come out at the same time.
Well, it may be more of a business move by Nintendo, the 3DS has sold way better that the WiiU after all.
And yeah… the 3DS’ is a minor version of what is to come, but the portability is really handy for people like me, My 3DS usage has increased over a 1000% since I got SSB (that is… my 3DS was dusting somewhere in the house before then).
The 3DS version doesn’t even compare to the Wii U version in terms of anything – control, graphics, music, sound effects, gameplay, it doesn’t come close in any department.
Staggering the releases makes total sense in that regard; why buy an inferior game when a better one is out there? So they released the (still amazing) 3DS one first.
That’s how I see it, anyway. Someone from Nintendo support retweeted my tweet along the same lines, so it appears the choice to release the 3DS version first is because they quite frankly knew it couldn’t match up to it.
Yeah, Smash 3DS got my charging and using my 3DS regularly. I played a bit of Tomodachi Life and a little bit of Kirby this year, but Smash is what got the system charged every day.