gaming Nintendo Switch Online Criticism Thread

[Kyoshi Frost Wolf 40,284]

This is a very necessary thread in my book. Nintendo Switch online is bad, we know this. Ever since it became a paid service in September 2018, NSO has been one long running joke. While $20 a year isn't the worst thing ever considering what you get like NES and SNES titles along with cloud saves, the actual online service is abysmal. Entirely Peer 2 Peer and the service lacks features that became industry standard 16 years ago. Now we have the "expansion pack" which more than doubles the price, bringing it to a whopping $50 for a standalone membership and brings us N64 and Genesis games. Obviously this is dreadful. N64 would be cool at a lower price and Genesis games are already easily obtainable on the Switch through various means. The expansion is now out in the wild and many reports of numerous issues with the N64 titles are cropping up. So Nintendo can't even emulate Nintendo 64 games properly. I remember dreading that the price for this would be double from the standard membership, but Nintendo somehow exceeded my expectations of awfulness and went the extra mile. Let's also not forget that they are also forcing in Animal Crossing DLC to bolster the price even though most people do not have Animal Crossing. 

All of this comes with zero improvements to the service itself and at the cost of the Virtual Console, which was one of the main reasons I bought a Switch in the first place. All I wanted was the ability to purchase the games I want so I can own them and have them carry over to future systems, though knowing Nintendo they would probably f**k that up too. Modern Nintendo is certainly a sight to behold. They can make one of the most successful gaming consoles in history and then constantly trip over roadblocks that they set for themselves. 

Anywho, what are your thoughts and opinions on Nintendo Switch Online and the "Expansion Pack"? What would make the service better? It seems Nintendo could use a lot of pointers frpm nearly two decades ago.

As one can tell, I think it is all terrible. A paid service in 2021 that doesn't even let us send simple messages to friends is abysmal on its own. A $50 yearly service that can't even emulate N64 games properly is a special kind of fail. $50 a year is only $10 below Xbox Live Gold, a service that gives you access to online play while also giving you monthly games and far, FAAAAR superior online service on top of that. Even if you don't have Gold, you can still do basic as hell things like sending messages to friends, something that even the paid service on Switch won't even let you do. 

I changed the name to make it more appropriate. 

 

Edited October 27, 2021 by Kyoshi

[Pastel Heart 6,463]

If I had a Switch the big gimme for this would be the N64 stuff for me since that's my most treasured console but if they're messing up then I dunno why I'd want this.. N64 stuff is expensive these days yeah but who wants broken stuff? Good N64 emulators exist like Project 64 so I dunno what went wrong here. The whole always online drm thing is something I've never ever been a fan of either but that's more a complaint about digital services in general

I just wanna mini console ~.~ 

[Misty Shadow 7,084]

I still remember back when everyone was rejoicing over the Nintendo Share program, which was unfairly stealing money from Youtubers, being canceled. I was one of the people who did NOT rejoice because I knew they were just going to pull more anti-consumer crap later in different ways. Glad this blew up like it did because this is definitely not okay, even if it is only a symptom of a grander problem. The Nintendo of today is not pro-consumer just because we all grew up with their games, people need to get over it and accept the hard truth. 

[Cash In 21,510]

Switch Online definitley leaves a lot to be desired. Online itself is fuctional most of the time at the very least, but it can be borderline unplayable in games like SMM2 and Smash. As for additional content, I'm okay with the NES and SNES games, although a lot of them were put out a snail's pace and there are still a handful of staple titles that are missing, but I think having those games available at will is neat and a pretty good deal. The N64 and Genesis games would've been fantastic...if they didn't charge $60 AUD for it.  I'm sorry, but that's just far too much.

[EpicEnergy 22,074]

I just call it for what it really is - corporate greed.

I personally never owned a Nintendo Switch, so I never owned NS online or the expansion pack either. I probably wouldn't be able to afford owning the NS online expansion pack though due to it's cost.

[baba_booey 4,299]

Honestly it's pretty sad how the Wii U had better online services than the Switch (no friend codes, messaging, Netflix, Hulu, etc) for free at that.

[Evil Pink One 12,978]

Nintendo sock bolls!!!!!

* plays Nintendo products and waits for sales in the nshop*

[Celli 4,332]

Reposting here, thanks to Splashee for saving it for me 

Nintendo will add an extra service for a ludicrous price and they can't even make the base service functional. They clearly do not get online. Their service is absolute trash, barely functional, and it costs $20 a year. PSN and Xbox Live are $60 a year but at least those services work properly with proper voice chat. If they can't give me a reason to pay for the base service, why should I pay an extra $30? And why are they forcing Animal Crossing into it? Not everyone likes AC. Just boneheaded decisions. If they didn't lock online functionality behind a paywall it wouldn't be so bad. It'd still be a shit service but at least you aren't paying for it then. Online should not be locked behind a paywall regardless.

[Splashee 28,537]

Nintendo is using a network synchronization scheme called lock-stepping, which is basically waiting for all the players' game state to step the game forward together, in sync. If one of the players' network connection is slow, the rest must wait, bringing the speed to a halt.

Whoever has the weakest connection will bring the rest down.

Even with the wide ethernet connection OLED Switch dock and a fiber connection, Nintendo is not giving enough speed here (the limits are set by Nintendo, not the hardware). The hardware should be able to, but Nintendo's online services are not good. They might be saving money. Question is, why should you have to pay so much when they are clearly not spending that money on the service you are paying for?

 

 

I have worked with Mario Kart DS and its network code is quite interesting. The one where you play locally wireless, is the full featured game, being lock-stepped. If you get out of range, the game will pause for a few seconds, and if it is out of range for too long, the connection is lost.
However, Mario Kart DS also had online play via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and the game was completely rewritten to allow this to be playable without lock-stepping! That meant, no battle mode. It was essentially a different game, all to work with network latency.

Lock-stepping allows the game, either an older emulated game, to be played as it originally was made, over a network connection. When I heard about Super Mario Maker 2 having online network play, I knew it would be a disaster before the game was even out. I knew that in order for a complicated game like 2D Mario, where you can jump on a Koopa shell and have it bounce across the screen and hit multiple objects, enemies, other players, brick blocks, and all that, you must do lock-stepping.
If you solve it without lock-stepping, how would you do it? There are too many results, too much delays with network latency, that even randomly guessing would require time skips that are even worse than lock-stepping. Racing games (such as Formula 1 2018) solve this by adding AI cars that predict what path a player will normally take, but when the player doesn't, the car is rewind into their local position (usually interpolated in a odd way) where it could, and most likely, hit your car and damage it, making you lose the game. Unfair.

Lock-stepping is completely unplayable in itself. It halts all the time, because no one can be synchronized simultaneously in the real world (light can only travel so fast). Also, halting the game means pausing the sound. Sound skipping and pausing is worse than visual video pauses. Now, this is why input lag is added. The more input lag, the longer is the buffer to wait for a bad connection. Lock-stepping is sharing only the important parts of the game play, and not the entire game state, which is normally the input the player made that frame/time. If the game plays fine, without halting, you still might have a slow connection bringing a long input lag, making the game unplayable. It is what it is.

 

This is all what you will get for paying Nintendo for these services. There is no fix for the technology. The price Nintendo is selling this for is ridiculous!

 

So how do Nintendo solve this? They need to make their services faster. That's the first step. The faster their services are, the better the connections to every player will be, and then, and only then, can you blame a player for having a slow internet connection and ban them, if they drag your frame rate down. Or lower the price!

[Will Guide 21,325]

Somewhere somebody complained that Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 Nintendo Switch Online had foggy issues, s**ty texture in the Dark Link room and controller lag. I don't know where people are getting all these complaints about Ocarina of Time on N64 Nintendo switch online but I had no issue whatsoever.

For me personally, the game was pretty crisp kept in its original resolution instead of being stretched out to put the wide screen, the save states work pretty well, I had no trouble adapting to the controls on a pro controller, and heck I even went out of my way to 100% complete Ocarina of Time doing stuff I never done before even in previous re-releases.

I'm sorry but other than the online mode of Super Mario Maker 2 having incredible lag, I never had any major issues with Nintendo Switch Online features.

[Celli 4,332]

21 hours ago, Will Guide said:

I'm sorry but other than the online mode of Super Mario Maker 2 having incredible lag, I never had any major issues with Nintendo Switch Online features.

Just because you didn't have issues with it, doesn't mean they don't exist. Don't try to downplay other people's problems with the Online. Smash bros Ultimate is one of the biggest examples of the issues with the functionality.

[Splashee 28,537]

22 hours ago, Will Guide said:

Somewhere somebody complained that Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 Nintendo Switch Online had foggy issues, s**ty texture in the Dark Link room and controller lag. I don't know where people are getting all these complaints about Ocarina of Time on N64 Nintendo switch online but I had no issue whatsoever.

For me personally, the game was pretty crisp kept in its original resolution instead of being stretched out to put the wide screen, the save states work pretty well, I had no trouble adapting to the controls on a pro controller, and heck I even went out of my way to 100% complete Ocarina of Time doing stuff I never done before even in previous re-releases.

I'm sorry but other than the online mode of Super Mario Maker 2 having incredible lag, I never had any major issues with Nintendo Switch Online features.

The problems with Ocarina of Time is the official emulator used. MVG talked about it in his YouTube review. It has nothing to do with online gaming though. For the online services, I had a pretty good description of why it is pretty much impossible to make a good online experience without actually using a good infrastructure (which Nintendo didn't do, but they still charge premium money for the service).

[Envy 5,998]

The Expansion Pack is a complete joke and I hope to god that it somehow flops on them. But I know that unfortunately Nintendo has a bunch of fans that will eat up anything and everything they do. They did not deserve the success they have had with the Switch. Not even one iota.

Nintendo has no business charging for their online. What are we even paying for? Servers? LOL No. Nintendo doesn't have "servers", it's all peer 2 peer. I shouldn't have to pay extra for my Nintendo games to be online. It's such a rip-off.

The Switch itself, being able to be both a TV console and a handheld console really seemed like the perfect place to settle down and purchase VC games. But when the Switch came out, suddenly the VC rug was pulled out from under us, and we have instead been offered this poor subscription service which only just now four and a half years after the release of the console, got N64 games. And you have to pay a completely absurd amount of money for the N64 games. It's a spit in my face. I wanted to enjoy my favorite N64 games like Paper Mario and Kirby 64 in handheld format, but I will not pay $50 to temporarily subscribe to them. It is a rip-off.

[Will Guide 21,325]

2 hours ago, Splashee said:

The problems with Ocarina of Time is the official emulator used. MVG talked about it in his YouTube review. It has nothing to do with online gaming though. For the online services, I had a pretty good description of why it is pretty much impossible to make a good online experience without actually using a good infrastructure (which Nintendo didn't do, but they still charge premium money for the service).

I don't know why everybody is talking about but as far as I can tell from when I personally play the game, there was no trouble whatsoever. 

[Will Guide 21,325]

2 hours ago, Celli said:

Just because you didn't have issues with it, doesn't mean they don't exist. Don't try to downplay other people's problems with the Online. Smash bros Ultimate is one of the biggest examples of the issues with the functionality.

 Look, I know every system has its pros and cons. 

I'm just saying exactly what I experienced and it was going okay for me.

 

[Celli 4,332]

11 minutes ago, Will Guide said:

 Look, I know every system has its pros and cons. 

I'm just saying exactly what I experienced and it was going okay for me.

 

Then don't downplay everyone else's experience just because you happened to have gotten lucky enough to have a better experience.

[Will Guide 21,325]

People claim that paying $50 a year for N64 games is a rip off but really back in the Wii version it was $10 for each N64 game on the Virtual Console but here we're eventually getting basically access to more than 10 games with more games coming in the future and we only have to pay $50 a year. I'll that bet that before a full 365 day years has passed that'll be over 30 games and only having to pay $50 for 30 games is much cheaper than having to pay $10 a game (about $1.66 per game). And that's not including the Sega Genesis games or Happy Home Paradise being paid for. Not to mention the NES and Super NES games that are still technically part of the service for free.

To me the price is very well worth it and I'm looking forward to a lot of good things in the future.

[Celli 4,332]

@Will GuideDude.

Microsoft has a much better deal at $15 a month with Gamepass Ultimate. You get 100s of NEW games, 4 Xbox games for free, 2 Xbone and 2 Xbox or 360 games(or a combination, and you get to keep the Xbox/360 games), EA play, AND ON TOP OF THAT, The Xbox Series X lets you play ALL your OG Xbox, as well as 360 and Xbone games. Nintendo is just as profitable and successful. and has NO excuse. $50 a year and all you get is old games, a barely functional Online service, and cloud saving that isn't even universal, Microsoft doesn't lock cloud saves behind a paywall, and it covers every game, so why should Nintendo do that? Even Sony has a better Online service.

NSO is shit. Plain and simple.

[Envy 5,998]

3 hours ago, Will Guide said:

People claim that paying $50 a year for N64 games is a rip off but really back in the Wii version it was $10 for each N64 game on the Virtual Console but here we're eventually getting basically access to more than 10 games with more games coming in the future and we only have to pay $50 a year. I'll that bet that before a full 365 day years has passed that'll be over 30 games and only having to pay $50 for 30 games is much cheaper than having to pay $10 a game (about $1.66 per game). And that's not including the Sega Genesis games or Happy Home Paradise being paid for. Not to mention the NES and Super NES games that are still technically part of the service for free.

To me the price is very well worth it and I'm looking forward to a lot of good things in the future.

But here's the thing. You keep paying that $50 every single year, you don't get to keep those games, they become inaccessible when you stop subscribing. Which can happen for any number of reasons.

Plus, what if I just want Paper Mario and Kirby 64? 30 games are not a value if I only want to play a small number of them. The value is not there. Just let me purchase the games I want.

[Kyoshi Frost Wolf 40,284]

9 hours ago, Celli said:

@Will GuideDude.

Microsoft has a much better deal at $15 a month with Gamepass Ultimate. You get 100s of NEW games, 4 Xbox games for free, 2 Xbone and 2 Xbox or 360 games(or a combination, and you get to keep the Xbox/360 games), EA play, AND ON TOP OF THAT, The Xbox Series X lets you play ALL your OG Xbox, as well as 360 and Xbone games. Nintendo is just as profitable and successful. and has NO excuse. $50 a year and all you get is old games, a barely functional Online service, and cloud saving that isn't even universal, Microsoft doesn't lock cloud saves behind a paywall, and it covers every game, so why should Nintendo do that? Even Sony has a better Online service.

NSO is shit. Plain and simple.

I can attest to this and there's even more perks than that; You get discounts on anything that is on Game Pass if you decide to purchase, Switch online gives us no discounts OR options to purchase the classic titles. Another BIG plus to Xbox in comparison and this is something many people don't know; Microsoft Rewards. For every purchase you make, as well as searching on Bing, doing daily tasks, monthly tasks AND Game Pass quests, you get points that add up pretty quickly. I have used this to pay for my last like...5 months of Game Pass Ultimate, no joke. The amount of content I've gotten essentially for free because of that is absolutely banan-o's. I made some purchases recently for a couple of upcoming games and that alone gave me 12,000 points, which is 1 month of GP Ultimate right there. The Switch only gives us a tiny fraction of coins in return for purchases. Would be nice if Switch online increased that amount, but Nintendo doesn't ever think of good ideas anymore. 

Here's something else that's funny: Nintendo recently "addressed" the backlash, without actually addressing it at all. They mentioned Switch online in an investor meeting and said something like "We need to continue improving switch online" as if they've made any improvements at all to it since its inception. In the same meeting, they bragged about how Switch online has apparently 32 million subscribers. That is so much free money for Nintendo since they don't do shit to make an actual competent online service. Them bragging about that shows their total disconnect. Honestly, Nintendo is way, WAY more corporate than many people realize. 

[Celli 4,332]

@Kyoshi See, I didn't even know about that, and that just makes Nintendo look even more pathetic.

ALSO, Microsoft was about to raise the price of Gold, but after LISTENING TO FANS, they reversed their decision. Nintendo is stubborn. They still live in the 90s and refuse to listen to criticism.

Microsoft is really pro-consumer with all their great deals and they have my respect.

[Cash In 21,510]

I know Kyoshi and Envy both mentioned this, but yeah, not including a virtual console was a move that I'm not big on. Say I want to buy Contra III for example. I pay 5 bucks for it, am able to keep it forever and play it whenever I want. Easy. I actually don't mind the whole huge library of games available to you at will, but not everyone wants that, so I feel like having that option of buying a game individually would've been nice.