22nd October 2018, 10:20 AM
Right now, I'm not playing any of Nintendo's games online. My Splatoon fervor comes and goes. So, I've got no reason to pay them anything. When Smash Bros comes along, well, we'll see, but at this time Nintendo is basically offering nothing. Sure it costs less, but their service should provide that bare minimum. Their current biggest online game is a wreck online. Fortunately, I have never cared about scoreboards, but many do. It's so easy to cheat there, and it has nothing to do with being able to copy save files. A properly implemented online server for Splatoon (server stored ranking data, NOT loading it off a user's switch and praying they didn't alter the file) negates all of those cheating issues. Also, they should host the online games themselves, the "dedicated servers" problem. The sheer number of people using old routers with "suspend" to cheat in locally hosted games proves that's pretty much a necessity in a game like Splatoon. Further, there's no excuse at all for shunting off voice to cell phones. I remember diehard loyalists explaining that this was "the future" of how chat would work, and here we are a year later, it never caught on. No one likes it, it brings in an extra device to configure, a device many kids just do not have (when I say kids I mean kids, 10 year olds by and large don't have cell phones), and quite simply, it means that a large number of the people you play against probably don't have it set up at all, meaning it isn't a "universal" solution. Don't get me wrong, I think telephony is long overdue for a standardized revision for organized "chat room" style call management like programs like Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or Discord all have been using for years. Implementing this as part of the telephone standard that any game can just "plug into" would negate the need for individual chat solutions, and that might well BE the future, but not this.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)