I'M DONE WITH SWITCH ONLINE - Videos for the 97.4%

https://youtu.be/xB8M_GZTgzc tldr, switch online sucks and is basically a scam

GOOD RIDDANCE

Locking online behind a pay wall has to stop. Go find another way to squeeze money out of customers.

I think what's shitty is that AFAIK it was free until well...

20$ a year is amazing considering the alternatives are 60-70$

It'd at the very least be SLIGHTLY acceptable if there were actual services involved. But Switch online and you get online for like what? A very small number of games? ooookkk thanks nintendont

Paying for online has never been a justifiable cost, it exists because it's a free money fountain that you can push on the consumer because for the most part you have no choice and collectively not paying for it isn't going to make the company reverse it.

Not sure if it applies as much on Switch, but running online services for games definitely costs a ton of money so not sure why charging for online seems so criminal?

I remember bringing this subject up with my siblings on Discord some time ago, and they were defending the shit out of Nintendo and their online service. At one point during the argument, my sister-in-law had the fucking gal to use "they're giving us a gift!!!" as a defense with no apparent awareness of how fucking stupid the defense itself sounds or the nuances in how Nintendo is handling online.

This is like saying you aren't allowed to bitch about a resturant that's failed 67 health inspections in a row unless you eat their food what a dip

3rd party developers pay for their own servers but Nintendo still locks it behind a fee. Online is free in PC games. Hosting matchmaking servers for peer-to-peer games is cheap.

All Nintendo is actually offering is matchmaking and persistent user database and presence (friends) servers; there is a cost to running that, sure, but it's hella less than the cost of deploying dedicated servers. The actual game sessions are P2P mesh networks, which is why the netcode is almost always unreliable in Switch games. Fortnite is excluded from requiring Switch Online because, afaik, Epic runs their own service and the Switch client just points to their infrastructure, and Nintendo's content to let them bypass Online altogether since they've brought their own servers along. And, of course, Fortnite has its own way of paying for the overhead.

$20 for the ability to play Splatoon 2 and 3 NES games a month, what a fucking bargain!

There's literally more games than just those

Yeah, like Dark Souls Remastered. If only there was a platform where you could play that game online without paying $20 a year

Paying money to access a peer-to-peer online service is a fucking scam. It was a scam when Microsoft started it on the original Xbox and it's a scam now. The 'free' NES games are a fucking joke. PS+ and Xbox Live both give you modern games and I still consider them to be massively over priced. These companies take a cut of every sale made on their services, they rake in money had over fist and they make you pay additional fees to access 'their online service', but it's not a service at all, it's a fee to use your own internet connection. Steam, Gog, Origin, and uPlay all do the same and more than these 'services' and they don't charge you for them. EA offers the Origin Access program but that's €60 per year for hundreds of games, not a random selection every month, uPlay offers the ability to earn discounts by completing challenges and earning Units, Steam and Gog both have seasonal sales and free game giveaways.

Maybe its just me but I'd rather pay $60 for a quality service than $20 for a shit one.

I'd rather not pay anything

Players pay for their own servers in Minecraft. But you know, letting someone connect to their own server isn't free. Nintendo isn't a charity.

Yeah exactly. 5 of us pay $7 each per year, if we had 3 more people it would be less than $5 each per year. Like sure, people don't want to have to pay anything, who does, but that's a trivial amount of money so who really cares?

I like how you have to pay for online subscription while a lot of games use p2p connection... They aren't hosting a dedicated server so what's the point? Well there is master server which helps with finding players and creating lobbies, but Blizzard had their master server on a single PC for BattleNet for a long time and it wasn't expensive...

I'm a Star Citizen backer and I own a digital spaceship that repairs other digital spaceships and it cost more than the price of buying a year of Switch Online for every unique poster above me in this thread, spending money is not the problem for me. If Nintendo made a like, Switch Online Premium that was $72 a year and they put you on dedicated servers instead of P2P (and let's pretend this half-and-half tiering idea isn't even more stupid than just P2P), I'd be willing to pay for it, and the deciding factor is dedicated servers. P2P mesh is filthy garbage at this point in multiplayer gaming, unless you're doing something that isn't impacted by packet loss or latency like turn-based games with generous response windows (Civilization, for example). Before Splatoon 2's multiplayer was locked behind a paywall, I tolerated it because, hey, it was free. But oh did I complain. Like an embarrassing amount at times. And I'm far from the only one who had their match experience in Splatoon ruined on multiple occasions from interrupted connections (including when someone else's shitty connection drops and you get a matchmaking lockout cooldown for quitting the match) and even just being killed by someone three seconds after they're already dead. And that's not even mentioning hackers. But it was free, so I put up with it while my patience lasted, and then I'd put it down for a few days to cool off once it'd got to me again. It wasn't ideal, but I could still enjoy the good times when matchmaking gave me people with good connections and the match was skill-balanced instead of being a one-sided stomp (in either direction) after the first 45 seconds. Then Nintendo asked me to pay for the exact same experience, but I can play emulated versions of NES games I've bought at least three times already, and I have the right to purchase a replica NES controller that can only be used to play those digital-service NES ROMs. And then Tetris 99 comes out as a carrot, but frankly I'm not big enough into Tetris for it to swing me. Then SMM2 comes out and naturally uses level sharing as a carrot-and-stick, followed by the surprise reveal of the new carrot, online co-op/competitive co-op/etc. modes! And then whoops you can't play online co-op with friends, only randoms. Uh, how about fuck you, Nintendo. This was an acceptable model in 2010 but P2P is showing its age. Just look at the endless fuckfest that is GTAO PC and realize all those hacks exist because R* could not be fucked/were not budgeted by Take Two to overhaul the console P2P solution and provide dedicated servers, so adding a trainer menu is as easy as dropping one DLL into the GTAV folder and now you can ban other people by unlocking hacker-bait skins (that cannot ever be normally unlocked) on their client/profile while deleting hacker reports made against you from reaching R*.

Sadly, this is the state of console online. MS started it with Xbox LIVE and make serious bank with it, and so naturally Sony and Nintendo proceeded to follow. I would say the defense of "running servers isn't cheap as even PC's free online is paid by someone", but even most console games these days have switched to pure P2P connections for multiplayer, so at this point, you're just paying for service maintenance costs and the "privilege" to play games online. As such, and as consumers become more and more knowledgeable, there's been more and more pushback to this whole system. The big 3 have realized this though, which is why you have things like game passes and free games tacked on to the online service costs to find some way to justify the value coerce people into buying the online service. Sadly, I don't see this changing anytime soon. I very much doubt that any of the big 3 are suddenly gonna realize the error of their ways and make their online services free. If there's money to be made, and people are willing, they will proceed to make that money.

Well, Wii U was the lone holdout of free online in Gen8 and it got its ass kicked, so I imagine Nintendo decided to follow Sony's lead in moving to paid online after the PS3, what with how massive a success the PS4 was. They saw gamers saying they want to pay for their online. It sucks that it came to this, especially since Nintendo Network was pretty good for a free service.

Here's the thing: people were hoping Nintendo would change their minds or, barring that, at least give the service a kick in the pants so quality would improve over standard stuff to justify it. I got my Switch and Splatoon 2 as a birthday gift last year. Instead Nintendo hasn't improved their internet at all, are just giving you deals on games and free NES games I can already play in numerous other ways, and now hold 85% of my copy of Splatoon 2 hostage behind "only" a $20 yearly paywall. The low price does not excuse incompetency or bullshit, and this is still more of a dick move than PS4's PS+ because at least that bullshit was there from the start of the PS4 lifespan.

And it's not even good online. I get disconnects all the time, smash bros sucks online half the time and mario maker is going to be useless to you if you don't have the membership. Once you get the membership then you gotta go through obfuscated ways to play with your friends online assuming it even supports it (mario maker doesn't support online co-op with friends because "muh leaderboards"). Online save backups don't work for splatoon 2 and pokemon games to "prevent cheating" because they can't be fucked to keep your player rank in splatoon 2 on their end of the servers so if your switch shits itself you're going to lose a shitton of progress. In the case of pokemon it's not even going to deter cheating because you can just generate a fuckin pokemon on the 3DS and then move it onto pokemon sword and shield when it comes out. Nintendo fucking retired their virtual console for this bullshit nes games releasing three of them a goddamn month piecemeal when I can just sideload virtually any of nintendo system games on my 3ds outside of their home consoles including sega genesis games as well.. It's absolutely wasted fucking potential on so many different levels. But I have to pay for it to play online, same with xbox. Shit fuckin blows huge booty holes but nintendo is fucking incompetent when it comes to these things.

Uh?

Am I somehow misremembering in that PS2 and PS3 online were completely free besides MMO subscriptions obviously, but PS4 suddenly required PS+ to play online on anything not F2P? PS+ also rapidly declined in quality and being worthwhile for a long time, upped its price, and dances back and forth between consumers being indifferent to it and being really damn annoyed. It's bullshit, but i'm just saying that Nintendo pulled an even worse move by having their online play be free for over a year and then, despite all warnings, put a (cheap) paywall on it against everyone's advice with little to make up for it and no improvements at all in service.

20 dollars a year isn't amazing and 60-70 dollars a year for access to your own internet service is downright robbery. Stop blindly defending stuff just because it's the norm. Companies aren't on your side.

The alternative is $0. Always saying they're going to fuck you doesn't mean it's not fucking you. Just because it's popular on consoles to fuck customers by charging extra for multiplayer in games they already own doesnt mean it's fair or reasonable.