Today, the 18th of September, marks the one year anniversary of Nintendo's "Online Service" for the Switch. While it was a year ago today that Switch owners gained access to the program, it wasn't until a week later that users started to be charged $20/year for access to this service. In February of 2017, then-president of Nintendo Tatsumi Kimishima said

"We really think that regardless of what others are doing or what services are being offered, it comes down to a battle of content. We feel it’s a matter of getting our content to the consumer at a price point that will make them happy, and then we’re willing to look at what else we can do going forward. This is just the starting point for us, so again, it’s a battle of content. We think we have what we need to win the battle on that front, and we hope to provide more details about the service going forward."

It was clear from even before the Switch's launch that this was to be a developing program, gaining features and proper functionality as time went on, but how well has the service fared up to this point?

2017​

The story doesn't exactly begin in September of 2018, at least when discussing the Nintendo Switch's online performance. Games such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2 have had free online matchmaking functionality since their launches in April and July of 2017 respectively, just a little bit after the Switch's release in March of the same year. The online infrastructure and netcode for these titles had already been set in place and made functional, even more than a year behind the service's official launch in late 2018. But how?

Well, for those of us who don't happen to recall, the existence of the Switch's paid service was actually announced pre-launch of the console, and was originally planned to be rolled out in 2017, however, around Splatoon 2's release in July 2017, it was announced that the planned paywall would be delayed until late 2018. When Polygon asked Reggie Fils-Aime, the then-president of Nintendo of America, for reasons for the delay at 2017's E3, he responded:

As Nintendo looks at the overall online digital experience there’s a recognition that there’s a lot of work to be world class. And we pride ourselves … We believe our IP is world class. We believe that when we create a piece of hardware it’s world class. We need to get our digital environment world class. And that’s what we’re working hard to do.
We wanted to make sure that it is a robust, well-executed online environment, and for the $20 annual subscription fee, the consumer says, ‘This is a no-brainer. I want to participate. I’m all in.’

But as it would turn out, the service wasn't exactly a "no-brainer". At least, not in the way they intended.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2 are just two examples of Nintendo's first-party offerings in 2017 which had online functionality, and they were generally well-received as games. Mario Kart was criticized by some for being not much more than a port + DLC, but Splatoon 2 was apparently well liked, holding an 83 from critics and an 8.5 from users on metacritic at the time of writing, and further developing the strong fanbase that Splatoon 1 had established. Despite their relatively positive receptions, many factors of their online functionality were bemoaned by a large number of consumers playing them.

Random and frequent disconnections predominantly plagued all of these titles, as well as lag in all forms. Users could get upwards of 4-5 disconnect per stream on a bad day, and the lag in those games would make players being hit by invisible items, miss hitting players that appeared to be hit on the attacker's screen, and seeing red shells maneuver past their targets a constant occurrence, because the game couldn't properly keep track of which player was ahead of which. It was, in total honesty, a hilarious shit-show when we tried to steam it on temp's twitch channel, and while it made for entertaining content, it undeniably made for a very poor online gaming experience. These same issues were widespread enough among other users to prompt a number of online guides on how to reduce your Switch's online lag as early as April of 2017.

Splatoon 2 had a very contentious online mode at launch as well, specifically when it came to its lag issues. Many causes were blamed for this issue, but the most frequent goblin, so to speak, was the game's "tickrate." A user called Dessgeega on the Squidboards forum had this to say:

The tickrate, how often the game refreshes the connection between players, is only 16 per second. The first game was at 25. Overwatch is at 60 and even MINECRAFT does better at 20. The low tickrate combined with international matches means tons of lag, being killed by ghosts, teleportation, rubberbanding, and disconnects a-plenty.

These issues were not relegated to a few users, however, as the whole of the community seemed to have at least a healthy dose of contention when it came to the quality of Splatoon 2's online. Twitter was a common posting ground for irate players to display examples of lag killing them unfairly or erratic movement.

Game still has garbage connections. This is 2017 Nintendo, get with the bloody times already pic.twitter.com/HD4EkOt0D6

— Polar (@TheLonePolar) December 14, 2017

But of course this was a developing ecosystem, and free so far. People were very unhappy, and all but unanimously agreed that Nintendo needs to do better, but the service had yet to officially come.
Nintendo had time to improve things... right?

2018
​

2017 rolls over into 2018, and people are still sharing a plethora of sarcastic tweets criticizing the online of Nintendo's games. Mario Kart had seen not a single shred of improvement in its stability or its lag, and the new title that had come around this year, Mario Tennis Aces, was similarly being absolutely lambasted for its poor online performance.

Chris Hovermale of Destructoid wrote an article on July 21st of 2018, around a year after Splatoon 2's original release, describing the state of Splatoon 2's and Mario Tennis Aces' online functionalities as "unacceptable", and sometimes outright "unplayable".

...any time I search for opponents in online normal or tournament matches, I always have zero to two bars of connectivity, maybe three if I'm lucky. The very few times I successfully connect to an opponent, the unreliable lag spoils those exciting mechanics with frustration and boredom. The notion that I'll have to pay for this unplayable netcode in the near future feels insulting.
I’ve had plenty of online fun with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2, but I regularly get disconnected during longer sessions. When I recently fired up MK8D to play with a friend, we found ourselves unable to keep our room open after about a dozen attempts.

Threads across gaming forums of all kinds sprang up one after the other containing irate customers feeling betrayed by the quality of the online experience. Splatoon 2 continued to receive just as much heat as it did at launch, and for all the same reasons. Visiting tweets from 2017 to 2018 and comparing them, it's evident that absolutely nothing had changed, and that the attitude around Nintendo's handling of their online games had only soured significantly. There's genuinely a twitter account called Splatoon2Lag, which is dedicated to publicizing instances of what they believe to be shoddy online in the game, active since August of 2017. (Their last retweeted tweet at the time of writing was from 9/11/2019.)
Even youtube has compilations of lag in Splatoon 2.

​

For a full year and a half after launch, Nintendo continued to put out games with woefully inadequate online performances, and people's attitudes became more sour and confrontational. Justifiably so.

and then came...
September 13th, 2018
​

With their finger as far from the pulse of the gaming community as they could possibly get it, Nintendo published a trailer introducing the features and release date of their official, paid "Online Service", to begin on the 18th. In the trailer, 5 features were announced: online play for compatible games, a small library of 20 NES games (with online features), save data backup to the cloud, a smartphone app for voice chat during online play, and some nebulous "special offers" yet to be revealed.

In order, let's revisit what the state of these features were during the months coming after its implementation.

The first feature was not a new feature at all, simply the announcement that the experience users had previously been "enjoying" was now locked behind the subscription's paywall. Mario Kart, Splatoon 2, Mario Tennis Aces, etc. would have their online functionality locked unless one was a subscriber to the online service. What upset customers more was that, as before, Nintendo provided no dedicated game servers of any kind, instead programming their games with peer-to-peer connections. Without the overhead of maintaining servers, people wondered exactly what they were paying Nintendo for, with many describing the service as "paying Nintendo to use your own internet."

In what Nintendo assumed would be sweetening the deal, they included a batch of 20 NES games to be played through a standalone app on the Switch. While they did include some beloved titles, such as Super Mario Bros., SMB3, and The Legend of Zelda, it also had a lot of what people thought were mediocre filler titles, like Ice Climbers, Pro Wrestling, Baseball, and Soccer, with Nintendo promising to release more NES games on a monthly basis. In most consumers' eyes, the Virtual Console, or its hypothetical equivalent on Switch, had been missing from the console for a year and a half. To many, this was the kind of thing you might have at launch, not gated behind a $20 paywall as a pittance inclusion as part of a subscription fee. In addition, the games are never technically "yours", as as soon as the subscription isn't renewed, the games become inaccessible.

In further absurdity, ever since December 30th of 2017, over 9 months ago, the homebrew scene had already set up a vastly superior alternative to this system in the form of RetroArch for Switch. Not only would it play any NES game you'd like, for free, it sported a lot of basic features that the official NES player embarrassingly did not. While one could use up to 4 save states with the NES online games, the emulator provided limited options in terms of filters and aspect ratios, no ability whatsoever to remap controls (making rolling your finger across the A and B buttons awkward due to the joycon button layout), and 4-5 frames of input lag compared to next-frame response time with RetroArch's runahead.

There was, however, one feature that RetroArch didn't have, and that was the ability to play NES games online with friends, a genuinely novel offering. Unfortunately, playing a Nintendo game online between myself and a fellow American one timezone away gave between 11-16 frames of input lag, and playing with someone in another country produced a maximum of 33 frames of input lag. Needless to say, while the idea was interesting, the quality of Nintendo's online ruined the joy of any game played through it.

What's more, save data backup being tied to a subscription fee felt like a scam to many people. Every other console on the market, and every other before it, allowed direct access to users' save data through a memory card or via transfer to an external data storage device, like a USB stick. This allowed people to backup their own data in case of corruption or theft, in order to make sure their progress could be saved. This was something that consumers felt was fundamental to have access to, and here it was being sold back to them. Worse yet, they would never have full control over their own data, with it being handled exclusively through Nintendo. Just to put the cherry on the cake, Nintendo not only announced that user cloud saves would be deleted if the subscription was not renewed within a 6 month period, they also announced that:

...in certain games this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost. To ensure fair play, Save Data Cloud backup may not be enabled for such games.

To ensure that Save Data Cloud backups cannot be used to unfairly affect online multiplayer rankings, the feature will not be enabled in Splatoon 2.

This, understandably, created a large amount of backlash from consumers who argued against this stance, but Nintendo didn't back down, all the while the Splatoon 2 leaderboards continued to be defiled by hackers for months going forward.

The hassle of needing to download an app and fiddle with a phone any time one wanted to communicate with another online was so tonedeaf and archaic that it stirred nothing but ridicule, and these "special offers" at the time only included the ability to pre-purchase of NES-style controllers. These were not available for purchase to anyone without an active subscription to Nintendo Online.

The reception to the Nintendo Online announcement...

...was not very favorable.
But even though consumers were paying for not a single dedicated server, they did still need to pay up if they wanted to keep playing with their friends. It was highway robbery, and evidently neither Nintendo nor the law had any qualms about them engaging in it.​

December, 2018
​

With what was for many their most anticipated game of this generation to date, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, releasing December 7th, pressure to subscribe to the online service was at an all-time high. Like Smash 4, this new entry promised robust online features, all of which would be gated behind Nintendo's subscription. The netcode for Smash 4 had actually been, by Nintendo's standards, not terrible (at least as I played it on 3DS), but consumers were given a subtle warning during Sakurai's Nov. 1st Smash presentation when he heavily recommended that players use a LAN adapter for their Switch when playing online.

The game released and, while hype for the game and its dearth of content/polish was still at a peak, players quickly discovered that the online was greatly lacking. YouTube channel GigaBoots was quick to put out a video, on the very next day following release no less, stating that Smash Ultimate has around 6 frames of input lag when played locally using their most optimal controller setup. This much lag is already unpleasant for a fighting game, however through my own testing and experience, this number gets multiplied drastically whenever matchmaking online.

Matchmaking randomly, letting the game's online choose the optimal opponent for my Switch's region, multiplies the input lag by, on average, around 2.5 time. This means that one might expect 15 frames of input lag on average when matchmaking blindly online, as a conservative estimate. When pairing with specific people from a friends list through an arena, even this number can end up doubled, depending on their region. Playing with someone on the literal other side of the globe produced over 30 frames of input lag. This is the most extreme example I've been able to test, but one should also note that, when playing with this same person through the indie game Rivals of Aether's netcode beta branch on Steam, the input lag become less than half of that of Smash Ultimate.

Street Fighter V notoriously released with what people considered to be unacceptably high input lag, at around 5.3 frames, even less than Smash's most stable mode, but fan outcry prompted Capcom to issue a patch on October 23rd of 2018 which significantly reduced both the input lag and the lag stability to 4.41 frames. Even then, the data-miner performing the tests, WydD, called the reduction "better, obviously but not great" illustrating just how out of step with the industry Smash's online experience is.

Connection stability also takes a major hit on occasions, when the game will seemingly experience slowdown so severe that the game will literally pause itself and show a loading icon. Even more common is the phenomenon of dropped inputs due to lag, which considering their frequency, has a high impact on the overall enjoyability of the game. Overall, in terms of input lag and online performance, the game is a massive and jarring step back from even their previous outing, Smash 4, much less any other fighting game on the market. While many other fighters, SFV inclusive, get dedicated servers and no additional online fees, somehow Smash Ultimate goes without both of these modern conveniences.

Meanwhile, up to this point in time, Nintendo had released the following NES games in 3 installments, one per month:

• October: Solomon's Key, NES Open Tournament Golf, Super Dodge Ball
• November: Metroid, Mighty Bomb Jack, TwinBee
• December: Wario's Woods, Ninja Gaiden, Adventures of Lolo

With such comparatively lackluster titles being released through the service for three months in a row, even optimists were beginning to have their opinions soured.

2019
​

During a February investor meeting, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa noted that

A growing percentage is now opting for shorter plans like the one-month membership.
It is critical that these members want to continue using the service for a long time rather than letting it expire, and for that we need to build relationships with consumers and enrich the content.
With this in mind, we are currently planning ways to boost the appeal of the service on a yearly basis... It is very important to our future business and we are giving it our all.

On February 13th, Tetris 99 was released as a free game, but which required the online service in order to be played. It was effectively a battle royale competitive Tetris, and while people did mock it for the easy comparison, it was generally received as being a harmless, functional game.

On May 15th, Nintendo also rolled out a system by which you can buy two digital vouchers for $99.99 and redeem them for two digital games, so long as they're eligible. Since the online service itself is $20 USD, and buying two digital games worth $60/piece saves $20, then technically, if one buys two new digital games per year, the subscription pays for itself.

Finally, after 2.5 years, Nintendo finally introduced SNES games for the Switch by putting out 20 SNES titles on September 5th of this year. Included in this pack are many big-name games, such as Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Kirby's Dream Course, Kirby's Dream Land 3, F-Zero, and Breath of Fire. It's undeniably a better showing than the NES pack on its release, though the amount of time taken to get to this point is arguably much too long. In addition, Nintendo has genuinely improved the online play when it comes to these titles, and while they don't feel perfect, they're at least not ruined by input latency. Unfortunately this still feels like too little too late, as it was in late 2017 that we were already given the ability to emulate these games at a much higher quality on the Switch.

But these additions still didn't address the core problems of abysmally performing online ecosystems for all of Nintendo's first-party titles, and monetization introduced a full year ago had yielded no improvements the core quality of playing online. Smash's input lag still turned online into a facsimile of itself, tweets depicting Splatoon 2's poor performance were still being made to this day, and Mario Kart 8's instability and lag has still hadn't budged an inch.
​

Conclusion
​

It's become completely clear that Nintendo's management will do everything in its power to avoid addressing the core issues, and instead intend to dance around the problems sprinkling freebies. While the voucher deal may very well render this service "free*" for some users, that's only true for users who A) want their two games digitally, B) are buying two games at launch, and C) have their two desired games be on the list of compatible titles.
​

The problem is, what are we paying for? Cloud saves that were only necessitated by Nintendo locking us out of accessing our own save data? Cheap emulation of NES and SNES titles we've been playing at a higher quality for almost 2 years, now? The same discounts on game purchases that we'd have if the service never existed at all? The dedicated game servers that don't exist?

​

In this way, Nintendo's "Online Service" is less a service and more a shakedown with benefits. The consumer is forced into paying for a service that provides nothing in the way of online infrastructure, being charged in order to even go online at all. Nintendo is collecting taxes on a service they're putting almost no money into, with what feels like the fidelity of a 2005 online network, and trying to placate people with candy they distribute occasionally. Until Nintendo actually makes games that don't take on input latency whenever they go online like the Titanic takes on water, some actual servers that they could pay for with the money they're already collecting, and netcode better than monkey-scratch, then this whole "Online Service" is nothing but an inherently farcical joke. In short, it's been a fundamentally abysmal performance, one which has willfully refused to budge an inch in 2.5 years, regardless of how many freebies in which they dress it up. For Nintendo to have done no better for its consumers by this point in time is an absolute insult.

 

[Meteor7]

whats with the idiotic comparison? how is some service you think sucks comparable to your son?

you say the online service is terrible. thus not worth spending time on it, or paying for it. then don't.
if people dont pay for it, maybe they'll change something.

Well, the comparison wasn't "this service is as important as a child", it was "both situations have a third party holding back something they don't have a right to control unless a premium is paid." Kidnapper to kidnapped for random, analogous to Nintendo to your internet functionality for subscription fee.

It's possible the alternate analogy from my previous post leaves less room for misinterpretation, but who knows.

The closest analogy to our current situation is trying to go to a shop, and being stopped access by a third party until you pay them. With the added stipulation of you being involved in some recursive payment with the shop in question, I guess. The shop is your ISP giving you internet access, the third party being Nintendo. It's taking without providing, and one company selling the right to access a service they're not providing, a service you already pay your actual providers for, is extortion, not a service.

That being said, I do hope they change things drastically, even if that change only comes years from now in the next generation.

 

[Draxikor]

Is this online situation equals in japan?

 

[AdenTheThird]

Nice! online service has come so far (':

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I got Splatoon 2 at release day and never had a single issue with disconnections or lag. In the Splatoon 2 section of the NSO mobile app there's actually a spot that shows how many disconnections I've had and it says 0.
I've had plenty of other people disconnect, leaving me with a team with 3 players, or in rare cases only 2, but since I don't seem to have any issues personally, I can only surmise that the disconnecting players have poor internet connections, or they had to turn the game off because their mom said it was dinner time.
It's probably no fault of Nintendo's or I would have experienced it too. In Splatoon 1 I did actually get disconnected a number of times. That game seemed to treat people disconnecting differently, where everyone would get kicked if one player disconnected, at least that's how I understood it.

In Mario Kart there are the occasional players warping around or items coming out of nowhere, but again, it doesn't seem to be a frequent occurrence, and could very well just be some people that have a poor internet connection. In fact Mario Kart online has always worked pretty well, even on the DS with its abysmally slow wifi, although that was only 4 player.
The same can't be said for Smash Bros which tends to lag or outright play in slow motion when playing online - haven't tested Smash Ultimate much online though so I don't know if that has improved there. It was still pretty bad in Smash 4, and it was awful in Brawl.

In fact, I've heard that online in Nintendo games is actually P2P (don't know if that's true for the Switch as well) so lag or other issues certainly can't be blamed on the servers.
And if what the OP says is correct, that certainly seems to be the case for the Switch as well.

I don't know why people seem to think having dedicated servers makes the experience better. P2P actually has less latency and lag since the data sent doesn't have to take extra steps to reach its destination. It's going to the same place anyway, sending it directly just skips a step.

And if there's lag in a P2P based game, there are only 2 possible reasons, either some people just have a bad connection, or the online code is written in a way that makes it extremely susceptible to lag.

And since it seems to be a vocal minority experiencing these issues frequently, I'm going to lean towards it being the former. Further evident by the fact that I've hardly heard anyone complain about it on the forums. They complain about the online lacking features, they complain about having to pay, but I haven't heard them complain about lag in Mario Kart and Splatoon. It's probably happened and I just missed it, but it's clearly not a common occurrence, as I check the forums multiple times a day.

You will always have some people with bad connections in any game, so some issues like that are unavoidable. I think people don't realize that.

The complaint about bad signal strength is a real issue though. The Switch seems to really struggle with that, and it doesn't just affect the JoyCons. I haven't had issues with it more than once, and that was when visiting my mom, trying out the ARMS online demo with my brother since it had a couch coop option. In his bedroom, where I get perfectly good signal with my phone, the Switch was barely able to connect at all and once it did it would only last a couple matches before I got a connection error. My phone is much smaller so why does it have better signal? It shouldn't be that way, and sadly it's not something they can fix with a software update. They could maybe increase the Tx power, but that only does so much. Maybe that's part of the reason there are disconnecting players in Splatoon and occasional weird lag in Mario Kart, but then again, Mario Kart has always been that way, it doesn't seem to have improved or gotten worse, but it's rare enough that it's not a problem IMO.

And on the topic of voice chat, I don't use it, I don't care about it, but I think Nintendo should have implemented it better. That's a genuine complaint and voice chat honestly should have been integrated into Splatoon 2 from day one. The fact that nothing has changed in regards to voice chat since then, while Fortnite players get to enjoy their voice chat with fully functioning combined mic+headphone jack is a slap in the face to people playing other games. I know Nintendo are heavily focused on being family friendly but it's holding them back and they seem to still be living in the past in that regard.

tl;dr
Overall, the OP seems heavily biased, and a tad inaccurate. For example, Nintendo's online does have dedicated matchmaking servers. Whether you think that's worth $20 a year is up to you, but those servers do cost money to run, and it's still only a third of what M$ and Sony charge. You can't expect them to pour the same amount of money into it as M$ and Sony are doing, especially when P2P actually works better than taking an extra step through a server only for that data to be sent to the same place anyway. What are they spending all that money on? Likely lining their pockets with most of it, I'll admit. But if you have any idea how much of the money spent on PS Plus or XBox Live Gold goes into someone's pockets, I'd wager a pretty big percentage of it. Probably only a few percent actually goes to paying for the servers.

Is the online experience in games perfect? No, lag does happen, some games have it worse than others, but I don't see getting dedicated servers as a thing that's going to help, it's only gonna make things worse, and I'm not sure what else they could do to fix it unless their netcode is just that bad.

Do I think you should be getting more for your $20, rather than just the same online service that was free before, with a bandaid in the form of emulated games and partial cloud saves? Yes, and honestly I don't care enough about the emulated games to want to pay for them anyway. I have plenty of devices I can run emulators on, I own many of these games already either on the original systems or Wii Virtual Console, and I would rather my $20 go towards something most people would actually pay for than essentially making people pay for something they might not even want or care about. But in the end, that's not why I got NSO. I got it to play online, cause you don't have much choice. And I don't think anyone buys NSO because it includes NES and SNES games. There would have to be a much bigger offering, possibly including some 1st party Switch games in the mix for that to be appealing to most. And perhaps that will happen in the future.

tl;drttl;dr
But the bottom line is, the OP makes it seem like NSO is a pile of steaming, barely functional garbage, and in many cases unplayable, when that's not even close to the truth. In my experience in Splatoon 2, it actually works great, I just wish they implemented a better way to handle people dropping out just as a match starts. Maybe just let another player join midgame if someone drops out. Or give the other team a small handicap if they have more players, to make it more fair.
The lag issues in Mario Kart don't really affect the gameplay, and it always seems to be a single player warping all around on the rare occasion there are lag issues. You can hardly fault Nintendo for some dude having a bad connection when everyone else in the match seems to be playing just fine. If everyone seems to be lagging, chances are you're the one dude with the bad connection. Likely the same thing that's happening to those complaining about lag in Splatoon 2 - which I've never once experienced personally.
The one series I have always found to be unplayable online (at least unless you live in the same country as your opponents) is Smash Bros, but as said I haven't tested the online in Ultimate much so I can't really speak on that.

The one thing NSO is really lacking to make it feel worth the money is a selling point other than just being able to use the online services that used to be free. NES and SNES games are not a selling point and cloud saves might be if they actually worked for every game, but since they don't, they're not much good. Other than that, I'm happy with the quality I'm getting overall. That would likely change if I was really into Smash and the experience is as bad as it has been with past entries. But eh, for me it's a game that's most fun when played locally so I'm not much interested in the online.

 

[the_randomizer]

Total disrespect you hav for nintendo and the history of gaming using the word like gargabe is a disgrace you obviously wasnt around in tht area to appreciate what games achieved back then - fine you can say you don't like them but to call them gargabe is just stupid

It's my opinion, I don't like most of the NES games on the NSO, I grew up with the SNES and if you can't my opinion, that's not my freakin problem.

Wow NES Tennis and Donkey Kong Jr., most excellent games! I can't wait to waste my money on those!

 

[GravitySuitCollector]

Wow NES Tennis and Donkey Kong Jr., most excellent games! I can't wait to waste my money on those!

Don't hate on Donkey Kong Jr. too much. It really is a good classic arcade game. I can't say Tennis aged as well, though.

As for the rest of NSO, it'd be nice if it just worked, at least a bit less laggy. Please, Nintendo.

 

[the_randomizer]

Don't hate on Donkey Kong Jr. too much. It really is a good classic arcade game. I can't say Tennis aged as well, though.

As for the rest of NSO, it'd be nice if it just worked, at least a bit less laggy. Please, Nintendo.

Out of the 60 NES games, what hasn't aged well? Most of them IMO, and if people can't take my like of SNES more, that's not my concern.

 

[Sayora]

Finally, after 2.5 years, Nintendo finally introduced SNES games for the Switch by putting out 20 SNES titles on September 5th of this year. Included in this pack are many big-name games, such as Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Kirby's Dream Course, Kirby Super Star, F-Zero, and Breath of Fire. It's undeniably a better showing than the NES pack on its release, though the amount of time taken to get to this point is arguably much too long. In addition, Nintendo has genuinely improved the online play when it comes to these titles, and while they don't feel perfect, they're at least not ruined by input latency. Unfortunately this still feels like too little too late, as it was in late 2017 that we were already given the ability to emulate these games at a much higher quality on the Switch.​

SNES Online does not include Kirby Super Star, it includes Kirby's Dream Land 3.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Both Xbox and PlayStation offer their own freebie services with their subscriptions. In the case of XBL it's Games with Gold which you get to keep for free forever, regardless of whether you continue subscribing or not, and with PSN it's Instant Game Collection, with games you collect in your library and can play for as long as you subscribe. This is separate from Gamepass and PS Now which are separate services that give you access to a library of games for the duration of your subscription.

You only get to keep the 360 games MS offers with Games with Gold, you don't keep any of the Xboner games when you stop subscribing. The Xbone games function the same as PS+, you can play them as long as you subscribe, but you can't after your subscription ends.


Anyways, on topic, I only have NSO cuz I got it for free for a year from Twitch, not going to bother paying for it (even if the cost is minuscule) because it lacks basically any interesting features to keep me paying (and their shit online infrastructure certainly isn't worth $20 a year), though SNES games are a small start. If they start offering real bonuses that we haven't seen before (AKA N64+ free titles), then it'll be hard pass for me.

 

[osaka35]

I got Splatoon 2 at release day and never had a single issue with disconnections or lag. In the Splatoon 2 section of the NSO mobile app there's actually a spot that shows how many disconnections I've had and it says 0.
I've had plenty of other people disconnect, leaving me with a team with 3 players, or in rare cases only 2, but since I don't seem to have any issues personally, I can only surmise that the disconnecting players have poor internet connections, or they had to turn the game off because their mom said it was dinner time.
It's probably no fault of Nintendo's or I would have experienced it too. In Splatoon 1 I did actually get disconnected a number of times. That game seemed to treat people disconnecting differently, where everyone would get kicked if one player disconnected, at least that's how I understood it.

In Mario Kart there are the occasional players warping around or items coming out of nowhere, but again, it doesn't seem to be a frequent occurrence, and could very well just be some people that have a poor internet connection. In fact Mario Kart online has always worked pretty well, even on the DS with its abysmally slow wifi, although that was only 4 player.
The same can't be said for Smash Bros which tends to lag or outright play in slow motion when playing online - haven't tested Smash Ultimate much online though so I don't know if that has improved there. It was still pretty bad in Smash 4, and it was awful in Brawl.

In fact, I've heard that online in Nintendo games is actually P2P (don't know if that's true for the Switch as well) so lag or other issues certainly can't be blamed on the servers.
And if what the OP says is correct, that certainly seems to be the case for the Switch as well.

I don't know why people seem to think having dedicated servers makes the experience better. P2P actually has less latency and lag since the data sent doesn't have to take extra steps to reach its destination. It's going to the same place anyway, sending it directly just skips a step.

And if there's lag in a P2P based game, there are only 2 possible reasons, either some people just have a bad connection, or the online code is written in a way that makes it extremely susceptible to lag.

And since it seems to be a vocal minority experiencing these issues frequently, I'm going to lean towards it being the former. Further evident by the fact that I've hardly heard anyone complain about it on the forums. They complain about the online lacking features, they complain about having to pay, but I haven't heard them complain about lag in Mario Kart and Splatoon. It's probably happened and I just missed it, but it's clearly not a common occurrence, as I check the forums multiple times a day.

You will always have some people with bad connections in any game, so some issues like that are unavoidable. I think people don't realize that.

The complaint about bad signal strength is a real issue though. The Switch seems to really struggle with that, and it doesn't just affect the JoyCons. I haven't had issues with it more than once, and that was when visiting my mom, trying out the ARMS online demo with my brother since it had a couch coop option. In his bedroom, where I get perfectly good signal with my phone, the Switch was barely able to connect at all and once it did it would only last a couple matches before I got a connection error. My phone is much smaller so why does it have better signal? It shouldn't be that way, and sadly it's not something they can fix with a software update. They could maybe increase the Tx power, but that only does so much. Maybe that's part of the reason there are disconnecting players in Splatoon and occasional weird lag in Mario Kart, but then again, Mario Kart has always been that way, it doesn't seem to have improved or gotten worse, but it's rare enough that it's not a problem IMO.

And on the topic of voice chat, I don't use it, I don't care about it, but I think Nintendo should have implemented it better. That's a genuine complaint and voice chat honestly should have been integrated into Splatoon 2 from day one. The fact that nothing has changed in regards to voice chat since then, while Fortnite players get to enjoy their voice chat with fully functioning combined mic+headphone jack is a slap in the face to people playing other games. I know Nintendo are heavily focused on being family friendly but it's holding them back and they seem to still be living in the past in that regard.

tl;dr
Overall, the OP seems heavily biased, and a tad inaccurate. For example, Nintendo's online does have dedicated matchmaking servers. Whether you think that's worth $20 a year is up to you, but those servers do cost money to run, and it's still only a third of what M$ and Sony charge. You can't expect them to pour the same amount of money into it as M$ and Sony are doing, especially when P2P actually works better than taking an extra step through a server only for that data to be sent to the same place anyway. What are they spending all that money on? Likely lining their pockets with most of it, I'll admit. But if you have any idea how much of the money spent on PS Plus or XBox Live Gold goes into someone's pockets, I'd wager a pretty big percentage of it. Probably only a few percent actually goes to paying for the servers.

Is the online experience in games perfect? No, lag does happen, some games have it worse than others, but I don't see getting dedicated servers as a thing that's going to help, it's only gonna make things worse, and I'm not sure what else they could do to fix it unless their netcode is just that bad.

Do I think you should be getting more for your $20, rather than just the same online service that was free before, with a bandaid in the form of emulated games and partial cloud saves? Yes, and honestly I don't care enough about the emulated games to want to pay for them anyway. I have plenty of devices I can run emulators on, I own many of these games already either on the original systems or Wii Virtual Console, and I would rather my $20 go towards something most people would actually pay for than essentially making people pay for something they might not even want or care about. But in the end, that's not why I got NSO. I got it to play online, cause you don't have much choice. And I don't think anyone buys NSO because it includes NES and SNES games. There would have to be a much bigger offering, possibly including some 1st party Switch games in the mix for that to be appealing to most. And perhaps that will happen in the future.

tl;drttl;dr
But the bottom line is, the OP makes it seem like NSO is a pile of steaming, barely functional garbage, and in many cases unplayable, when that's not even close to the truth. In my experience in Splatoon 2, it actually works great, I just wish they implemented a better way to handle people dropping out just as a match starts. Maybe just let another player join midgame if someone drops out. Or give the other team a small handicap if they have more players, to make it more fair.
The lag issues in Mario Kart don't really affect the gameplay, and it always seems to be a single player warping all around on the rare occasion there are lag issues. You can hardly fault Nintendo for some dude having a bad connection when everyone else in the match seems to be playing just fine. If everyone seems to be lagging, chances are you're the one dude with the bad connection. Likely the same thing that's happening to those complaining about lag in Splatoon 2 - which I've never once experienced personally.
The one series I have always found to be unplayable online (at least unless you live in the same country as your opponents) is Smash Bros, but as said I haven't tested the online in Ultimate much so I can't really speak on that.

The one thing NSO is really lacking to make it feel worth the money is a selling point other than just being able to use the online services that used to be free. NES and SNES games are not a selling point and cloud saves might be if they actually worked for every game, but since they don't, they're not much good. Other than that, I'm happy with the quality I'm getting overall. That would likely change if I was really into Smash and the experience is as bad as it has been with past entries. But eh, for me it's a game that's most fun when played locally so I'm not much interested in the online.

the fact wifi and usb ethernet are around usb 2.0 speeds may also play a big part of it. I have fiber and use ethernet, and I see a lot of the issues. i don't play much online because of it.

I just thought it was cheaters, but it could easily be lag. could be easy to confuse one for the other if you didn't know better, and complain about the wrong thing.

side note, splatoon 2 does need to fix its matchmaking. I've seen a team of lvl5s matched with a team of lvl30s and most of the lvl 5s jumped. that was a fun match. they need a system that isn't pants-on-head silly. might make online feel more like it's skill based than luck based.

 

[Ampersound]

I payed 5$ once for the online for a year. If they don't have proper servers by next year i will cancel the subscription immediately. This is unacceptable for 2019!

 

[The Real Jdbye]

the fact wifi and usb ethernet are around usb 2.0 speeds may also play a big part of it. I have fiber and use ethernet, and I see a lot of the issues. i don't play much online because of it.

I just thought it was cheaters, but it could easily be lag. could be easy to confuse one for the other if you didn't know better, and complain about the wrong thing.

side note, splatoon 2 does need to fix its matchmaking. I've seen a team of lvl5s matched with a team of lvl30s and most of the lvl 5s jumped. that was a fun match. they need a system that isn't pants-on-head silly. might make online feel more like it's skill based than luck based.

You don't need more than 480 mbps to play online games. You hardly need more than 5, if that.

I never pay attention to the levels, I didn't even realize they were displayed. Is that ranked battle or normal? I mostly play normal.

 

[osaka35]

You don't need more than 480 mbps to play online games. You hardly need more than 5, if that.

I never pay attention to the levels, I didn't even realize they were displayed. Is that ranked battle or normal? I mostly play normal.

I mean you can play consistently, but is there really no downsides to max usb 2.0 for online play? since it's p2p, i mean.

normal, not ranked. haven't played for a while, but they at least used to show level. you knew you weren't going to have fun when you were level 20 paired with level 5s and playing against a group of level 30s. i mean. you don't even want to play then. wonder if they hide them now just so folks don't complain XD

 

[piratesephiroth]

The idea that charging for online play is antiquated and hails back to the days of exclusively peer-to-peer multiplayer, sometimes backed with small Master servers that did little beyond listing the active sessions - that kind of multiplayer was effectively free, or close to free to implement, so charging for it wouldn't make a lick of sense. Nowadays multiplayer entails running enormous data centers filled from the basement to the roof with high-end servers that deal with a lot of the computing on their end, and that's not free - it has costs associated with running the system. The fact that PC games have gotten away with free online for this long is an anomaly and not the status quo - lots of PC games operate on a subscription model, particularly in the MMO sphere which has similar requirements. Other games subsidise this extra cost with vanity items or lootboxes. I suspect that as the implementation of cloud computing progresses there will be a tipping point for "free online", and we're not far away from that time. Industry giants like Valve can offset their losses with their storefronts, but the same cannot be said about smaller scale solutions.

Comparing P2P multiplayer with MMOs? What the heck are you even talking about, lol?
MMOs need to have a good structure of servers, of course (nothing near "high end" as you claim, rofl, unless you're running a globally popular game). However this has nothing to do with regular multiplayer service, where the servers only provide matchmaking.
By your logic they needed to charge for eshop access too because you're consuming massive amounts of resources just by browsing it, and that service does require very good servers.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I mean you can play consistently, but is there really no downsides to max usb 2.0 for online play? since it's p2p, i mean.

normal, not ranked. haven't played for a while, but they at least used to show level. you knew you weren't going to have fun when you were level 20 paired with level 5s and playing against a group of level 30s. i mean. you don't even want to play then. wonder if they hide them now just so folks don't complain XD

Your internet probably isn't fast enough to make use of USB 3.0 speeds anyway since most internet connections are way slower than 480 mbps. The only time you would really notice the difference between 480 mbps and 1gbps/1000mbps is on a PC when copying files over LAN or something, but even then it's only half the speed, you'd tell the difference but it would still be fast enough, it would just take longer to copy.

As for wifi I don't think it's connected to USB, but the wifi adapter in the Switch just isn't super fast (it's not 802.11ac as far as I can tell, or if it is, it's a poor version of it), not that it matters because like I said, online play really doesn't use much bandwidth, latency and poor connections (dropped packets) is a much bigger factor. I saw speeds well over 100mbps downloading stuff onto my Switch and that's plenty for pretty much anything, even streaming movies in 4K UHD if that ever becomes a thing on the Switch. The hardware is technically capable of it but Nintendo haven't enabled anything past 1080p output.

 

[Foxi4]

Comparing P2P multiplayer with MMOs? What the heck are you even talking about, lol?
MMOs need to have a good structure of servers, of course (nothing near "high end" as you claim, rofl, unless you're running a globally popular game). However this has nothing to do with regular multiplayer service, where the servers only provide matchmaking.
By your logic they needed to charge for eshop access too because you're consuming massive amounts of resources just by browsing it, and that service does require very good servers.

You're not very familiar with how modern games work then. Very few AAA titles still cling to the P2P model with servers only dedicated to matchmaking, many popular games played online are either hybrid systems of P2P host "bubbles" connected by an overarching world server (games like Destiny, for instance) or straight up run the entire process server side with the clients being only responsible for displaying graphics and sending input. In some games even a portion of the AI, graphics and physics workload is off-loaded to the servers when played online, the days of straight up P2P are over. This new approach has many advantages, particularly in terms of curtailing cheating and enabling a level playing field in terms of latency. As for the latter point, you *are* charged for using the eShop - part of the proceeds from selling digital goods is dedicated to keeping the servers up and running, just like a portion of the profit from selling goods and services pays the rent of a brick and mortar store, I don't know what kind of point you're trying to make. That browsing the shop is free? Yeah, of course it's free, people who *buy things from it* offset that.

 

[chrisrlink]

I'm getting NSO with my switch lite + let's go pikachu or 3 houses a bit off topic has any legit switch been banned with trading *legal* pokemon between let's go games? and using them online (I'm not talking genned I'm talking about pokemon caught in game traded to a hacked switch use power ups *candies, HP/PP up* then traded back

 

[Foxi4]

You only get to keep the 360 games MS offers with Games with Gold, you don't keep any of the Xboner games when you stop subscribing. The Xbone games function the same as PS+, you can play them as long as you subscribe, but you can't after your subscription ends.

Ah, I didn't know that, I thought you got to keep them for good. I learn something new every day, I'll adjust my post to reflect that.

 

[piratesephiroth]

You're not very familiar with how modern games work then. Very few AAA titles still cling to the P2P model with servers only dedicated to matchmaking, many popular games played online are either hybrid systems of P2P host "bubbles" connected by an overarching world server (games like Destiny, for instance) or straight up run the entire process server side with the clients being only responsible for displaying graphics. In some games even a portion of the AI, graphics and physics workload is off-loaded to the servers when played online, the days of straight up P2P are over.

You're talking about rare AAA titles with MMO features.
Is Destiny even on the Switch?
The absolute vast majority of multiplayer games use exclusively P2P for gameplay, especially in these modern times when indie development gets stronger and stronger.

 

[Foxi4]

You're talking about rare AAA titles with MMO features.
Is Destiny even on the Switch?
The absolute vast majority of multiplayer games use exclusively P2P for gameplay, especially in these modern times when indie development gets stronger and stronger.

Quality over quantity. Overwatch, to think of a different example, has no host among the players - all the players are clients connected to a dedicated server which runs an instance of the match. Another popular shooter, Rainbow Six Siege, uses a hybrid system with the Terrorist Hunt mode ran locally by a host with an option of P2P players joining in and the Casual and Ranked multiplayer modes ran entirely on the dedicated server running match instances. Even indie developers have access to these features as many of them are baked into popular engines like UE or Unity. Modern netcode is very different from what you imagine it to be.