I pay money to Nintendo for the privilege of using their online services. In return, Splatoon 3 is equipped with a vastly ill-optimized peer-to-peer matchmaking system resulting in long matchmaking times and frequent dropped connections. The dropped connections can cause it to take anywhere from 10-15 minutes just to find one short 2-3 minute long match, and has also cost me points in the ranked system when I get automatically assigned a loss due to being forcibly disconnected. I have been in contact with Nintendo support multiple times during this and been through all steps of their troubleshooting my own network, and found that there are no issues with my own network. So far, their response beyond this has been simply to say that they are sorry I am having issues and that they have no further solution available. I tried to escalate formal feedback to the correct team at Nintendo who could potentially help with correcting the issues on their end, but was told that while they would take note of my feedback, I would not be contacted back and they could not connect me with anyone else. It’s ridiculous that I have to pay Nintendo extra money monthly to use online services in their games and they aren’t even hosting servers; even worse still that they refuse to help with issues and refuse to acknowledge that the problem is on their end. Nintendo needs to either improve the optimization of their peer to peer matchmaking or, more logically, scrap the entire system and actually host proper servers for the game. It’s practically criminal to be charging money for online services that are less functional than competitor’s Microsoft and Sony online services from almost 20 years ago!
