During the Super Mario Maker 2 Nintendo Direct it came to be known that the highly anticipated game would support online play in both vs and cooperative fashions. The thought of playing custom Mario levels with or against friends sounded awesome! Unfortunately, it seems this is not meant to be as a new report has come out stating that online play will be limited to random matchmaking only. That’s right randos only… Ok, Nintendo must have a good reason to lock such an important feature away from us right? No, not really. The reason multiplayer is locked to randoms only is because playing with friends could mess up the competitive global leaderboards. That’s right, all multiplayer is locked to randos only because someone might manipulate the leaderboards…
“This is true. As the game is now, you cannot create friend lobbies online. You can only play online with randoms. You can still get friends together and play with local play, and you’re free to play with four players on one Nintendo Switch system. You can also still challenge your friends to your creations and take on their designs through Course IDs and having them follow your Maker profile.”
Now I get Nintendo wanting to keep the integrity of their leaderboard system intact but exploiting a leaderboard is as old as online gaming itself. Seriously, this draconian implementation of restricting friends ability to play together isn’t going to solve this. All this has done is made it so friends who live a long distance from each other lose out on a way to play together. For those with local friends, local play and same console play still allow for you to play together. Sadly Nintendo has delivered a big phat finger to the rest of us and show that they still have no clue how the online world works.
What do you all think about this news?
