Topic: The Nintendo Switch Online Subscription Service Thread

@gcunit @octane
Hi, how about transforming/renaming this thread into the "Official Nintendo Switch Online Subscription" thread? My guess is that there will soon be a deluge of questions threads about the sub and it would be good to have the discussions more confined.

@Therad Have been thinking about trying to make one of these threads official, but I don't tend to actively follow them to determine which one would be most appropriate. Happy to take your nomination though, thanks. I'll make it happen.

Well, I think I have found a great reason for why I wont be subscribing to Nintendo Online even though I had the funds set aside to do so. Apparently my playing Mario Kart online this month has gotten me close to hitting my data usage limit for my ISP. I hadn't even known I have a data limit. It's never come up before.

Playing MMOs for 14 hours a day and streaming Netflix couldn't accomplish this. Playing online games on X-Box couldn't pull it off. But online races in Mario Kart 8 did... Wow?

Have you setup port forwarding and/or dmz in your router? Remove those rules and mk will draw less.

Wouldn't doing that also mean it's easier for others to steal internet?

I believe all pf/dmz does is put your switch outside the internal router firewall. I’m sure someone could tell it better.

What I’ve done is also hide my SSID from broadcasting, and use the security (WEP I think)

EDIT: my autocorrect went nuts and lagged out, so it originally said it was Mubarak’s SSID was hidden. I don’t think his was...

Very sure. After all, only Splatoon 2 is supported by the Nintendo Online app so far, and unlike my brother I don't get excessively upset about them. I just get back to the race

All I can think of is I kept being picked as the host, which was eating up data like nobody's business.

No, it is the other way around. If Nintendo have any security issues with the switch, hackers can use it as an attack vector to attack other things on your lan.

A true DMZ partion your net into 2 different networks, one secure and one unsecure. The problem is that most home routers, if any, does this.

Mk might draw up to twelve times as much bandwidth if you have port forwarding/DMZ on. This is because Nintendo use your switch as a game server, which is because they don't want to pay for that bandwidth.

Yeah, no... If I almost hit the data limit from playing Mario Kart 8 online for a few hours six or seven times, increasing the bandwidth used by 12x isn't a very smart idea IMO. I'm still trying to get into my ISP's account management (why on earth does it send the password reset link to an email account that's only accessible once you've used the password reset link... instead of to the same email the monthly "your statement is available online" message goes to?!)

Anyway, once I can access the account, I can track exactly where and when all the 400 gb of data was used. I know where about 200 gb is from (downloading Switch games and reinstalling software on my desktop after a clean reinstall of Windows). I'm strongly suspecting the rest were from Mario Kart 8 though. Namely because the my normal usage of the internet doesn't risk me going over 400 gb of data even if I had to clean install windows twice for various reasons (such as a program borking Windows when it uninstalls)

Dang, make sure to keep us updated! I'd be interested to see what exactly happened. And your network is secured, yeah? With no guest network enabled?

I change the PSK every week because I'd had neighbors who would steal internet before. And I unplug the router if I'm not actually doing anything online to discourage things even further. It should be secure, but that's one reason I want to look into things. I wasn't even home for 2 weeks of the current billing period. So the many hours I spent online in Mario Kart races then wouldn't count against me. And I've only done maybe 6 hours total of Mario Kart online, tops. I mostly do single player or local 2 player split screen.

@FaeKnight Let me guess, Comcast with a "Data Plan" at 1TB? And this is why I believe Yves Guillemot is bat-stuff crazy with his "everyone will stream" and the entire industry is equally crazy with "digital future!"

All that said, no MK8 shouldn't consume nearly the bandwidth that most XBox One online games will consume (though online gaming tends to not consume too much data to begin with relative to streaming.) Downloading patches on XBox should be a lot worse than actually playing most games.

A DMZ as Hobbit said merely moves one single device outside the firewall so that it basically receives all inbound traffic the router isn't routing elsewhere as though it's using the same public IP the router itself is. It eliminates the need for NAT....I don't think that'll help if you're using that much data somehow. I'm still betting it isn't MK8. I was playing Splatoon 2 and MK8 on cellular with a 30GB bucket and was fine. I didn't even dare stream video on that connection!

Mediacom, and they changed my service at some point without actually informing me they would be changing it. Connection speed is the same, but they added a 400 gigabyte data limit, with an extra $10 tacked onto the bill if you use all 400 gigs, then an additional $10 for every full or partial 50 gigs over the limit. So my normal bill of $110.59 for phone and internet jumps to $120.59 if I use 400-449 gigs of data, $130.59 for 450-499 gigs of data used, and so forth. But the first I heard of this was a banner announcement at the top of my web browser (usually notifications of service going down for maintenance) telling me "you've used 85% of your 400 gb data limit"

To be fair, Mediacom are dishonest and will raise rates while reducing service at the drop of a hat, often with no warning. But they are also honest about their dishonesty. Which is the only reason I switched to Mediacom when my old ISP decided to keep charging me for top tier DSL high speed internet while claiming "almost as fast as dial-up" was the best connection speed in my area after I moved two and a half blocks.

Till I can figure things out, the only unknown factor in my data usage is the MK8 races.

EDIT: The graph for when data got used is showing the bulk of the usage was in the middle of the month. Which happens to be when I was doing the online races. My normal usage is about 80 gigs a month, with it jumping in June and July due to buying a PS Vita and a bunch of games. There's another spike within the last three days caused by having to reinstall a bunch of stuff on my desktop.

That sounds pretty illegal.

I'm kind of surprised we're this close to it but they still have to announce a release date.

From what I can tell, it's legal, but just barely. Mediacom has a long history of raising rates and changing services with no warning to customers. But hey, at least their honest about their dishonesty. The service contract strait up tells you they can raise the rates and alter service plans without any warning. And it doesn't even do so in fine print. It's in plain English, in the main body of the service contract. Not even lawyer double speak is used.

Yeah, every new week we await some kind of Subscription Devoted Direct (Though a general one would be nice too) being announced with all the details beyond the price, online play, half of the NES Line Up and cloud saves. Because right now, there's really not much to get excited for this service.

I would like to hope they surprise us with something, like maybe a handful of SNES games made available (Super Mario Kart with online play? That alone with generate more subs then say, NES games with the same feature) or even give away that New Super Mario Bros U port that was rumored as an occasional "big game" they'll add the the library. They have more than enough big games from Gamecube to Wii U (Bar the ones worth rereleasing as full releases) to give out as freebies and heck, they know we want Gamecube games.

But as we're running out of time, its feeling more and more unlikely this service will launch with a bang....

In all honesty, since the sub will likely be required for Smash online, I don’t think they’ll have any problem with sub enrollment. Same with Splatoon in Japan.
And I don’t foresee them releasing NGC games for free when those are still recent enough to monetize (a la Luigi’s Mansion 3D).

It would be cool if they had some features like achievements or leaderboards along with that online compenant. Seeing the classic NES games added with online components was really cool and I'm hoping we'll see more functions like these added to other classic games.

I still don't like how close we are to it yet have no clue when this service mandatory for online play relases

Second half of September, from what they've said. but no exact dates. They also haven't released the other 10 initial games for the NES service. Which I would have thought they'd have done by now.