But I like friend codes!

Ding Dong! The friend codes are dead. Which old Friend Code? The Wicked Friend codes!

...yeah, that was a lot better in my mind. But seriously, hurray for the end of friend codes!

I don't mind them... but they're just a pain in the arse when you have to add the same friend over and over for different games. Having the singular Friend Code on the 3DS is the best though, you can still limit it to your friends, but don't have to bother adding a new FC so you can play together online.

I still say keep them in some form. Maybe accompanying the name?

So Friend Codes isn't so much a problem as Nintendo's insistance to make communicating with friends as difficult as possible. There is no point whatsoever in having 3DS friends, for instance.

My faith this attitude has been improved with the Wii U is very low.

very true, hopefully they're going to add a pictochat or some other chat with friends thing soon though.

I was happy about this. It's such a simple thing, but makes a huge improvement because it allows you to give your profile personality. Plus it makes sharing and adding friends a lot easier.
"Hey, let me add you in Smash Bros. What's your FC?"
"3452-2534-2354"
Who's going to remember that chain of numbers, especially in person? It's much easier to just reply with words.
"You just bought Borderlands? Nice! Add me, Gamertag is BedCommando, no space"
Easy.

In person or over the phone friend codes are a pain in that way but once it's setup it's no different. Also, and especially for a portable system, the friend codes are added automatically (yes?) whenever you play local multiplayer with someone.

It's no different to mobile phone numbers. You don't really need to remember the numbers, you save it to a name and forget about it. The number sharing itself is ridiculous, and you remembering your own number means nothing when you get a new number, but once that's done it doesn't matter. Set and forget.

As people (including me) have said, the biggest problem is it not being unified. If it was a "gamertag" and you had to have a different one for every game it would be almost as ridiculous. Why should I have to re-add the same person for multiple different games? Why do I have to work out outside of the game which games we both own?

As far as I'm concerned:
multiple friend codes ~= multiple gamer tags < single friend code ~= single gamer tag

i agree with the whole thing about friend codes, they would work perfectly fine if you only had one each, not one for each game, but either way its no real problem so long as they have only one of whatever they have

Didn't you hear/read that video-chat has been confirmed?

Plus, I guess that's fine and dandy and all with just one friend-code, but let's look around here. Some people can't dispense 12 digits off-head. A friend name of sort on the other hand slips of the tongue in an instant; I mean, it's your name.

I'm not saying I can't memorise an FC for myself (as I have an eidetic memory) but others do prefer a friend name, and I guess it's considerably easy for all of us. Even in the NL Podcast Episode 20, I remember Jon suggesting it, despite them already discussing singular 3DS FCs. It's a better option, unless we all want to regress back to the digits, unified or not.

I want it to cost at LEAST $25 a year. Free Online means more trolls, changing their names whenever they want.

I want it to be free with a simple ignore function that bans trolls and cheaters from your online experience. make it easy and cost-efficient yourself.

What would be really awesome would be the ability to add your 3DS friendcode to your profile. Then you could see if people are playing their 3DS or WiiU, chat with people on either system, and play against people on either systems (Smash was mentioned to have some sort of 3DS/WiiU linkage, and I think that would be neat).

I saw this earlier on Gamespot, but I guess I either thought it was too good to be true or was too tired to post the news on here, one or the other. Even though friend codes didn't really bother me, it was a small hassle to have to write down someone's code for each Wii game and take up space on the signatures, so this is very good news.