Nintendo Apologises for eShop Issues Caused by High Super Smash Bros. Traffic, Urges Patience

This is bordering on ridiculous now. Nintendo really will never learn, will they?

It's annoying, but not really surprising. Sakurai even said it himself that there would be issues at the end of the presentation.

This is getting hard to defend when it happens every single time. -_-

It makes you wonder if they are just incompetent or unable to fix their issues. From Club Nintendo website outages to eShop troubles like this, I wonder if their troubles are deeper than a simple fix. I don't know what those troubles would possibly be though.

They surely would have known that millions of people would get on there all at once.

I decided to just wait after getting two error plus the prices have made me a bit hesitant.

Is it that hard, Nintendo? geesh.

Actually, I'm not having too many issues now. Just got Lucas with little troubles. Looks like the traffic is passing through now.

Can't get Ryu within twelve seconds so Nintendo sucks and blahblahblah.

Pretty much covers most people.

I trained like a Jedi in life to be patient and it payed off, went out for a hour came back had 2 disconnects but have my characters and stages. I'm not mad at Nintendo they warned us and what was to be expected really all I have to say is Thank you Nintendo for already winning E3 2015 and making quality products and doing DLC right. (all in my opinion)

With all the new Smash content on the eShop. I'm not surprised the eShop is having issues.

Did they not know this would'ave happened? Come on Nintendo it's 3 new characters for one of your popular franchises that you own,you should'ave least prepared for this.

well i was only trying to add $20 to my account charged me twice, but i did successfully downloadload bundle #2

Good. You should be sorry.

i wasn't mad anyway! i was just pleased that the miiverse stage was available after the presentation

Its kinda silly to accuse Nintendo of being incompetant considering server crashes from high traffic can happen to anyone honestly. When it happens to Sony and MS nobody bats an eye but when it happens to Nintendo people use it as another excuse to say they are behind the times. I take it none of you are aware of what happened with Steam a few christmases ago when they offered the full game of L4D2 for free

@MyLegGuy This. It happens every time and Nintendo never learn.
You should be able to purchase and use something when it is released, not hours/days later.

And people still defend them.

@Webby-sama But that's really not the issue here. The problem is that this happens every time there's a major release on the eShop. It shouldn't take two and a half hours to download DLC.

I guess this could be a good problem to have in one way to look at it.

Mine keeps crashing on check out and its so infuriating.

@lividd3ad And it doesn't happen to every other online retailer out there when announcing high discounts or promotions? Nintendo does need to improve this, but at the same time, this happens to every single company out there, there was a reason why Sakurai warned that there could be problems after the Direct.

it was horrible at 11:00 through 12:00 est time. I went mow the lawn. and now I downloaded it super easily. like there was no traffic at all. MAN those dlc characters are worth it.

Although this may be an unpopular opinion... maybe it would be better to spread out a release of something that will be stupidly popular across the regions by a couple of hours or so to stop the servers crapping themselves instantly.

If they don't ever intend to make the servers better anyway.

@Wolfgabe it shouldn't happen to anyone to begin with! it's nearly worse when it happens to sony/MS because you are paying for those services. wasn't fun trying to redeem my 20 euro xbox live gold on christmas day, i'll tell you that

@Peanutosan I'm pretty sure every region has its own servers.

@manu0 Hmmm... fair point. That thought never crossed my mind for some reason.

No excuse then really :/

@Peanutosan The excuse is that from a business standpoint it just doesn't make sense to upgrade the servers in a way that allows them to handle these singular peak loads, especially not with Wii U's relatively small user base.

Nintendo should apologize for Ryu being in Smash Brothers, in general.

I'm not even going to bother trying to get the DLC until later next week

Please understand.

I keep on trying and trying and get so far and then I am unable to connect.

first world problems, and all that. People need to put things into perspective
But in all seriousness, 1) no ones gonna remember error messages or how long exactly it took to download these add ons and 2) reports of an eshop meltdown or whatever are going to create more buzz so it's not really within Nintendo's interest to fix these issues at their cost.
Plus, how often do you hear about people clamouring for DLC on other platforms? That's quite a story.

Gosh dang people. Must everyone flip out and act like it's the end of the world anytime something happens like high traffic? Good grief so you can't buy DLC this very waking moment, you have my deepest sympathies.

Well the free Miiverse level updated fine for my kids, so Im happy.

Kind of funny though how we get the free stuff no problem but for paid stuff there is a problem, it really should be the other way around.

Kids played for about an hour, now the youngest is back to playing Minecraft, my oldest is doing his homework, wife is shopping for new clothes, and Im thinking about going to play Splatoon. Which was also $60 like SSBU but at least so far no paid DLC, and only 3 hard to find amiibo, not 51.

I really hope Zelda U is one and done. Never thought Nintendo would go so far so fast w/ DLC. At least Pokemon Shuffle and Rumble were free-to-start, I really can't purchase too many more $60-to-start games.

going to get him next week after the fervor has died down.

Well, if everyone's going to wait until tomorrow and next week then I should be fine getting them tonight. Don't have my eShop card anyways.

Don't really care (mostly because of the cost). If I get anything it wont be for a couple weeks anyway.

@Plateface And it happens to every other company too. PSN is down regularly on PS4 due to DDoS attacks and high traffic. The eShop servers being down is normal.

I'm not sure if I can detract from playing Splatoon right now. So, this isn't going to bother me. But, I'm glad to see that there is some new DLC for Smash.

Didn't Nintendo tell us to expect this in the Smash presentation a few hours ago? Chill, people.

Took me about five tries, but I finally was able to order my DLC. I got all three fighters, plus Green Greens and the Zero costume.

Add that to Mewtwo and the three costumes I'd already purchased, aaand...I've spent more money on Smash than I'd intended. But hey, I'll get way, way more mileage out of this game than I would out of 95% of games that retail for the same price, so I probably shouldn't complain.

I was at my friends birthday party and only arrived home later so I didn't have any problems.

I tried to get the new fighters after the presentation, but had the network issues, so i'll try again later. I wish Nintendo could reinforce their network when they expect a large load

So what nintendo had a issue. It's not like they have problems all the time.i can count 2 pretext for a splatoon and now.im glad that means people are using the wii u.

@IceClimbers not eshop.added down this is the first since I got my wii u last year.psn all the time

I was surprised to have no issue at all buying them from the eShop. Extremely seamless. Thanks Nintendo!

I tried a couple times in the first thirty minutes, then I left and walked my dogs and took care of house chores. Came back in a couple hours and things went off without a hitch. You don't pay for Nintendo's online, so I'm willing to take the trade off of the servers crashing with a popular release. It's after all not the end of the world...

@Luna_110 It happened with Steam a couple days ago with the opening of the Summer Sales. I could not buy anything in the first hours of the promotion, server overload.
And everyone pretty much agrees that Steam is an amazing online service. So, is it ok for Valve to fail but not for Nintendo?

@Wolfgabe I was about to say the same thing. Practically every companies servers have crash at one time or another from Microsoft to Google. People some times.

@lividd3ad No. Never. But, please... understand.

I was unable to get into the eShop earlier today but a couple of hours later and everything was fine. Not a huge issue.

Yeah it sucked, but I was able to buy the DLC. Everything is cool.

No surprise, but at least we get free online.

Not trying to defend Nintendo here because I do feel flabbergasted at their decisions and incompetence. If you think that the eShop servers being down is normal and a small recurring problem, how about compare that to the DDoS attacks Sony and Microsoft experienced last year, which was way worse?

Such display of attitude shows that you guys are no better than Sony or Microsoft fans at their worst behaviors.

I tried a few times and ended up having to go to work.

I'm home now and I guess I'll start downloading.

(It's really not that big of a deal to be honest)

@faren916
You're comparing Hackers to Nintendo's unwilling attitude to upgrade their servers and online experience. So your argument isn't really valid. The eShop becomes gimped at the announcement of a few DLC characters. At this point I think being irritated is very warranted, especially after repeated occurrences over the past few years. There would be riots if the XBOX and PS stores were this faulty.

@AyeHaley Yes, it is. IT can not plan for theoretical peak demand, only expected averages. For something like this that is planned but will cause an unknown amount of traffic, all that can be done is to prepare everything that can be done on the current budget and then present the factual results for the next time. The documentation will hopefully be enough to show to upper management that more budgeting, people and hardware is necessary, but often management will decline to increase any resources since this is planning for a rare peak, and not the expected averages.

Not once in my career have I met an IT manager nor engineer come in to work and say "I'm not going to set up enough resources for our needs. Just because."

@omalleycat215 "Abraham DeLacy Guiseppe Casey".

I didn't really mind that much but, it would have been a nicer experience if the eShop had a basket like feature. Then you could save items to pay for later/when it kicked you back to the store front after trying to pay instead of having to go through all the steps of selecting DLC again and again.

Why are so many people so mad that Nintendo brought Capcom's Ryu into Smash Bros? So what if many third party companies don't make their games for Wii U? Nintendo makes good enough games themselves and it's pretty mature of them not to get bitter at other companies and treat them poorly because of how Nintendo gets treated by other companies. People should learn that lesson themselves. Treat others better than how they treat you even if they are being ridiculous to you.

@IceClimbers That hardly makes it acceptable.
And being hacked is slightly different.

Wow, talk about first world problems.

It's not perfect, but it's really not cost effective to maintain a server structure large enough to handle these occasional rushes and peak downloads, if they occur every few months for a few hours right after announcement, and then for the other 99% of the time, they handle 99% less traffic.

This most certainly does happen to other platforms, whether hacked or not.

@Action51 The well-known "My cookie doesn't fit into my glass of milk" problem. People don't understand that when the servers are at the limits, they have to wait until all the earlier downloads are done. But no, they want it now, right now and at best yesterday.

Dear people and friends, have patience and don't just throw rocks at Nintendo just because your download is slow at a time, where someone gets online, that everyone wants and tries to download. Think and try to keep a keen head It is not like those DLCs are limited. They are endless and won't run out, so calm down and wait.

@SnuggleMon I think it's fair comment to say Nintendo could prepare better for the mad rush, I've put my card details in about 20 times now trying to download Lucas. There has to be a better solution to this highly predictable predicament!

@adamatsu You can't predict how many people want to buy this DLC and how many people want to buy something else. All I say is, no matter where you buy a game or DLC (Nintendo EShop / PS Network / Xbox Market), there can be lags or delays if new and wanted games and DLCs are fresh out. One has always remember to this. No matter how big your servers are, there is a limit and if this is reached, nothing can help you to smooth the traffic. Speaking of it, does anyone knows how big the Nintendo severs are? I mean, it is easy to say that they have bad servers, but I never heard someone talked about their tech, so saying "they have bad servers" is a pretty wage statement.

I gotta say, this has has really sucked the life out of me. I've been out of the loop due to exams, so naturally I didn't hear about Ryu, Roy or any of that nonsense. All I knew was Lucas, and... Eh. I was happy to have him back.

Then I found a bundle deal. And I was depressed. It'll cost me $37.00 Canadian to get all of the new characters, stages, costumes etc. That's just second wave too, not counting all the old DLC such as cat costumes, Mewtwo or any of that. This is total over-saturation. I was ready to spend six bucks on getting Lucas, but with three characters which are basically mandatory for competitive play and therefore required pricing out at $22.00 just for them, well... Jeez man. Pretty rare I even spend $37.00 on a main game, let alone DLC. And six bucks in a month is fine to throw in for one character. Put 'em all in at once however, and you'll find they have less impact. I would've bought each of these characters if they were spaced out by a month or two. As is, I'm just giving them a miss for now. Nintendo pushed their luck here. I suspect we'll be getting a Jimquisition on it pretty soon the way they're going.

I don't know whats the traffic in Australia, cos I live there. Um im gonna get the DLC next week or week after, im in no rush but I will still get them. I would rather give my spot in line to a die hard fan rhththat truly deserves, I would rather wait