Nintendo Warns It'll Block Rule Breaker's Access to Super Mario Maker's Online Features

Banning people for using glitches is just stupid. Some glitches are just fun to use and in some levels you need a glitch to get to the end faster.

I see people requested stars all the time - after all, without them your upload number is a bit restrictive. I've never heard of this being against the rules, unless someone really is harassing people with it then I don't see the problem. I mean, advertising your own levels is essentially a subtle way of asking for stars...

The first two rules are pretty BS in my opinion. I see no harm in sticking a Miiverse post at the end of a course you made asking for a star (not that I do that). However, pestering other people asking for stars should be a bannable offense. Exploiting bugs in other people's courses means that they need to be fixed.

Ban me from Pokémon then, I have no regrets of cheating stuff you probably will only distribute through Game Stop or other stupid store exclusive events.

Then test the game thoroughly and make sure those glitches don't appear.

Should mention this in-game too, because otherwise if the case is given, one wouldn't why you were banned.

@rushiosan you mean like all of this years events that most of em are gonna be wifi?

Looks like some peoples will be 60 bucks short
Remember kids, Nintendo can't do wrong!

Considering glitches are a staple in the world of speedrunning, this won't go over well...

Good, no more stages that are fully reliant on having prior knowledge of glitches.

Oh man... I think I'm about to break one of those rules!! STARZ PLZ!!!

https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/profile/DG.Chris

Seriously though, I'd appreciate it even if you played my level and just gave me some feedback. I am close to 50p stars, and my levels are pretty good I think. Thanks to anyone that takes the time.

I'm really excited for the update, btw. The rules here seem pretty fair for the most part, I'm pretty sure the speed running rule will only be enforced where we see outrageous completion times that would be impossible even for an expert player. The asking for stars rule seems a bit harsh because that's such a huge part of Mario Maker and people seem to be pretty stingy with stars unless you play their levels and ask them to play yours, but I see why they'd enforce that one if someone is excessively pestering some users for stars.

Cheaters should always be punished in online games but it has to be legit. Someones acoount should not be banned if they accidentslly stumble on a glitch.

I wonder how severe these 'restrictions' are. A lifetime ban would be an extremely poor response to someone accidentally stumbling across a glitch.
Meanwhile, I'm still weeping about one of my few levels getting taken off the server because nobody played it, haha.

OH CRAP I ASKED FOR STARS SOMETIMES DAMMIT

What constitutes as a glitch I wonder? Some of you may be overreacting I think they're talking about the level hacking glitch, not in-level glitches.

If it takes down those levels that crash the console automatically then good. If it bans people who just found a faster way through glitching to do a level then ugh that is not good.

2nd rule is BS

Nintendo at common sense again the rule department needs to get the house cleaned.What are the people you get for the rule department?

@AlexSora89 well time to delete them before the Admins come for you.

Asking for stars is daft. Just be patient. If a course does not get much stars it is time to improve it.

I'm sure there will be much uproar in the community. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN RUIN THE GAME ONLINE FOR EVERYONE!?

I feel like the 1st one should depend on if the user is actually harassing people for stars. Sometimes it's hard to get your course played so asking once or twice shouldn't be bannable. The 2nd one is iffy as glitches are popular for speed runs. Just hoping these aren't lifetime bans... that's a legit waste of $60 if you accidentally discover a glitch.

The second rule I'm a bit iffy on, I can see both sides of the fence but the other rules are fair enough.

To be fair, if you do get banned, you can make another account. Just keep in mind that it would be a good idea to keep all your purchases consolidated on one account and that you can only have 12 accounts on a single Wii U.

I'm fine with this being a little better moderated honestly. As long as they don't get stupid wth it...

You have to give stars to get stars. Asking for stars is annoying but you can just ignore that. Persistently harassing a user for stars should be bannable though.

What if the stage is reliant on a glitch in order to beat it?

Oh yay more BS mario maker bans are incoming. Number 1 rule of thumb is to stay as far away from miiverse as possible to avoid bans.

Good.

@BulbasaurusRex Then the person that made it should be banned, imo. Just make proper stages and stop trying to break stuff.

sigh, I guess...

@BulbasaurusRex then it's a terrible stage and should be removed.

Nintendo hates cheating online more than piracy, that's a fact. They cracked down on cheaters more harshly than pirates.

I stopped playing this game when they never updates the level search to include a simple way of playing your friends courses directly from the game wirhout typing in a long code. Using the webapp is lame, I mean the Wii u is already 2 screens, now you want me to use a third? Too much work, not enough fun

Nintendo just made it easy for me to pass on this game as I don't have anyone to play courses with that would actually be willing to use the Gamepad and the online portion of the game is what I have the most interest in and if Nintendo is going to start banning players who stumble across Nintendo's own screw-up's then I'll vote with my wallet and never purchase this game...

Good.

If I'm understanding this correctly, you won't get banned for exploiting glitches, you'll only get banned if you exploit glitches to set a world record. Which I can appreciate- esteemed records should be achieved fair and square. At the same time, it's the course creator's responsibility to seal up any unintended routes that could be taken advantage of. It's called play testing for quality assurance.

@Neko_Ichigofan
I believe this only applies to those setting world records. Not the general gaming populous.

@MadAdam81 Remember the bullet time level posted here? Don't tell me that wasn't cool!

Nintendo being Nintendo. Glitches can be fun. Nintendo is taking fun out of this game.

I so agree with the 2nd one when it comes to any online leader board. Sometimes I see world records that seems impossible even if the creator had a hidden shortcut to the end like 3 seconds in a "don't press" stage.

Nintendo must hate events like agdq and sgdq 😂 What a stupid rule! Watching people like Carl Sagan, Poo bear and Panga is what makes Mario maker great in my opinion.

Carl's latest creation while I'm here 👍 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mLC9XgOvHjM

Nintendo doesn't seem to know how speedrunning works...

Speaking of Mario Maker, my Wolf Link amiibo has Japanese text! Look in my screenshot album! https://miiverse.nintendo.net/users/16bitBSTRD/album

They should be thanking people for finding bugs that they didn't, not punishing them.

Good that they put that second rule so speedrunners using glitches doesn't make leaderboard broken for gamers who play game with pure skill.

These rules seem harsh. It's tricky to know whether someone intentionally used glitches to obtain a record, or if they stumbled upon it accidentally.

Since stars are very valuable and hard to get, I don't see any problems with adding a minor note to my level that says "starz plz".

@Yoshi ye

@tchjsa11 Yes, I want it to block rule breakers. In my opinion, those people ruin the game a bit for everyone else by creating stupid broken levels. With Mario Maker I want to see great Mario levels, not silly hacks and bug exploits.

@ShadJV Advertising your own levels, at least in the in-game comments, should also be prohibited. Nothing is more distasteful than getting to the end of a level and seeing a bunch of comments that say "CHECK OUT MY LEVEL 0000-0000-0000-0000". Really the same kind of disrespect as going onto someone's YouTube video comments and just posting "HEY CHECK OUT MY CHANNEL".

People who do stuff like that should get banned. There is a time and a place to advertise your own stuff, and the comment section of someone else's creation is not that place.

Wait, so if you accidently stumble upon a bug in a level and end up smashing the course record...they'll kick you out? No proof that you did it intentionally?

when did Nintendo become such a school marm?

@SanderEvers I guess if you are using it to break records and such. Hopefully it will be done with a report system and a real person looks at it though and not a robot that will jut ban people who use or stumble upon a glitch for fun use.

And yet there is nothing stopping the one user (goes by dad) from uploading the same 100 crappy levels every week and starring them himself. He's in the top 100 makers worldwide! I called him out on it and he blocked me. I wish nintendo would do something about that.

@Iggly - Yeah!

How dare Nintendo have rules! Other gaming companies can have rules and codes of conduct longer then a J.R.R. Tolkien novel...but Nintendo is EVIL because they ask people to be courteous and not cheat!

Also...Super Mario Maker is just dull and boring if you can't beg for stars. Truly, the core content of the game is "no fun" if you aren't begging people to star your uninspired, broken level.

If Nintendo bans people for using glitches for a game like Mario Maker, they may as well stop selling the original Super Mario Bros entirely for having the Minus World in it. Super Mario Bros 3 too, can't have people using that bonkers World 7 Pipe glitch...

One of the interesting things that makes some people come back to the Mario series is exploring for glitches. To say one cannot look for and exploit them for fun is denying the heritage of the Mario series. On the other hand, if by glitches they mean artificially hacked in glitches, rather than naturally existing glitches... Sure, ban away.

Banning people for asking for a star at the end of their course would be like Google banning people from Youtube for asking for likes at the end of their videos. (Well, not completely, since Mario Maker isn't monetized like Youtube, but you get the point, right?) It's stupid, who cares? Just let people do it if they want to. Of course, messaging people asking for stars is another matter entirely... Definitely a punishable offense.

As for levels that need prior knowledge of glitches to complete... Sure, why not? The whole point of Mario Maker is to be able to make levels that would never exist officially, then share them. Learn something new, don't worry if you can't complete a level based on your lack of knowledge or skill. There's all kinds of levels that can be made. No reason to get mad over more specialized levels. If it can be completed without hacking, it's still legit.

Man, so many whiners on here. That post says "Users may be restricted..." May. This is standard practice for a company that wants to maintain some kind of order with their online system. They're not looking to punish some random dude who makes a post asking for a star or two, or accidentally finds a glitch. They're keeping the door open for when somebody truly disruptive comes along and finds a major way to exploit their system to either get hundreds of world records or thousands of undeserved stars. Then they can ban that person and point to this warning as precedence. Nintendo is not "the man." They're not killing people for minor infractions. They're not even the RIAA. So you can stop with your conspiracy theories and paranoid stoner rants now.

@WaxxyOne Nintendo has already made it clear in their legal agreements that they reserve the right to ban anyone from Miiverse/online access at any time, for any reason, with full indemnification and no liability. People sign that agreement before using the online services, there's no questions about Nintendo being able to do such things. What people are questioning are the exact terms of these 3 edicts, because they are set forth in somewhat unclear terms. To compound that, the term "may" for a legal agreement is rather nebulous, don't you think? So of course people are going to be confused when Nintendo suddenly hands out these edicts without clarifying them.

Honestly, Nintendo had to make a choice somewhere in there. The choice they made fit in with the majority of Mario Maker levels. Speedrunners that exploit glitches are awesome, I really enjoy watching speed running records, but the majority of us just want to play the game and not do all of that. When someone goes into a level that we have worked our asses off on to make challenging and uses a couple glitches to clear it in 30 seconds, that makes us feel bad. Nintendo made the right choice, but I wish they would add an option that would allow level creators to say "Hey, I don't care if someone glitches through my level" because I do feel bad that speed runners are being targeted.

"The user took advantage of bugs that were unintended by either the course creator or the developers to obtain new World Records."

It sounds like they are leaving it open, if you intended the glitch to be used to complete the level it is probably fine. I made a really hard level that no one could beat that you had to use a not well known trick to beat(I am not sure if it is a glitch but I am also not sure if it was intended by the developers). No one was able to beat it and it was recently taken down because no one starred it either.

@gokev13 Should have left hints on how to use the trick.

Does this mean that slowmo levels aren't allowed anymore?

Rule 1 would be fine. Keyword: would. I don't see a problem with asking a few times for stars. But when it gets to harassing other users for stars or something like that, that's when it should be bannable.
Rule 2 is straight up BS. Nintendo might as well say "Hey kiddies, guess what, if you accidentally discover a glitch, your copy of Super Mario Maker is now pretty much screwed! F*** you, we have your money!" This will also affect speedrunners as well, as others have said, because much of the speedrunning community exploits glitches. Also, Nintendo, if you hate people using glitches so much, then why don'tcha, y'know...try and fix them? I dunno...just an idea.
Rule 3 is understandable, though.

I assume/hope Nintendo largely made the second condition with that 'sever breaking' glitch in mind - the one where you could actually edit the level and then play through it.

I suppose we don't know until someone actually gets penalised for it, but I like to think that they're safeguarding themselves rather than planning to ban anyone who used a midair spring jump to beat a level.

Speaking of bans; recser8, who made headlines with this article, has had all her/his stars and courses removed. So there is some small justice in the world.

@PlywoodStick

Ha ha, yah, I was actually trying to troll my nephews with the level because they made some really hard ones that took me a long time to beat. My goal is to beat every level I try and they made a few that took me awhile. So I made a doozy for them (it took me forever to upload). I don't think they have the same endurance I have though because they tried for awhile and then gave up. Perhaps I will put it up again and try to make it a little more user friendly, but that would mean I have to clear it again.

@andrew20
But not in Miiverse posts... well, sometimes after starring a level myself. With a drawing saying "Star trade?". Does it still count?

Too many comments, didn't read them all.

Case in point on rule 2: Almost every course I see has someone clearing it in about five seconds, even if it takes over a minute to play because of the length. That's the kind of cheater I think they're going to go after. It's outright trolling.

Go ahead, go back to the featured courses to unlock mystery mushroom characters. Look at the record times on them. THAT'S what Nintendo wants to stamp out.

What glitches are they referring to here? Speedrunners use glitches to get faster times, but Mario Maker isn't a set game like Ocarina or Mario 64. Every run is different, because it's made up of different levels.

The first rule just seems awkward. I'm sure there are a lot of people who post their levels on Miiverse and ask for stars. It doesn't seem like a major violation to me.

Everyone let is just put stars on every one we do then they will stop asking for them.

If they don't want people glitching the games, then FIX THE GLITCHES! God, this is lazy. "Instead of actually doing shit to fix our broken game, we'll just ban anyone who uses the glitches!" The first one is akin to advertising in the Youtube comments section or on reddit or whatevs, so I can let that slide. The last rule is also in place already, but the issues with their Code of Conduct are for another day. The second rule... I see several problems with it.

For one, laziness! They couldn't just patch out the bugs? Nintendo, a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation can't assign a small team to fix level-breaking glitches in their most popular game?

Secondly, I have a problem with the way that rule is worded. "Unintended by either the course creator or the developers to obtain new World Records" What about levels where the creator showcases a glitch they found? Would a person be banned for playing it? What about the creator, would they be banned? Can I get banned for making a level that contains a glitch? How does Nintendo know about all the applicable glitches and how ot determine which levels contain the glitch? Would only the world record holder be banned? What about the guy who was .0001 seconds slower than the world record holder? Does he get banned, too? What about some random guy who just happens to trigger a glitch, like what happened in a Super Mario World episode of Game Grumps? There is so much gray area in this rule, they ought to release it in theaters as the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Not to mention the fact that the rule is totally oppressive. Nintendo has always had the attitude of, "You shall play our games the way we want you to, or else you won't play them at all!" The most recognition competitive Smash has gotten from Nintendo was Reggie saying "no johns" in a Direct, and the Smash Brothers Invitational. Then you look at the Pokemon Company, who have put on every event in both the video games series and the card game, make the rulesets for both the VGC and TCG, advertise the events on their website and put up the footage from the events, release the World Champion's deck at retail, and so much more. And in 2013, Nintendo tried to stop Melee from being played at EVO, even after the Smash fans raised almost $100,000 just to see their game played.

Not surprising, but very disappointing. They finally make a do-it-your-way game, then make us do things their way.

@TheDavyStar There's a difference between using a glitch to make a cool level and making a level that requires people to know and execute a glitch to finish it.

@Uberchu like that is always the case -_- oh please.

Banning hackers I could get, but glitches and star requests... Those are just part of the game. It's like banning youtubers for begging for subscribers, or exploring special effects.

Heck, how do we even know which glitches are and aren't okay? Half the levels end in a spring sending you off the platform after the flagpole. Are those okay? This is just gonna open a whole can of worms. I'll be surprised if they wind up enforcing it though.

It's good that they're blocking star requests. The influx of "heart 4 heart" spam in the LittleBigPlanet series made it pretty much unplayable.

At the same time, though, they should remove the star-based limit on uploads to make it less tempting to get desperate.

@AyeHaley not sure what you mean? a lot of events have been wifi over the few years, not all of them though.

The other day I ended up on top of a level by accident and beat the world record. I was so stoke. You're telling me I could get banned for that? What is this crap.

@MadAdam81 Not exactly. In both cases the crux of the player's intended enjoyment is through exploiting the game.

With the first rule, they probably only mean in excess, or somehow unsolicited. And don't forget that future patches may iron out the bugs mentioned in Rule 2, which may render the affected times invalid. It's okay, you guys. This sounds like it makes sense.

oH, BOY!
because everyone LOVED miiverse's code of conduct!

@SanderEvers Even if the course creator intends you to use the glitch, the developers wouldn't. Thus, you get the ban hammer.

Hm, I quit a level I couldn´t beat and got credits for "world record" because of some bug. Wonder if I´ll get banned now...

@That_Guy_from_Faxana Hey, what happened to you! Been 7 years since a Nintendo Life post. Come back Faxanadude!