The Nintendo online gaming experience have never been… the best around, its a fact. And this time is not going to change the bias gamers might have towards Nintendo and particularly the 3DS thanks to yet another bug plaguing the online multiplayer of Super Smash Bros.
Over the past few days, quite a few Super Smash Bros had the bad surprise to find themselves banned for a duration of a duration as high as 136 years. And that ban would happen after an unexpected disconnection during an online match of Super Smash Bros. Unfortunately, thanks to the lack of stability inherent to Nintendo online, this glitch is not so improbable after all.
So why 136 years? Why choose such a specific duration? Well to be exact, it is not 136 years but actually 4,294,967,295 secondes, hence a little over 136 years of ban duration (it’s not making any difference at this point, is it?). You can see the bug screen on the video below.
Anyway, the complaints are starting to rise all over the social networks so I did a little digging. On this reddit thread dedicated to help the players in their quest for justice (and maybe explanations regarding their lifetime sentence), I found quite a few explanations. So I’ll try to sum up the how and why regarding this glitch.
That’s not what it looks like inside… not really.
Basically, if you get banned during an online match, you’ll get a chose value of ban time equal to -1 second. After that, the online service is going to basically check if you have any precedent of cheating, abuse,… If your record come up clean, your ban time will get back to 0 and you’ll be able to resume playing normally. On the other hand, if you are a confirmed hacker/abuser, a ‘sentence’ time will be added to that -1 second, effectively preventing you to play for the chosen duration.
Now, that’s where it gets tricky. Imagine a second the verification step isn’t performed properly, and you stay stuck with a -1 second ban duration. Your machine will try to make sense of the negative ban time and will choose to automatically subtract one second to the -1 second total. And there you go! Because of the way our gaming machines are built and programmed, when you subtract 1 to the lowest number, you get the highest number (it comes with the binary code who work inside our machines operating systems). And the highest number is 4,294,962,000 which is quite close to our precedent total.
How to avoid this glitch? For the moment, try to not disconnect in the middle of an online match and pray for the gods of stable connection to be with you.
Fortunately, if the glitch would ever happen to you, Nintendo is apparently in the process of solving the wrongful ban problems.
https://twitter.com/ToothyMcButt/status/528706196350709762
Do you play Super Smash Bros? If so, have you encountered this problem? Tell us here at Gamer Headlines.