It’s no secret and it’s pretty much never been a secret: Smash Bros. Ultimate has bad online play.



It’s not just the ranking system, which hinges off of a largely meaningless and inscrutable number. It’s not just that you can’t find the friend codes of people you play with or change character in quickplay. It’s not just the many little problems either. It’s a very poor netcode that you have to pay for in form of a subscription and an ethernet adapter.



Ultimate’s internet is so bad that I believe it shapes and sharpens any criticism the game gets.

Criticism is a fact of life for a competitive, living game. And criticism often helps the game’s developers make good decisions, but only if it’s valid criticism. Finding valid criticism is a skill you have to develop if you work in any part of the gaming field.



Like in a customer service job, sometimes there really is a piece of hair in the food and you have to throw out a hair net with a hole in it, give a free meal, and apologize. Other times, Karen had a bad day and nothing short of a free meal will appease her. The reality of the situation does not concern Karen. Karen’s subjective fury will subsume all realities.



In gaming, there is an endless slipstream of Karens who will launch a thousand tweets to anyone who remotely resembles management.



But Ultimate also has its fair share of broken hairnets. The game absolutely encourages camping and jumping around spacing safe aerials. Neutral can be way too noncommittal and the game can go way too slow because neither person gets enough reward for approaching the other. The aforementioned online problems. And the list goes on.

He lost game 1 for approaching

I lost game 2 for approaching



game 3 we stopped approaching and just stood still pic.twitter.com/dFkS2390AT — hungrybox (@LiquidHbox) January 8, 2020

But Ultimate has its fair share of Karen criticism. Players everywhere may complain about the inherently flawed design of Kirby and Little Mac. However, while their designs don’t lend at all to competitive play, they’re very fun and useful for casuals. Kirby makes for a great starter character who teaches recovery. Meanwhile, Little Mac’s ground game is so fast and strong that it’s fun for casuals who still struggle with aerials.



also I talked about this on stream but let’s tweet about it



Little Mac is the worst designed character of all time and here’s why — Gavin Dempsey (@TweekSsb) May 15, 2019

I think some of Ultimate’s Karen criticism comes from online play. One Karen criticism is that projectile characters and zoners are too strong. Zoners do not dominate the meta, don’t dominate top 8’s, and have to contend with a lot of strong rushdown characters. However, Ultimate’s poor internet system lends a lot of strength to zoners.

SO TIRED OF LOSING TO THIS DUDE LOOOOL JUST FUKING WAIT AAAAA



Part of me wants to ask for Samus players to practice with me on wifi, but then I remember it's gonna be Samus on wifi and don't feel like doing it anymore kdhsjdhjw — Ramin (@Mr_RSmash) January 14, 2020

In Ultimate, you can react to a lot of projectiles when playing offline but not when playing online. In an offline match, standing to one side firing projectiles isn’t that hard to punish because you can reaction shield as you approach and close the gap. Offline, you can’t reaction shield and have to guess the opponent’s timing, which requires a lot more brainpower and effort. In turn, even if you do win against the Ness spamming PKFire, by the end of it you feel exhausted. You can find online Nesses who build neutral entirely around PKFire and win. In offline play, Ness looks entirely different and builds neutral around oppressive aerials.



This leads to a strange confusion around Ness as a character. Low-level and casual players will see Ness as an obnoxious PK Fire machine, where competitive level players see him as an obnoxious forward air machine. Online play changes opinions around Ness and makes opinions around Ness less valid – or online valid.

Ultimate lag leads to even more tier list talk

The lag in Ultimate’s online has such an incredible effect on the game that players have made separate tier lists for online play that look radically different from normal tier lists. This said, it’s worth noting that a lot of the best online players don’t play characters that would benefit from lag. King Chris destroys the field of WiFi warriors using Zero Suit Samus.



Ultimate’s shoddy online doesn’t just change the perception around zoners or specific characters either. It changes how players perceive the entire game. Ultimate takes a lot of flack for encouraging defensive play, being too cheesy, and for not feeling quite responsive enough.

All these criticisms are valid, but only to a certain degree.



A mix of the input buffer, a longer shield drop timing, and less micro-spacing options really can make Ultimate feel much less responsive. Ultimate games can run for nearly 8 minutes because both players know their best option is to do nothing but wait and whiff punish and try and bait with safe moves that look unsafe.

hopefully you guys are open minded about all of this, I’m just gonna ramble a bit



I overall dislike the gameplay, but I DO like a handful of characters. Things are too unreactable/unpublishable. Everything is just so safe. — Gavin Dempsey (@TweekSsb) April 3, 2019

Character design in Ultimate is also so wild that pretty much every character has cheesy ways to kill. Players with the Chrom-style up special can cheese kills at the ledge. Two framing is so precise that it sometimes feels more luck-based than skill based. And boy are there are a lot of prominent comeback mechanics this time around.



However, the cheese, the response time, and the defensive play will all feel twice as bad online. The increased lag makes a responsive, careful playstyle even stronger because it’s easier to drop combos and some normally tight combos will drop due to connection. Cheesier playstyles become a lot more common as well because no quickplay’s format destroys sympathy for the other player.



In quickplay, GSP creates a “win-at-any-cost” mentality that leads to repetitive strategies designed to abuse lag. Making the person next to you miserable feels a lot worse than making someone faceless competitor rage quit. In real life, even if this repetitive strategies work, they can lose you partners in friendlies. In my experience, local play and online play with friends ends up much more honest than online play with strangers.

The long awaited sequel to the WiFi Samus Saga. This time I give them a taste of their own medicine. Enjoy my anger, it was genuine. pic.twitter.com/QZtcKw8Qse — Charliedaking🌙 (@CharlieHaruno) December 21, 2019

Ultimate’s lag makes online unbearable, like playing League with high ping

To me, the worst part of Ultimate is that lag. Even small amounts of lag make a huge deal of difference and to me it makes online Ultimate feel like a different and worse version of the game. I still enjoy playing online against friends and in arenas but offline instantly feels much better and more fluid.



The problem is, the average Ultimate player likely plays online more often than they go to locals. Online play can subconsciously give players a sense that the game is less responsive, more cheesy, and more defensive than it actually is. Then, when a top competitor loses a set and goes to Twitter to complain about cheese, defensive play, or the fluidity of the game, the large semi-casual playerbase will shower these posts with attention, signal boost them, and exaggerate them.



Is Ultimate genuinely flawed? Of course. But I do believe the poor online play makes the player base overstate the flaws in offline play and the entire game. We don’t just see this effect in Ultimate either. You can see it in League of Legends constantly.

Should Nintendo charge more for online services and improve its quality? Please, for the love of everything holy 80%, 4 votes 4 votes 80% 4 votes - 80% of all votes

No way 20%, 1 vote 1 vote 20% 1 vote - 20% of all votes Total Votes: 5 Voting is closed Poll Options are limited because JavaScript is disabled in your browser.

Low level League players will be quick to hate on competitively strong, mechanically complex characters that don’t lose them nearly as much as ELO as simple lane bullies that require team coordination and strategic map play to stop. Low level league players will similarly signal boost a pro’s complaint about ping as a way to shift blame for their losses. Ping makes a much bigger difference for pro players who will compete in a pingless environment than for online players, who can climb as long as the ping is below 200 and stable.



Every Ultimate player can separate online and offline experiences in their mind. We can all spot the differences and remind ourselves of them. However, when general Ultimate criticism comes up, we can end up rolling online and offline experiences together in memory. Ultimate comes out all the uglier at the end of the process.



And all of this is a real shame. Ultimate’s internet did not need to be nearly this bad. The core game has its flaws but it deserves so much better than the immensely flawed internet it got.