Many were disappointed to hear last week that Animal Crossing: New Horizons would disable cloud save backups, and some passionate fans are determined to change that!

Earlier this week, an online petition on the matter was organized and launched by some members of the Animal Crossing community on Discord hoping to earn the attention of Nintendo. It’s very modest right now standing at around 350 signatures when writing this article, but it’s well written and we think it’s a worthwhile cause to share.

The petition outlines a number of potential compromise options that the developers could consider while still respecting their vision to “avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series” outlined in the original French interview breaking the news.

These options could include implementing a time interval for how many times per year a save can be restored or a waiting period before a restore is complete. The goal would be to offer limited restoring functionality for extreme cases like save corruption and a stolen or broken console, while reducing potential abuse that the developers want to avoid.

However, one issue with these solutions is that they likely could only be implemented on a system level inside the Nintendo Switch’s operating system, remaining out of direct control by the Animal Crossing developers. Given that New Horizons is a major first-party title though, it could still be done if the desire exists within the company.

Even if this particular petition doesn’t take off and is unlikely to make any difference on its own, we do believe that Nintendo and the Animal Crossing team are listening to fan feedback on social media generally. One recent example of fan outrage sparking a change was the debacle and reversal over online multiplayer with friends in Super Mario Maker 2.

Mr. Tezuka has confirmed that the ability to play online multiplayer with friends is coming to #SuperMarioMaker2 in a future update. Stay tuned for more information to come. https://t.co/oxGuEcJ8Om pic.twitter.com/1AfK1vEGIe — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 11, 2019

Personally speaking, I definitely understand where the developers are coming from with this restriction on the surface. Yet it’s really hard to argue cheating concerns are more important than keeping your town safe after playing for possibly thousands of hours over years — and that’s what the developers are currently doing.

Don’t forget that there are still over nine months left to go before the scheduled release date of New Horizons in March 2020, so now is the perfect time to make some (very polite) noise if you’d like to see a change!

Pre-orders are now open for Animal Crossing: New Horizons at Amazon, GameStop, and Best Buy. Stay tuned to Animal Crossing World for more on Animal Crossing: New Horizons as we approach the release date next year.