Online multiplayer

[Codeman23]

What would you think online is going to be like? And do you think the rumors of a leader board takes away from the fun smash brings or are you like me and can't wait to see where you rank in the global standings?

 

[Gingerbread Man]

My only hope for online play right now is that its smooth.

Brawl often feels like a totally different game on wifi. Its unbearable.

 

[PikaJew]

Just better...

Brawl was insanely slow, even when playing with friends and making sure everyone had a good internet connect.
Definitely more options. I understand the only 2 minute games so someone isn't waiting for the game to end, but add some sort of option for them. Such as having camera controls on their end so they can mess around and take pictures, or come back as a ghost so you can run around but not effect anything. Or send them to the official **** around stage (like the Sandbag in Brawl) but bigger and with other people waiting for matches to end/start.

Definitely better lobbies so it's much easier to connect to games, you can see how many people are playing each mode.
Online co-op play for the story mode or event matches.

Online tournaments where many games are going on at once. and when you lose, you're done, but if you win, you go to a stage with the rest of the winners. It's a big enough stage for a bunch of people to run around and fight each other or do other stuff while they wait for the next match. Who ever plays next gets summoned from that stage to play their match, and the winner gets sent back to wait for the next match with the remaining winners. Maybe even add an option to watch different matches within your tournament. It's just a way to keep things entertaining while you're waiting for your next match. And maybe winners of the tournaments are awarded coins, stickers, trophies or even Wii U points for the shop channel?

 

[Mr.Jackpot]

Online tournaments where many games are going on at once. and when you lose, you're done, but if you win, you go to a stage with the rest of the winners. It's a big enough stage for a bunch of people to run around and fight each other or do other stuff while they wait for the next match. Who ever plays next gets summoned from that stage to play their match, and the winner gets sent back to wait for the next match with the remaining winners. Maybe even add an option to watch different matches within your tournament. It's just a way to keep things entertaining while you're waiting for your next match. And maybe winners of the tournaments are awarded coins, stickers, trophies or even Wii U points for the shop channel?

You mean a stage kinda like this?

I'm honestly not worried about lag and netcode quality anymore. Kid Icarus Uprising, a game on the 3DS much more fast-paced than Brawl with huge maps and giant full screen projectiles (coincidentally also by Sakurai) has shown almost lagless amazing online play even on "Everyone" mode against randoms. I am absolutely sure we'll get at least as much from Smash 4 several years down the 3DS's lifetime when programmers are even more familiar witht he hardware, and I expect much more from the Wii U version.

 

[PikaJew]

You mean a stage kinda like this?

Yes, but bigger and with more levels to it. LEVELS JERRY, LEVELS!
Just big enough for 20+ people to comfortably run around.

 

[DakotaBonez]

Has a fighting game ever had an online tournament game mode before? That would be incredible. Encourage people to use the tournament mode as opposed to other online modes by awarding Coins to 1st 2nd and 3rd. View other matches while waiting for your next fight, if someone gets disconnected I guess you'd win by default. But online games can pause for a minute to see if they reconnect before canceling the match. Tekken Tag 2 online on the wii u worked perfectly even when the opponent had 1 bar. (the best connection being 5)

 

[Big Burn]

ha. sorry. I posted this in the wrong thread

 

[Orngeblu]

I'm pretty sure it's going to have smooth online play. Also, I'd love to see online rankings, but I also don't want it to take away from some things like taunt parties and stuff. So, to work around this, they need to make a "ranked mode", and an "non-ranked mode". But this will only be useful really if they're thinking about making a 4-way brawl be ranked. If they do that, that'll be ridiculous. If anything have a 1v1 ranked battle, and the 4-way brawl to be non-ranked. It'd also be cool, if they implemented something into team battle, where you can team up with someone on your friend roster, or a family member/friend, and the battles with those team members will be ranked. (They should also have Team Attack on).

TL;DR. Want, don't want to ruin taunt parties. Want ranked and non-ranked modes, and be able to team up with friends, especially on the friend roster.

@DakotaBonez: An online tournament mode would be ****ing amazing. I'd play that all day!! :3

 

[DxBOY15]

As long as the online gameplay is better than Brawl's, I'll be happy

 

[DakotaBonez]

A friend pointed out to me today that my Wii U had no ethernet port. I had been content using wifi but he insisted on a direct plugin to to the ethernet. I looked for hidden slots (like the wii's SD card hole) but only found two more usb 2.0 ports. You can plug in a wii LAN adapter but the wi-fi is actually reported to be faster than internet through the adapter.The wii u uses 802.11n wireless networking. Much faster then PS3 and XBOX360 which use 802.11g wireless networking. I need to do more research. But it seems that wifi is nearing ethernet speeds.
EDIT:
802.11g has a speed of 54mbps with a range of 50 feet.
802.11n has a speed of 300mbps with a range of 175 feet.
More realistically would be 1/3 of those speeds.
Fast ethernet has a speed of 100mbps, so 1/3 of the wii u's supposed 802.11n speed of 300 should match that.I'm not sure if everyone now has giga ethernet which has a speed of 1000gbps. Can a tech wiz help me out here?

 

[CalumG]

There are only two things that Smash 4 needs in terms of online play to make it truly awesome:

• As little lag as possible - I appreciate that obviously the lag differs depending on those who are playing, but in Brawl even if all 4 players have the highest speed internet connections available, there's still far too much lag frames for my liking, it kills the experience
• Everything you can do offline, you should be able to do online. Stock matches, Coin matches, Tournaments, Co-op Adventure/All-Star mode, items on, no items, Fox only, Final Destination - you name it. One of the things that makes Smash Bros. so special is the wealth of different features, game modes and customization options it has, which Brawl's online mode made no effort to show off.

Of course, the actual quality of the online services depends on the quality of the game itself. For example, the Stage Builder - if the Stage Builder gets big improvements, it'd hopefully have a more thriving ecosystem (like LittleBigPlanet but not nearly on that kind of scale) rather than with Brawl, which had some pretty shoddy service in terms of downloading other peoples stages.

 

[Orngeblu]

Implementing stages to be used on Smash's online can cause some problems. Stuff like inappropriate content is one thing, and the other is trapping some, or all players rendering the fight impossible to finish. It'd be cool, but would not work out very well.

 

[Wizzrobe]

I have big expectations for this. hopefully it will be smooth so i can practice 24/7

 

[CalumG]

Implementing stages to be used on Smash's online can cause some problems. Stuff like inappropriate content is one thing, and the other is trapping some, or all players rendering the fight impossible to finish. It'd be cool, but would not work out very well.

When I was talking about stage builder I was talking about online in general, not specifically in-game. Obviously, the big improvements Smash's online needs are less lag and more options, but its important to think about the online ecosystem as well - leaderboards, Miiverse, and how the games overall online presence asserts itself (after all, many are hoping for SSB4 to be a flagship example of Nintendo's new online ethos), not to mention custom content. For example, if there were a better Stage Builder, I'd hope it came with better online functions: search engines and rankings/user ratings of custom stages, the ability to leave a review of a stage, custom stage competitions, and a handful of Stage Builder stages uploaded by Nintendo themselves from time to time. There are websites like this for Brawl's stage builder but it should honestly be built into the game itself to save everybody the trouble.

Of course, there could be a limited ability to play custom stages online, but only between people who all own the stage on their console - playing random people online with Custom Stages wouldn't really work.