Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection shutting down.

Remember how, back when WiiConnect24 was shut down, I suggested trying to make it so you can use alt servers for it, like they did with the original Xbox's Xbox Live?

Well, this is more important. Yup, Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is shutting down, & unless we do something about it, no more online play for Wii & DS.

Discuss.

[www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk]

This really sucks! Wonder if a class action lawsuit can be done since they are breaking 'features' that originally were advertised as a part of the purchase? If some way to do homebrew apps that can match the stuff being broken can be created, that'd be great.

They are doing it to increase sales of WII U based on what I've read about it since Wii U services are not being affected. BAD MOVE. They just lost sales of even more Wii U since us loyal customers won't buy that piece of shit now as the same crap will happen to it in about 5 years when the new console comes out after it - the Wii V or whatever the heck it'll be.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2014 09:18AM by mastermesh.

It's not being done to increase sales of the Wii U, because the games will stop working regardless of which system they're being played on.

The people who really need to take up this issue with Nintendo are the third-parties who made wii games featuring online play, which is going to be killed off due to Nintendo disabling WFC. Nintendo themselves were the ones who promoted WFC to developers as the "preferred" authentication and match-making service, now they're screwing over all the games that used it - this is the thanks those developers get for attempting to support the wii's shitty online infrastructure.

I think they're shutting it down more because gamespy is their provider and they've been upping the rates trying to get people off their service.

So what would it take to create a homebrew solution? Do we have the necessary keys to fake a server? How much is known about Wii matchmaking?

Gamespy doesn't seem to be used by many third party games, they all use their own matchmaking stuff. WFC is used primarily for authentication (mapping the global console friend code to a game-specific friend code) and as a profanity checker to make sure people aren't using offensive names for their characters and such.
The basic WFC authentication stuff is pretty simple, just a tiny patch to IOS's SSL module to disable verification and redirect "naswii.nintendowifi.net" via DNS spoofing.
But presumably all the third party servers will also get shut down (no point keeping them up if nobody can access them), so they will need to be individually reimplemented. Although for most games if you go online now you'll probably find them dead with no active players so it's probably not much of a big deal. Worst case they can be reimplemented later by reverse engineering the individual games.

Funny thing is they said pay-and-play content (DLC) would still be supported, but at least for the Rock Band games you can't get into the music store to buy anything if you can't log into WFC first.

So will wii-homebrew wifi/internet stuff still work? Like my leaderboards and such? Are they planning on releasing an update for this?

Homebrew stuff will be fine, pretty sure there won't be any more system updates.