is anyone actually going to use pretendo?

[chaotik0]

so now that we can no longer connect to nintendo’s servers to play splatoon 1 online battles, RIP, there has been a lot of talk about using pretendo (fan-made servers for wii u games, similar to wiimmfi for mario kart wii) to play. a lot of people are not comfortable with hacking their wii u, but they just announced a way you can connect to their servers without hacking. for splatoon, right now they have private battles working but not online matchmaking yet.
edit: it says no public battles on the website but i actually got into battles immediately as i tried, so maybe they didn't update it or public battles means something else i dont know

here are links to their blog post talking about it, and it has their setup guide if you scroll to the bottom of where they were talking about it
https://pretendo.network/blog/4-8-24

with all of this taken into account, do you think it is worth it to use? is it still too much to get working?

whatever is the case, i personally think it has good potential. i actually had a lot more fun playing this game than 3, the maps and the kits are just so incredibly fun, so i would be more than down to play with people on pretendo, i just want to know if people actually think it is a good idea

this is my experience testing out the online and hackless method, its in the replies but if you don’t feel like scrolling here is the link
https://squidboards.com/threads/is-anyone-actually-going-to-use-pretendo.44263/post-307796

 

[Cephalobro]

It depends, some players don't want to create a new account to connect to Pretendo.

But I agree that Splatoon 1 had some things that are better than Splatoon 2 and 3, for instance, all ranked modes share a single rank, meaning that you can choose which one to excel at and focus your skills on one mode. Secondly, you can actually see your own drawings in the game, which gives you the confirmation that your drawing actually made it through, and it does in fact cycle out the old posts with new ones regularly regardless of followers, allowing pretty much everyone a chance of having their posts shown and not have only a selective group of people take up the spots every single time.

Anyways, if it's possible to use Pretendo without starting over on any online-focused game, more people are going to be willing to use it.

 

[Dessgeega]

I doubt this will be a reliable way to play Splatoon 1, sadly.

To use an analogy, I play a dead MMO via a fanserver, not going to say which. At any given time there's usually a bit over a thousand players logged in, scattered across various areas and events. That game offers a variety of activities for groups of any size between 1 and 8 players, and it's still difficult to fill teams at times.

Splatoon always requires 8 players to begin a match under default gameplay, and by all accounts regularly filling matches for everyone will be a challenge. Even then, you're going to see the same players over and over - if someone gets under your skin, you won't be able to get away from them.

 

[chaotik0]

It depends, some players don't want to create a new account to connect to Pretendo.

But I agree that Splatoon 1 had some things that are better than Splatoon 2 and 3, for instance, all ranked modes share a single rank, meaning that you can choose which one to excel at and focus your skills on one mode. Secondly, you can actually see your own drawings in the game, which gives you the confirmation that your drawing actually made it through, and it does in fact cycle out the old posts with new ones regularly regardless of followers, allowing pretty much everyone a chance of having their posts shown and not have only a selective group of people take up the spots every single time.

Anyways, if it's possible to use Pretendo without starting over on any online-focused game, more people are going to be willing to use it.

wait do save files not transfer through accounts? i honestly forgot how it worked
i have savemii on my wii u so i get to transfer save files however i want but some people do not want to hack their wii u, so this wouldnt be possible for them.

 

[chaotik0]

I doubt this will be a reliable way to play Splatoon 1, sadly.

not with that attitude
for real though, yeah it will probably hard to get people into it but i wanted to make this post for people to say how interested they are in it so we have a general idea of how hard it would really be

 

[Dessgeega]

not with that attitude
for real though, yeah it will probably hard to get people into it but i wanted to make this post for people to say how interested they are in it so we have a general idea of how hard it would really be

Did you read the rest of my post? The logistics aren't great no matter how you look at it.

 

[Cephalobro]

wait do save files not transfer through accounts? i honestly forgot how it worked
i have savemii on my wii u so i get to transfer save files however i want but some people do not want to hack their wii u, so this wouldnt be possible for them.

Existing NNIDs won't work with Pretendo, unfortunately. However, they do point out that NNID-to-PNID migration is theoretically possible, it would also be risky.

 

[chaotik0]

Did you read the rest of my post? The logistics aren't great no matter how you look at it.

yes i did
what i said was half copium but the other half was supposed to be like we can at least try, and if we have a good idea of what it will actually be like to try by getting what other people think that would help out
ok maybe a bit more than half copium

 

[sevenleaf]

i think we can’t realistically expect pretendo servers to be as active as, say, splatoon 3 is right now - but that doesn’t mean we should just give up on it

even with the new method to access pretendo without a hacked wii u, there’s still the barrier to entry of “you still have to Do Something to play.” which, no matter how simple it is (full disclosure: i have hacked my wii u so i haven’t looked too deep into the non-homebrew method), is something not everyone will be willing to do. plus, not everyone who was playing splatoon 1 back when it was current is going to be able or willing to play now, even if pretendo had no barriers to entry whatsoever - people have given away their wii us/copies of splatoon, it’s been an issue that wii us are suddenly failing, some people have lost interest in the game and/or series, etc etc. so we just shouldn’t expect pretendo servers, especially early on, to be something where you can just hop into matchmaking and find a match passively.

that being said - i don’t think it’s a black-and-white “either the servers are active or dead and we shouldn’t bother” thing. i think that if we want to play via pretendo servers, we need to be intentional about it. convince your friends to try! make friends to play splatoon 1 with! make events out of it! also there’s the pretendo discord server but i kinda don’t like the vibes there so. ymmv with matchmaking there

personally i’d like to play on the pretendo servers, especially if i can find a big enough group to hop on with. but i can’t say i plan to play super often - splat1 isn’t the game i play competitively, after all, and i only have so much time in the day to play video games. it’d have to be an “at this specific time when i know others are playing i’ll hop on” thing for it to feel worth it for me.

 

[youre_a_squib_now]

wait do save files not transfer through accounts? i honestly forgot how it worked
i have savemii on my wii u so i get to transfer save files however i want but some people do not want to hack their wii u, so this wouldnt be possible for them.

You can't transfer accounts (easily) but you can transfer save files between accounts. If someone can mod their wii u to get pretendo, they can transfer the save.

 

[Catloafman]

I am setting it up right now actually hoping there are people playing

 

[DzNutsKong]

The one thing that would get me to use Pretendo is if there were some big Splatoon 1 modpack out there, like think Project M or CTGP. Imagine if the modding community ended up rebalancing the game, adding stuff from future entries, adding new kits and so on. If I recall correctly people have put Inkstrike in Splatoon 2? Don't know how feasible all that would be for someone to make but it'd be sick if it did happen and I'd love to try something like that out.

 

[chaotik0]

i think we can’t realistically expect pretendo servers to be as active as, say, splatoon 3 is right now - but that doesn’t mean we should just give up on it

even with the new method to access pretendo without a hacked wii u, there’s still the barrier to entry of “you still have to Do Something to play.” which, no matter how simple it is (full disclosure: i have hacked my wii u so i haven’t looked too deep into the non-homebrew method), is something not everyone will be willing to do. plus, not everyone who was playing splatoon 1 back when it was current is going to be able or willing to play now, even if pretendo had no barriers to entry whatsoever - people have given away their wii us/copies of splatoon, it’s been an issue that wii us are suddenly failing, some people have lost interest in the game and/or series, etc etc. so we just shouldn’t expect pretendo servers, especially early on, to be something where you can just hop into matchmaking and find a match passively.

that being said - i don’t think it’s a black-and-white “either the servers are active or dead and we shouldn’t bother” thing. i think that if we want to play via pretendo servers, we need to be intentional about it. convince your friends to try! make friends to play splatoon 1 with! make events out of it! also there’s the pretendo discord server but i kinda don’t like the vibes there so. ymmv with matchmaking there

personally i’d like to play on the pretendo servers, especially if i can find a big enough group to hop on with. but i can’t say i plan to play super often - splat1 isn’t the game i play competitively, after all, and i only have so much time in the day to play video games. it’d have to be an “at this specific time when i know others are playing i’ll hop on” thing for it to feel worth it for me.

im hoping that in time it will get more popular enough that we can get on whenever. srb2dude said that he wants to give it a try, and that got me thinking about if creators can make it more popular it can be just as active as it was in the past few days, especially since this new method of connecting seems to be really easy? i will try and test it out later to see how it works when you actually do it.

 

[chaotik0]

The one thing that would get me to use Pretendo is if there were some big Splatoon 1 modpack out there, like think Project M or CTGP. Imagine if the modding community ended up rebalancing the game, adding stuff from future entries, adding new kits and so on. If I recall correctly people have put Inkstrike in Splatoon 2? Don't know how feasible all that would be for someone to make but it'd be sick if it did happen and I'd love to try something like that out.

yeah its called project gamblitz, it adds a ton of splatoon 1 stuff to splatoon 2 as well as the kits unless you were thinking of something else

 

[a hot mess]

THE WORLD WILL END ON APRIL 9TH

 

[chaotik0]

You can't transfer accounts (easily) but you can transfer save files between accounts. If someone can mod their wii u to get pretendo, they can transfer the save.

yeah
but with the new method they made for connecting to their servers, it doesn’t require hacking a wii which makes it possible for people who don’t want to do that able to play still
if they have to make a new account to do it though, they don’t get to keep their saves and it sucks to have to build up everything you used to have again, which would make this method not that great for specifically those people that don’t want to hack their wii u to transfer saves, and if they do it might just be worth it at that point to get pretendo the normal way

 

[chaotik0]

i tested the new method yesterday a bit and it was actually so incredibly easy. of course, i already had my profile set up from like last year, so it was just as easy as changing my internet settings and then just playing the game after transferring my save with savemii

one of the limitations of the hackless method is that you can’t make miiverse posts, but you can still see them from other people. other than that, finding matches was actually pretty quick. ranked was only somewhat slower but there are people playing from a new save so not everyone even unlocked it yet and it still found matches quick. it could have just been luck, i could have just been playing during the most active hours though. i played at two different times 4 hours apart so it didn’t seem too much like luck but i don’t know. for running into the same players, i feel like it didn’t happen that often. there was 1 player that i would recognize again every like 6 or so matches (they were playing grim range and they were really good and splatted me quite a bit during the matches we played). other than that i didn’t remember seeing the same players that often. i also only got a few communication errors, but they were testing something with the servers yesterday and instability was expected according to an announcement they made yesterday on their discord.

this feels like mostly a success, it feels as active as it was during the final week before official servers were down. i thought it would be useful to try and give all the info i can for this so that people who are not sure or on the fence about using it have more to work with when making their decision.

 

[Holla]

i tested the new method yesterday a bit and it was actually so incredibly easy. of course, i already had my profile set up from like last year, so it was just as easy as changing my internet settings and then just playing the game after transferring my save with savemii

one of the limitations of the hackless method is that you can’t make miiverse posts, but you can still see them from other people. other than that, finding matches was actually pretty quick. ranked was only somewhat slower but there are people playing from a new save so not everyone even unlocked it yet and it still found matches quick. it could have just been luck, i could have just been playing during the most active hours though. i played at two different times 4 hours apart so it didn’t seem too much like luck but i don’t know. for running into the same players, i feel like it didn’t happen that often. there was 1 player that i would recognize again every like 6 or so matches (they were playing grim range and they were really good and splatted me quite a bit during the matches we played). other than that i didn’t remember seeing the same players that often. i also only got a few communication errors, but they were testing something with the servers yesterday and instability was expected according to an announcement they made yesterday on their discord.

this feels like mostly a success, it feels as active as it was during the final week before official servers were down. i thought it would be useful to try and give all the info i can for this so that people who are not sure or on the fence about using it have more to work with when making their decision.

I’ve been trying out the hackless method as well. I have pretty much had the same experience as you. It’s pretty impressive. Really happy with Pretendo so far.

Biggest downside is having to start a brand new save file when going hackless, but I’ve actually been having fun earning everything again (My original save had everything unlocked so it was actually kind of boring to play in comparison). Also the majority of people I’ve played with other than a couple have started over brand new saves as well so I’m not getting crushed by people with proper gear and weapon sets all that much.

The hackless method is definitely worth trying out for anyone who is potentially interested.

 

[hamnerheads]

I think the biggest hurdle for me is making a new account and grinding for levels. eliter unlocks at lvl 18. thats like,,, so many turf wars and I doubt there will be enough players to fill out all the different ranks. I'll still make an account when I have access to my wiiu, I just don't want to get my hopes up

 

[youre_a_squib_now]

I’ve been trying out the hackless method as well. I have pretty much had the same experience as you. It’s pretty impressive. Really happy with Pretendo so far.

Biggest downside is having to start a brand new save file when going hackless, but I’ve actually been having fun earning everything again (My original save had everything unlocked so it was actually kind of boring to play in comparison). Also the majority of people I’ve played with other than a couple have started over brand new saves as well so I’m not getting crushed by people with proper gear and weapon sets all that much.

The hackless method is definitely worth trying out for anyone who is potentially interested.

I played splatoon 1 for 2 years but "proper gear" does not describe my save file lol