There are positives and negatives to every possible option. I cannot give a proper opinion until Nintendo outrightly states the cost for online. When I heard this I immediately thought of the best possible outcome for this: dedicated servers. This may not happen, but I see it being a highly probable result of a subscription based online service. Whilst this won't solve all connection issues, it'll fix a vast majority and improve others.
Peer-to-Peer always gets a lot of flak for how badly affected it is by bad internet connections and bad hosts. Mario Kart Wii (have more experience with Wii than 8, still play it online via Wiimmfi) has this issue where connections aren't resolved correctly, and issues pop up where the item roulette can no longer speed up, people teleport around the track, red shells ignore players and either go for the person ahead of the target or rectify the mistake and hit the target from the front. In Splatoon 1 we've seen (the usual) teleport lag, no shots firing from players before coming out all at once, extremely bad trades from beyond the grave, laggy bomb rushes where all the bombs come flying at once just to name a few.
Severe lag matches are usually few and far between, but we can't deny that it has a negative impact on the gameplay, making it frustrating and even costing matches when people get splatted later than they should have. How many of you have seen matches where the Tower stops, flies forward, randomly slows down or continues for an extra few points despite no-one being on there (or the other team controlling it)? I've been thrown off the Tower into water before because of it, through no fault of my own. Other instances are when I've picked up RM and swam at full speed for a good distance before the game realises I have it and gives it to me, giving me more distance for a push than I should have due to no swim penalty (exact same issue that allowed super jumps). There was even one match when I was in a squad where my team was losing, and we somehow had 2 Rainmaker carriers in Extra Time (I was one, got splatted but the match continued, as soon as I respawned the other RM got splatted which somehow got me splatted inside the spawn, my squad partner even said they saw the other person with the RM and that I never had it). It may not happen often, but it really drops the quality of gameplay and makes things more frustrating than necessary.
If we get dedicated servers, the price is right (around £20-£40 a year) and the profits go towards active development and improvement of the servers, then I am fine with this. Bearing in mind this is coming from someone finishing an electrical course and is looking for part-time work. I don't care for the NES/SNES game thing, sure it's bad compared to PS+ and Gold, but Nintendo is always bad at providing deals and incentives for their customers, so it's not unexpected or a shock. Let's wait things out until Nintendo releases full information on this, because locking on to the fact it's a subscription and complaining without the full picture is just silly. I won't defend Nintendo, but we need a clear picture before deciding if it's good enough for us.
