I wonder why they always put so little effort in. I know at least part of the reason is that nintendo wants to make an entirely child friendly experience which usually involves leaving as little player to player interaction as possible.
The things that suck about Animal Crossing's online experience isnt about limiting communication or making it more child friendly, but just the mechanicisms of it. Whenever someone enters or leaves an island you're on you're forced to sit through a series of cutscenes.
My guess is that nintendo wanted to dramatically restrict the netcode they had to write, so not having to send world deltas or spin up multiple threads sharing a socket was the way.
I think with nintendo is far more complicated. They rare quite conservative and very very strong focused on security in all kind of ways, meaning not harming their image, or their products, the game-experience or their profit. For those things there are always tradeoffs, so they choose the ones with the least impact.
On the other side, Nintendo is also a very old company, with a long history and sight on longterm-goals. But it seems to be also full of now older people with not so much experience in modern things. Addtionally, it's japan, which has a very bad history with stuff like Personal Computers and online-services. So people at nintendo are simply lacking experience and knowledge there even more than anywhere else.
This environment seems to be resulting in this very slow growing gain of understanding the world of online-gaming-features, as also mobile devices. It's step by step, with each step taking years, where others already had started a decade earlier.
AC's online experience sucks in large part because Nintendo is paranoid about item duping. This leads to things like everyone needing to pause their gameplay so the save states can be in sync when someone visits and worse rolling back the state of the world if someone disconnects due to bad internet or their console going sleep due to inactivity.
Given the nature of the game I don't understand why they didn't prioritize fun over protecting against duping.
That's nevermind the fact that two friends can't do stuff like terraform or furnish an island together.
> I don't understand why they didn't prioritize fun over protecting against duping
I suspect they may be aiming for long-term fun over instant gratification. Hard to get items will inevitably have a story attached of how they were a acquired. That means asking about some new thing you see when visiting a friend will get them telling that story. If Nintendo can keep these stories interesting, it’s a compelling reason for people to keep visiting friends in-game.
On the other hand, if item duplication is possible, that destroys rarity, and most items will have no meaningful history to speak of.
A good point about why you care about not allowing dupes, but you can lose hours of gameplay with a rollback[1]. There isn't a periodic save.
This can happen for something as benign as a player taking a lunch break and not babying their switch.
Which harms the long term experience as if it happens to you once, it makes you paranoid about taking a longer term trip to a friend's island and doing something other than a short tour.
