Dear Nintendo:
If you check the Activity Log in my black 3DS, my third most used game right behinf Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Pokemon Black 2 is Swapnote... Used to be, since you decided to wipe out its Spotpass functionality.
I am a 28 years old university student from Chile, a small south american country with a small but increasing 3DS user base. For most of my early days with my 3DS, Swapnotes was THE app I was eager to check at the end of the day. Most of the early 3DS adopters here used 3DS for coordinating Mario Kart 7 play sessions and share small life stories. Sure, there was some "adult" content going on, but as most of us were adults having fun over the Internet, it was mostly tolerable.
Today I am greeted with this notification on my Swapnote inbox. I was sharing all my special stationery with a friend who bought its 3DS last week, and now I can't even talk with him. I have around 50+ friends from all over the world on my 3DS and now I have no way of comunication with them. Nintendo effectively shut down our small community with the press of a button.
I understand that Nintendo needs to secure a safe ecosystem for all their users, even the smaller ones. But can't nintendo achieve this by any other means? Can't your engineers at Nintendo hide any and all online interactions behind some kind of parental lock? Can't you charge a small fee for an updated version of Swapnote so the parents have to actually allow their children to buy the app, effectively forcing the parents to check what their kids are doing with their consoles? Can't you add moderation just like in the WiiU communities? So many solutions, yet you go with the most destructive one.
What now? Well, I'll try to send messages to my friends using whatever game I have at hand (Animal Crossing and Pokemon X, for now), and arrange Skype and Facebook groups so we stay in touch somehow. Because Nintendo is still so out of touch with current technologies that we can't trust in Nintendo to keep their customers together and happy.
Thank you, Nikki, for around 200 hours of fun and giggles. May our paths cross somewhere in the future. You'll be missed.