 So, Nintendo, at least in America, is known to have excellent customer support. They're very cordial, very friendly, almost always do right by the customer in one way or another. Hence, we get free Joy-Con repairs for Joy-Con Drift, despite the fact that Nintendo won't come out and admit that it exists and they're legally arguing it doesn't. Either way, in the United States, we get free Joy-Con repair even outside of warranty. This just goes into a long laundry list of things that Nintendo customer support has been excellent about at least here in the United States. I can't speak for other parts of the country because I haven't experienced their customer support but I have had nothing but glowing reviews myself of customer support when I have had to call them in the past, specifically over an issue I was having with Wii U at the time. But here's the thing, sometimes they mess up and sometimes it takes some extra intervention to make things right. So a particular person on Reddit sent in their Nintendo Switch for repairs because it had apparently been bricked or whatever the case might be. I'm just going to go over the original story. It's all been made right now but it took something extra from Nintendo fans to seemingly make this happen. So let's get to the original story. So this person said, and I quote here, this is by Doom Burrito. The original post goes to this, so late this September my Switch's battery died and I sent it in for repair. So it was a battery issue. Sorry there. I don't know why I thought it was bricked but we'll get into that later. He paid $100 plus for that repair as well. A fairly quick time later they sent back a new factory certified Switch as a replacement. So basically they just gave him a new refurbished Switch that you would buy off Nintendo's website. And he spent $100 plus for this repair. It was not a covered by warranty repair. Except when I turned it on and I went to the eShop it couldn't connect. When I went to update the operating system it couldn't connect. I called up Nintendo and they confirmed the console itself was banned and they had no way to reverse the ban. Note this was not the original one. It was a new serial number and it confirmed my Nintendo account wasn't fine standing. So it wasn't an account ban. They said they needed to look into how this mistake happened and would get back to me shortly. They apologized and said they would give me a download code to something when it was resolved. They didn't really tell them what. Just something. A week later I called them and they had no new info. But said they would definitely have a resolution within a week. A week later. I called again and they had no new info. But were going to escalate the issue and should be just another week. A week later I called the fourth time. No new info. This almost sounds like my issue with YouTube. Very weird to hear this out of Nintendo customer support. So I've tried explaining to them that I don't understand why I can't just send the banned console in and they send me a new factory certified one. Again, that's the logical thing to do. They're doing background research about where the repair process fell apart. But I can't see why that means I need to hold on to the non-functional console for them to do it. Agree there. I don't know why you have to hold on to it either. They could still do that internal research while sending you a new one. Anyways. I went to Best Buy and bought a console and it didn't work. Or if you went to Best Buy and bought a console and it didn't work. They wouldn't make me hold on to it for a month while they looked into what happened. They just give me a new one. The rep said there wasn't anything he could do and I just had to wait for them to finish. So as of now, it has been over a month with no actual new updates or progress from them. No one I've talked to has any idea why the background research is taking so long or what the next step will be or how much longer it will take. Like I don't fault the reps at all. They've actually been incredibly nice and apologetic but this is absolutely bonkers. Has anyone seen any other methods of escalating things like this? Now you put this out on Reddit because you didn't know what else to do. Update on 11-2 called again. Now that it's Monday, the rep knew exactly what I was talking about and immediately told me there's no new info. Wouldn't budge. I haven't been given any other response from Nintendo on Twitter or email etc. either. Update at 12-19 central called the supervisor line again. They said it has been escalated to an even higher team and that they literally have no further visibility into what is happening. The rep I talked to said he's the highest customer facing person available to speak to and beyond him it's just internal teams. He couldn't give any reason why they couldn't just send a working switch. He couldn't give any reason why this was taking so long. I get it. His hands are completely tied as well. But it's pretty annoying that they have absolutely zero visibility into the issue. I'll just keep posting and calling back. So this is where things were until today. So today things were finally resolved and all that jazz. But I want to bring up the point here that while customers front facing support were extremely friendly, why did this take over a month Nintendo? This was your mistake. Why should this customer be punished for a repair by the way? They paid for a repair. They didn't know they were going to get a new switch. They paid for a repair of their system instead of replacing the battery themselves which they could have done for much cheaper. They paid for Nintendo officially licensed repair of their platform and got back a bricked banned system. I guess banned more than bricked. I get that you're confused how a banned system got sent out to someone. I understand there's an internal process that failed somewhere. I get you needed to internally research it. So why do you punish the customer for your mistake? That's what I don't get. 45,000 plus retweets and everything later. Finally something happened. Update. We did it. I just got a call from a higher supervisor at Nintendo and they are overnight shipping a new console. Hopefully here by now. Just adding Nintendo switch online for the month I missed out on which a big whoop. And giving a copy of Pikmin 3 Deluxe which that's nice. He didn't have any info about why this took so long and didn't have anything to say when I mentioned that users shouldn't have to get 45,000 people involved. At this time there's been 45.4,000 upvotes of this post on Reddit. So yeah involved to get customer support issue fixed but he was nice and responsive. So basically so there we go four weeks later and all it took was getting to the front page of Reddit and having hundreds of people retweet me. Thanks to everyone's support and then he talks about voting because of the election. So what's interesting here is that he was getting nowhere with Nintendo. It was being escalated. It was being escalated. Nothing to report. We can't look at it. Nothing to report. So what's going on? Month later. Month later. Then the moment it gets 45,000 plus upvotes on the Nintendo switch Reddit hits the top. Ends up being one of the most upvoted posts of the year. All the retweets. Hundreds of retweets on Twitter. Finally someone at Nintendo calls them up and says we got you. New system coming tomorrow. Here's a free game. Have a good day. Why was it so hard to get to this earlier? Why could they have done this a month earlier? This makes it feel like it took Nintendo fan outreach to make Nintendo act because they were getting bad PR. This was a bad look for Nintendo. Not a bad look for the front facing customer support, but a bad look for the back end support of Nintendo. Not only is it horrible to think from Nintendo themselves they sent out a banned system. How does that even happen? That shouldn't even be possible. You can see that happening at GameStop where they might not confirm the online connectivity before they buy a system. So you can maybe see that happening there, but at Nintendo it should be well trusted from them to not get a banned system. So obviously there's already a bad look there in sending the banned system and then to make that customer wait over a month and it takes a Reddit slash Twitter campaign to get enough attention, enough negative attention drawn to it for Nintendo to do this overnight free game thing. I get that maybe it would have happened in this time frame anyways, but it shouldn't take this long. And it's funny that the moment it blows up on Reddit and Twitter is the moment Nintendo responds. Again, people always talk about how I'm biased and all this crap towards Nintendo and I have some bias in general. We're all biased on various topics because we all have life experiences that shape the way we think and view the world, but here's the thing. I don't give Nintendo a pass. This is a bad look. Nintendo should have never sent this out. Nintendo should have after making a mistake, which, hey, mistakes happen. Okay, we're all human. Mistakes happen. They should have rectified this immediately. It shouldn't have even been something that, oh, the customer's reporting it. Hey, you know what? Send it back and we'll send you a new one when we receive it, right? Like I can see them thinking, oh, maybe the customer's lying, right? So, okay, send the system back to Nintendo and they can send you a new one. Even if you had to pay for the cost of shipping it back, which isn't that expensive, by the way, because the switch doesn't weigh that much. Hey, Nintendo will quickly be able to verify, oh yeah, this is a banned system. Let's send you a new one. So even if you had to wait to send the system back, which could have took like a week, still could have had this resolved within 14 days. A month? Really? Plus, you could also have confirmed the banned system by running the serial code, you know, in Nintendo's system and could have realized, oh yeah, this is a banned system. We did send him a ban. He doesn't even need to send it back. The system is literally pointless at this point. You can't update games, you can't play online. It's basically a parts machine. I, and maybe that's what it was supposed to be. Maybe that ban switch at Nintendo, the entire reason they even had it, was it was supposed to be taken apart and used for parts to actually fix other non-banned machines. I could see that being a thing, you know, you can reuse the screen, you can reuse the battery, there's a few things you can reuse. You can't reuse the memory or the motherboard. You can reuse the rails. There's a lot of things that you could take apart on a switch and reuse in other switches that have broken things. You know, like the guy who sent the switch in originally because it had a battery issued, they could take the battery out of this and put it in that one. They could have just did that, which is what he paid for and got it back. Granted, no one's going to complain when you pay for a repair and then you get back what essentially feels like a brand new switch. In general, you're not really going to complain about that. I, it's baffling to me. It's baffling to me that this is the solution offered and that Nintendo messed up. I mean, what do this guy has between two data? Like that's all stored locally. Hopefully transfer that for them. This to me is a situation that just shouldn't happen and is kind of inexcusable. Now, this is the rare occurrence. I'm not going to sit here and trash all of Nintendo's support or not really the front facing support, but they're back end support. I'm not going to sit here and rip them a new one because they in general, as I said at the beginning of this video, do a very good job. They really do, but this is a case where someone messed up and then they just kept making this customer wait. I don't think that's acceptable behavior from customer support. And I get the front facing people, it was out of their hands. They're just, you know, they're front facing people. It's just like when I talked to YouTube about my issues, all the people I can talk to are front facing people. The fact that these front facing people can't even access the reports on why my channel has invalid activity. Very similar situation here where the front facing Nintendo will be like, Oh, I'm the highest up person you can talk to. I'm talking to the highest up front facing person and YouTube support as well. And again, they don't have access to see the invalid traffic for themselves. They just agree that this isn't right, but what are we going to do? Internal teams are doing whatever. Okay, same thing here. Guys didn't have access to what the hell was going on. Internal teams are handling it. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Anyways, I'm the Thunder Robo Jants from Nintendo Prime. Can't wait for some updated sales data later this week, man. I'm ready for some positive news to come in because the next video, the next video is not necessarily positive either. But at least it's not about Nintendo. So there is that. All right, folks, I'm the Thunder Robo Jants from Nintendo Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you each and every one of you in the next video.