Comment by KennyBlanken
2 years ago
Given nintendo's user base includes a LOT of children who are very young, the long codes may have been a feature, not a bug - the equivalent of a child latch - to slow down/discourage young users from adding people themselves so their parents have a better idea of who they are interacting with.
I expect it's more a combination of several factors:
- if we don't have usernames we don't have to deal with obscene usernames, trademarked usernames, impersonation claims, and similar
- if we don't have usernames and our generated friend codes aren't guessable, we don't have to worry about people getting random unexpected friend requests from people they don't know
Don't get me wrong I get there were intentional reasons for it in regard to friend codes and I don't necessarily fully mind with that in mind in that use case. I do kind of wish there was an "I'm 13/18+, let's take the training wheels off" feature though.