This needs to be put out in the open because without it, we'd just be willfully ignoring an aspect of Nintendo's plans that could prove problematic.
We've all heaped praise upon Animal Crossing and Mario Kart, but both of these games have powerful flaws in their implementation of online stability.
The developers of Mario Kart felt that certain courses could not be played online because they couldn't insure that with all the activity on the course, the connection would remain stable. In Animal Crossing, disconnections are not uncommon at all! (The loss of progress for everyone involved is actually a game design issue, and only very slightly related to connectivity stability.
In addition, the 30 foot distance on the WiFi dongle is fine if you're computer is in the living room, but 30 feet turns out to be exhausted by my walking right down the hall! But perhaps stronger WiFi routers are capable of better performance...
Anyways, if these problems persist onto the Revolutions online ability, then this would put a HUGE damper on the Revolution's claim on excellent AND free online capabilities.
But then again, there may not be too much cause to worry. The DS is not too strong a piece of hardware, and thus it may not be able to use techniques to enable online play via slower guaranteed throughput.
Blizzard, for example, offers a free online matching service, the highly popular B.Net. This is free and connects players, much like the Nintendo WiFi Strategy. And Blizzard's RTS games are very readily playable on 56K to boot! But this is done because a lot of what Blizzard has done is shunt the weiight onto the computer's cpu, 56K is fine as long as you have a strong enough computer to handle the less, but probably more complex data being sent over the net. Basically put, B.Net makes it such that you can play on %^K because the cpu uses programming tricks to make up for it.
Perhaps the Revolution will be better capable of this than the DS.
...Also of worth noting is that B.Net has no central server, when players play a Blizzard game one of their computers acts as the host. This seems highly like the way Mario Kart : DS AND Animal Crossing works, the service is free because Nintendo maintains few servers of their own and shunts the responsibility of hosting to the DS, and the Revolution.
This last paragraph lends thought to the idea that traditional MMORPGs and massively multiplayer online games like WoW or FFXI will be more difficult to pull off on the Revolution as compared to simple 4-player hookups like a Mario Kart Match, a Streetfighter match, Resident Evil Outbreak, SOCOM match-ups or a Gauntlet type cooperative game.
Finally, there's the question of how ready Nintendos coders are for network programming. At the very least, we'll see how ready NST is come March and the release of Metroid Prime: Hunters.
~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com