Sorry I completely forgot what this topic was about while typing that long post...in response to Nintendos home I think IGN said it best....it should be set to an Animal Crossing theme

I can't believe people are still asking this question. It's obvious that Nintendo doesn't like you having friends.

of course its obvious...but that doesn't make it not fun to talk about ways to improve nintendos online

Nintendo is to classy to copy.

friends just lead to rape and murder...it's true.

I haven’t heard anyone mention a parent’s point of view. The very restrictions you are complaining about are a HUGE selling point with most parents. Most parents are very concerned about their children and teenagers interacting and chatting on line. Regrettably, they should if anything, be even more concerned than they are.

This year, so far I’ve had to help 5 different friends whose children had gotten in trouble on line. In every case they really didn’t know all the ways their children were communicating on line. When they installed good monitoring software they were shocked at what they found. Three had to involve the police because of clear predator/pedophile activity.

In a survey of 500 teenagers across the country, ages 14-18, about computer habit. 58 percent said someone they’ve met online has wanted to meet them in person, and 29 percent said they’ve had a “scary” experience online

One in eight youth ages 8-18 discovered that someone they were communicating with online was an adult pretending to be much younger.

30 percent of teenage girls have been sexually harassed in a chatroom. Only 7 percent, told their parents about the harassment because they might be preventedfrom going online

86 percent said they could chat online without their parents’ knowledge, 54 percent could conduct a cyber relationship.

No, children and teenagers unfortunatly cannot be relied on to pick safe friends to chat with in any setting.

Nintendo’s intention is to provide a 100% safe environment and parents overwhelmingly approve of it being that way. I do not think it likely they will change their policies.This does unfortunately restricts those gamers old enough to not need this level of security. The only solution I can see is perhaps a separate 3rd party online game server such as already exists for games like COD and Unreal. They could have their own system of controls if any.

By the way, Wii has a "general" code for all the online games (atleast so i have understood), which is the Wii friendcode, since you can send friend requests through message board from the game. The number of friends, then again, is a little small at least in MKWii, since it fits only 30 per license. So, if you could add random people as friends ingame and chat with friends, the "protection system" would be gone. So you can have only one of those two. @Ben: I agree about the missing "no"("Ready?" "Maple Treeway!"). And it could have some sort of customisation for the messages. If Nintendo would address these issues, which people complain here, it would create new issues, which would need to be addressed. Now, there are some issues, but as in protective measure, it's much better this way. And about the voice chat, you definately don't want to hear me after you push me down from the track in Mario Kart.

 And no the Wii Friendcode is not that global: You can't see what a friend is playing right now, and is for the entiere Wii. Now the Wii is for the entire family. So there are persons in there, that I don't know, are there?