Wii U Update Eats Most of Basic's 8GB

[Starke]

Sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for designing a modern computing device which can be totally bricked by something as simple as an update being interrupted. There are any number of scenarios in which such a thing could happen which require no "user stupidity" at all, and other companies are evidently capable of designing systems capable of withstanding such mundane errors; why is Nintendo's inability to do so anyone's fault but Nintendo's?

LOL, I love the rantings of the ill informed.
There is a reason EVERY computer says
"DO NOT INTERRUPT WHILE PERFORMING SYSTEM UPDATES".

Well... yeah... wait a moment...

"There was no warning and no cancel button," Fritz Tweeted [https://twitter.com/benfritz/status/270035885272219648]. "Just a super slow progress bar. No explanation beside 'system update.'"

So, while sure, there must be a warning because no one would be stupid enough to put a system on the block like that without taking some steps to avoid it being bricked.

If you do that to Windows at the wrong moment you can fry it, and require it to be re-installed. You do that to the PS3 or 360 at the moment it's updating the firmware you'll fry them too. Their is almost certainly a way for him to Restore his Wii to working condition, but he'll ether need to download something, and boot it with a restore, or he'll have to send it to Nintendo so they can run it themselves. I'm not too sure if Nintendo would be eager to allow a functional restore too out of their service department since that would lead to wide spread hacking quickly. There is a reason people like me like to have their PS3 and other Firmware Updating devices hucked up to a UPS when we run updates. Unless you like the risk of breaking expensive equipment you should always follow the instructions.

Yeah, because no one would ever be dumb enough to actually run the update while downloading, that's just insane.

Except, of course, that's exactly what appears to have happened here. The system was applying the update as it was being downloaded.

Okay, I can understand how this makes sense from a DRM stand point. If you never leave a console with the full install file, it's harder to reverse engineer outside of the system as a whole... but, at the same time it also means that just using a UPS won't cut it. And of course it doesn't keep a backup, because you could potentially compare what the patch is writing to the backup...

Yeah, this has all kinds of smart written all over it. I'd say unplugging the machine was a dumb move, but, honestly, the reporter would have had to work pretty damn hard to one up Nintendo here.

 

[Jegsimmons]

i feel no sympathy...you bought something called a WiiU. What the hell did you expect?

 

[ResonanceSD]

DO NOT POWER DOWN THE DEVICE WHEN THIS SYMBOL IS FLASHING

Ok, fine, no warning, no symbol.

Oh wait, no, you get PAID to write about technology and you did this? No, sorry, entirely your own fault.

 

[lapan]

Lol I get it that every new piece of hardware comes with teething problems but you cant blame everything on it. This article is just illustrates user stupidity kicking in, you know off the bat that you dont have much in the way of storage. That being the case your first action should be to stick an external drive or high capacity pen drive into the machine. Honestly its not like this issue hasnt been discussed in length by everyone who is involved in games. Additionally anyone who has used a console in the last 7 years or so knows that you dont interrupt updates or game saves/loads or it could lead to data corruption.

Finally the article title is misleading - instead it is regaling us with stories about the incompetence of someone and tries to lay the blame at ninty's feet.

Sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for designing a modern computing device which can be totally bricked by something as simple as an update being interrupted. There are any number of scenarios in which such a thing could happen which require no "user stupidity" at all, and other companies are evidently capable of designing systems capable of withstanding such mundane errors; why is Nintendo's inability to do so anyone's fault but Nintendo's?

To be fair, most consoles won't take kindly to shutting them off during system updates.

 

[NoeL]

So, after doing my research and giving it some thought, I've come to the following conclusions:

1) Highly unlikely the update was 5gb, given that others have reported downloading fairly quickly and high server traffic is another potential culprit for a slow download. Given that Nintendo seems to be going the "BYO harddrive" route it's not out of the question that 8gb would be reserved primarily for the OS (though I'm not convinced that's the case), and even if it were I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing (unless the reported compatibility issues are correct).

2) The guy should have known better than to switch off during a system update.

3) Nintendo should have known better than to assume people would know better. Again, assuming the source is reliable (I have my doubts), the lack of a warning being displayed is inexcusable. Updating the firmware as it downloads is an interesting idea, and not necessarily a bad one, but if you're going to do that you REALLY should have failsafes, and it would appear Nintendo didn't have them.


So all in all, Nintendo's error, but hopefully gets resolved soon.

 

[theultimateend]

i feel no sympathy...you bought something called a WiiU. What the hell did you expect?

2000+ posts and that's what you got?

I'm a bit disappointed :/.

On Topic, I dunno, sounds like this is fake.

 

[Olas]

I cannot BELIEVE there are people criticizing Nintendo for this. You don't unplug a system during the middle of a critical update, that's like the biggest no-no there is outside of physically assaulting the console.

It would be nice if Nintendo found a way to make the console recover from power drops during updates, but there's certainly no rule saying consoles should have to compensate for people completely misusing them in this manner.

In fact, I don't care if it's because of a power outage either. Is it too much for Nintendo to assume people have stable power? I know power outages happen, but everyone knows you shouldn't try to update during a thunderstorm or if you know you have a shaky connection. The likelyhood of the average person spontaneously losing power during the 90 minute update window is pretty damn low and I imagine these things come with some kind of warranty in case of freak accidents.

WiiU: Not moron proof.

 

[Olrod]

So... what happens if you live somewhere with an unreliable internet connection and it goes down while you're in mid-update?

 

[rob_simple]

A 5GB update? That has got to be exaggeration on the author's part; no company could have the brass-neck to release an update that, even on a good connection, would take about an hour to download. Surely?

I know a lot of people have already said he was stupid for unplugging and that's true, but I got the impression from how the situation was described that he thought the system had crashed. I've found myself in that situation before: where I can't tell if my patches are installing slowly or if it's froze, (the only matter of recourse for which is a hard reset,) and I would be even more prone to confusion when installing a ridiculously sized update like what he's describing.

That being said, I'd probably check online before doing anything as rash as unplugging the system. Yet another reason I never go in for day-one consoles purchases.

 

[Olrod]

So what if this guy deliberately disconnected his Wii U to see what would happen. Perhaps he was running a "test" with the knowledge that either by accident or stupidity that this kind of thing might happen more than once to lots of people. Either people unplugging their console, or perhaps something as mundane as a downed internet, or worse, a power cut.

To completely kill the console with no hope of recovery is just mindbogglingly incompetent on NintenD'OHs part.

 

[9thRequiem]

I cannot BELIEVE there are people criticizing Nintendo for this. You don't unplug a system during the middle of a critical update, that's like the biggest no-no there is outside of physically assaulting the console.

It would be nice if Nintendo found a way to make the console recover from power drops during updates, but there's certainly no rule saying consoles should have to compensate for people completely misusing them in this manner.

In fact, I don't care if it's because of a power outage either. Is it too much for Nintendo to assume people have stable power? I know power outages happen, but everyone knows you shouldn't try to update during a thunderstorm or if you know you have a shaky connection. The likelyhood of the average person spontaneously losing power during the 90 minute update window is pretty damn low and I imagine these things come with some kind of warranty in case of freak accidents.

WiiU: Not moron proof.

Seriously? You don't know why Nintendo are to blame?

1) System updates rule 1 : Minimize the time you're in an inconsistent state. This means do not update during the download. I can't speak for the PS3 (but I imagine it to be the case), but for the 360 there's download, then update. Not following this rule is pretty much the dumbest thing you can do when designing updates.

2) No warning. Games have the "If you see this icon, don't unplug because it's saving" for a 30 second save, where the very worst that could possibly occur is you lose progress. Not having it for a system update is outright awful.

3) No backups for something the average user is expected to do. Most updates will backup first, then try the update. If the update fails for whatever reason, the boot process will roll back. Again, I can't speak for PS3, but I have powered down my 360 during a dashboard update, and it was fine (on next boot, it just restarted the update). Modern motherboards have a backup BIOS in case you try to update that and it fails.

4) Poor progress indication. It's a design point, sure, but it's considered good practice for anything that could be lengthy to ensure the user never feels it to be stuck. Progress bars usually work fine for this, but there's other things that will help if it's going to take so long the bar might not work well enough, for example written progress (either as a percentage or a actual amount of data).

 

[xPixelatedx]

This is really stupid, consoles should have fail safe in case you interrupt updates. I mean even iPhones can revert back to the previous version in such a situation, can't they?

And before anyone responds with 'well then don't interrupt the update', how about you really think that through? What if the console freezes? What if you lose internet from an outage at that time? (happens here all the time)

Or worse yet, what if there is a power failure?

All of these are very real and sometimes even likely scenarios depending on your living conditions. It is utterly absurd that in this day and age they would make updating your console so dangerous. This was a two hour+ update for some people as well, which just increased the likelihood that something would happen.

Honestly, it's a day 1 release. Give me the name of one console that didn't have problems day 1.

NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube... I just kept to the Nintendo brand to prove the point (there is a lot more). But yeah, I am pretty sure all those consoles just worked out of their respective boxes. No red ring, system updates or flesh eating locusts to be found!

 

[Olas]

I cannot BELIEVE there are people criticizing Nintendo for this. You don't unplug a system during the middle of a critical update, that's like the biggest no-no there is outside of physically assaulting the console.

It would be nice if Nintendo found a way to make the console recover from power drops during updates, but there's certainly no rule saying consoles should have to compensate for people completely misusing them in this manner.

In fact, I don't care if it's because of a power outage either. Is it too much for Nintendo to assume people have stable power? I know power outages happen, but everyone knows you shouldn't try to update during a thunderstorm or if you know you have a shaky connection. The likelyhood of the average person spontaneously losing power during the 90 minute update window is pretty damn low and I imagine these things come with some kind of warranty in case of freak accidents.

WiiU: Not moron proof.

Seriously? You don't know why Nintendo are to blame?

1) System updates rule 1 : Minimize the time you're in an inconsistent state. This means do not update during the download. I can't speak for the PS3 (but I imagine it to be the case), but for the 360 there's download, then update. Not following this rule is pretty much the dumbest thing you can do when designing updates.

Do you really think downloading while it updated really slowed it down much? Fact is Nintendo doesn't want people to have to wait a long time to start using their game console, forcing people to sit through a whole download AND a whole update separately would drag out the overall process considerably, especially for people like me with slow connections to begin with. Nintendo was more concerned about this than the unlikely chance the console might somehow lose power during the update. And I'm glad, it'll end up saving me time when I finally get a WiiU and have to update it.

2) No warning. Games have the "If you see this icon, don't unplug because it's saving" for a 30 second save, where the very worst that could possibly occur is you lose progress. Not having it for a system update is outright awful.

I agree with you on this, no matter how obvious it might seem to us, something this important demands a warning message of some kind.

Still, what moron really needs that warning? He knew it was a system update, he knew it was in the middle of the update because the progress bar wasn't full. When I was 9 I knew better than to do this. I still call this 30% bad design 70% user stupidity.

3) No backups for something the average user is expected to do. Most updates will backup first, then try the update. If the update fails for whatever reason, the boot process will roll back. Again, I can't speak for PS3, but I have powered down my 360 during a dashboard update, and it was fine (on next boot, it just restarted the update). Modern motherboards have a backup BIOS in case you try to update that and it fails.

I think someone else already pointed out that trying to create a backup with an 8GB hard drive, 5GB of which was already filled up by the update itself, would be somewhat impossible. But that's a bit beside the point.

This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that just because Nintendo COULD put in such a safety measure, it doesn't mean they're obliged to, or even that it's bad design for them not to.

They could have made the system waterproof too I bet, but unless the console being submerged in water is a serious concern, it's not going to be worth all the extra money needed to add that feature. I've updated my Wii god knows how many times, my numerous PCs even more times, I've even updated my 3DS several times now. So far I have lost power during an update exactly zero times, nor have I stupidly decided to unplug my console mid-update. The likelyhood of a power outage coinciding with a critical system update just isn't very high.

Life is chaotic, any number of things could go wrong at any moment, but that doesn't mean Nintendo should be expected to prepare their console for every single worst case scenario, and derided if something bad ever happens to it. There's a reason warranties exist. In Fritz's case I don't think he even deserves to have his warranty cover what happened, he earned his brick.

Also, this might not be important, but there's a difference between "powering down" a system and simply unplugging one from the wall.

4) Poor progress indication. It's a design point, sure, but it's considered good practice for anything that could be lengthy to ensure the user never feels it to be stuck. Progress bars usually work fine for this, but there's other things that will help if it's going to take so long the bar might not work well enough, for example written progress (either as a percentage or a actual amount of data).

Oh boo hooo. As if somehow this is a uniquely Nintendo problem. I don't know how progress bars work but I've never seen a steady one in my life. I would imagine by this day and age we've all learned to be patient enough with these things that we can sit through a brief spell of no apparent progress without losing our minds and assuming something's gone wrong.