My favorite feature of both recent portable systems has been their weird little community systems. Sadly, the Vita’s “Near” never really took off, but Streetpass seemed to do pretty well – at least, once Nintendo added Streetpass Relay stations to every McDonalds and Home Depot.
There are two Home Depots and probably a half dozen McDonalds within 20 miles of me. I have ALL the puzzle pieces, which is an accomplishment I should probably be a lot less proud of, and I’ve finished Find Mi I & II enough times to have every achievement. I never bought any of the other Streetpass games, though, and therein lies the problem I ran in to recently.
See, I’m going to be heading to Hawaii and Japan in a couple of months, and with the Switch taking off and the 3DS on its last batch of releases this is probably my last chance to collect passes and fill out my map and birthday calendar. So I figured that I would drop the five bucks for the expanded Mii Plaza, specifically to get the feature that lets you queue 100 Miis instead of just 10.
It turned out not to be so simple. After going into a couple of Streetpass Relay stations, I was up to 10 Miis in my queue, but it wouldn’t go over that. Some quick Google searches showed me that the Line feature doesn’t let me actually collect 100 Miis passively – I still need to open the 3DS every once in a while and send them to the Line, where up to 100 will accumulate. It still saves time, I guess, but it’s not the solution I was hoping for.
Also, I could not figure out how to USE the Line. I’d collect a few Miis, open the Mii Plaza app, and I’d immediately be at the gate greeting new Miis.
The short version of all this is: If you don’t have any games that aren’t completed, you never get the opportunity to send Miis to the line, because the option is only available on the menu that pops up to tell you that you haven’t played all of your games with all of the Miis already at the gate. So, the solution was to start a game of Find Mii, and now the game actually DOES prompt me to send new arrivals into the line and I’m finally getting the benefit of the Mii Plaza expansion. It took me nearly a week to figure it out, and way more trips to Streetpass Relay locations to gather more Miis than I really want to admit.
I’ve got it sorted now, but this has to be one of the most Nintendo solutions to a problem that I’ve ever seen.
Baud Attitude 
I updated my Mii Plaza for the same reason – to queue up to 100 Miis. Well, I totally misunderstood how it worked, and it was needlessly convoluted and super frustrating.
The problem is that I didn’t want to have to open my 3DS every 10 Miis, go to the Plaza Gate, and send them all to the back of the line. Well now, that’s exactly what I had to do anyway. Add the fact that there’s no way to know when the line is ‘full’ (meaning, 10 people were lined up), and I found myself sending 4, 5, 6+ people to the line, rather than 10 each time.
I think the issue stems from the fact that all of the mini-games use “batches” of 10 Miis at a time, so for example, having 100 people in the Puzzle Game just wouldn’t work without dramatically changing how all the games function. Ergo de facto, we’re stuck processing 10 Miis at a time.
Anyway, cool blog – found this post in Related and it was indeed very relatable! 🙂
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Thanks for the kind words 🙂
I’m glad to hear someone else had the same reaction to it. It’s not a problem most of the time – it’s not like the Streetpasses are exactly piling up these days – but the times when I AM collecting a ton of passes are almost always also the times when I really don’t want to be pulling out a 3DS every few minutes!
Anyway, thanks for the comment! Always good to have someone find this thing.
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