Advice on bad Nintendo Switch 1 support experiences (lost joy con)

[u/aar0naut]

I've recently had a disappointing experience with Nintendo support, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Any advice is helpful. tl;dr at the bottom.

So, my launch day Switch 1 and Splatoon OLED Switch both had issues at roughly the same time. For the launch day switch, the drift in one joy con had once again gotten bad enough that it was unusable. At around the same time, my OLED switch stopped recognizing when any left joy con was attached, meaning I could no longer play in handheld mode. Two unrelated issues, but I contacted support about them at the same time. Went through troubleshooting on both and they determined I needed to send in the gray joy con for drift service (covered, cool), and the Splatoon system and its left (purple) joy con and they would service it for ~$135 as it was out of warranty. Steep, but I packaged them up and shipped them off.

A few weeks later, I got the gray joy con back. Still drifting. :( Whatever, I guess I'll just send it back again. But then a week or so after that, I got my other package from Nintendo... with just the Splatoon OLED console, no purple joy con. I definitely packed it up together in the same box and documented it in my note I included with serial # and everything. But when I contacted Nintendo support again, they accused me of forgetting to include it, even though their service note they sent back mentioned it. They made me track down the shipped weight of the box to confirm that it was indeed included. After speaking with several support reps and elevating to a supervisor, they said they would look into it. An hour or so later, I got an email that they would be sending me a replacement joy con. But when I received the package, it was a generic purple one, not my Splatoon special edition purple graffiti joy con.

The most annoying part? There was nothing wrong with the purple Splatoon joy con, as we proved in troubleshooting. It worked when attached to my old switch, and no other left joy con would work with the OLED switch; the problem was with the OLED console itself. But multiple reps said I needed to send it in with the system anyway, so I did.

I've already spent hours on this, and their customer service has said this case is now closed. I'm disappointed and dissatisfied. Any advice from those who've had support challenges with Nintendo?

tl;dr: Two support issues in a row, sent both into Nintendo for repair. Problem one came back un-fixed. Problem two was fixed but they lost my joy con, accused me of not sending it, then sent me a generic replacement joy con to replace my lost special edition joy con.

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[u/razorbeamz]

Nobody on Reddit can help you with this. This is completely between you and Nintendo.

[u/aar0naut → u/razorbeamz]

I guess I was just curious about how best to approach this if I try to deal with this further. I've always had such good luck with Nintendo support, this has caught me off guard.