Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp server errors are bringing us down

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is a good time so far — when it works. The new mobile game is suffering from some painful server problems, leading to frequent crashes, communication errors and infinite load times.

I’ve had all of the above happen to me, sometimes in the same playthrough. Loading up the game takes time, which is to be expected (as I wrote yesterday). On a design level, Animal Crossing has never been about expedience, anyway. (I wrote about that, too.) But, when I begin to dig into its menus, Pocket Camp starts to lose its grip.

Adding friends is already a laborious process of cycling through submenus and collecting friend codes, and it’s made even more so when the game crashes as soon as I finish entering a fellow player’s ID. That’s, of course, if the game even loads up the friends manager in the first place. There have been several times where I had to close out Pocket Camp a few times for it to cooperate with me on simple tasks like this one.

The situation that many of us share is the dreaded communication error pop-up. These will happen out of nowhere, often after an especially long wait to move to a new area or complete a task.

The culprit behind the communication errors is pretty obvious. Mobile games based off Nintendo properties aren’t known for their stable servers; Pocket Camp is also a multiplayer-focused game with a big audience, so some lag is to be expected. But is it unfair to think that Nintendo would have gotten this together by now?

Perhaps, but, counterpoint: It’s unfair to deprive me from my much-needed Animal Crossing time. Let’s hope that Nintendo works it out before the long weekend is through. I’ve reached out for an update.