If you do something against the rules in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, you could get banned … for more than a century.

Players are reporting bans in excess of 71.5 million minutes in the latest four-player fighting game from Nintendo. This is likely a bug that is inflating legitimate bans. You can get locked out of online multiplayer if you target one player over everyone else or if you quit early. I’ve personally had one instance where the game banned me for 5 minutes for accidentally quitting a match early. But I’ve never seen anything like this:

https://twitter.com/Boba2007/status/528346302946762752/photo/1

We’ve asked Nintendo what is going on, and we’ll update this story with more details once we have them.

In the meantime, it is probably wise to avoid playing Smash online. Who knows when Nintendo will fix this and whether it will have the ability to reverse bans on individual players.

If you just can’t help but get online for some Smash, here’s some things that you should do or avoid to limit the possibility of having to go 136 years without Internet multiplayer:

  • In four-player mode, do not pick on just one character.
  • You can eliminate this concern by playing one-on-one in For Glory.
  • Never quit in the middle of a match.
  • Don’t even close the lid of your 3DS because that will cause you to lose your online connection.