darkSpyro

this video by the wonderful steve smith is all i need to say.

How does this relate to toys and merchandise though...?

Online would be great, but I think most people would rather have it for co-op (story mode, bonus missions, etc.) than battle mode.

And my only suggestion for online battle mode is a mute button.

I think it is rather nice that you need to get out of your basement to look for real friends to play with you .

Quote: Dark fhoenix

I think it is rather nice that you need to get out of your basement to look for real friends to play with you .

Didn't watch the vid so don't know if you're referring to something there, but wow much stereotype.

Not everyone has a friend that plays Skylanders on their own or has the money to buy it. I talk to people about Skylanders; the ones that don't brush it off usually aren't so interested they go and buy it, or are weary of all the costs, and don't interact with me often enough to play it with me regularly.

The only people I have to play with are my family, and frankly they're much worse than me at the games and don't want to spend the time to get better at it, so I don't find it very fun to battle with them or play co-op. I like multiplayer best with players of similar skill, or when sharing strategies with whoever I'm playing with, but my family isn't that interested in becoming better at Skylanders. They're very casual about games, and aren't interested in a lot of the stuff I try to teach them about the games. They just ask to play while I'm playing once in a while, and don't pick Skylanders up on their own. I'm not going to force them to change how they're playing if they have fun playing at their current level. But I personally don't have fun playing the way they do and want to play differently from them.

There would be bad players online, of course, but I could battle in more interesting matches more often, and I could ask to battle against people here who seemed good; and I wouldn't be playing against the same people who usually pick from one of their few preferred Skylanders and use strategies I already know and stop easily.

Also, I want to play with friends I make online, too.

I am sorry but all this social online media is killing real social relationships . Its too easy and convenient to just switch on your console and link up with a user buddy . That is not real friendship.

Friendship needs time and work to blossom . Skylanders is doing a good social service by staying offline . Maybe its more difficult for adults but for school children skylander hooking up is eezy peezy . Like it or not this game is targeted at children .

Quote: Dark fhoenix

I am sorry but all this social online media is killing real social relationships . Its too easy and convenient to just switch on your console and link up with a user buddy . That is not real friendship.

Friendship needs time and work to blossom . Skylanders is doing a good social service by staying offline . Maybe its more difficult for adults but for school children skylander hooking up is eezy peezy . Like it or not this game is targeted at children .

No, it's not. There are some kids out there who flat out cannot make friends like most. They're too introverted, and some genuinely have difficulty making friends and communicating. Sometimes it's not even about friendship - It's about just relaxing and having fun.

I'm not bothered about online play personally. But I also can't see the harm in it either.

I guess online is fine as long as it is done in moderation . There is plenty of online games anyway .

^ The way you're looking at this is flawed. You're assuming that this isn't an issue because the target audience is fine without it, so it doesn't matter if it's not there, and those outside of that target audience shouldn't complain without online because the target audience doesn't need it.
Some kids in the target audience sill want/would enjoy online. People outside of the target audience play this game. It's problematic that there's no online for many people (and probably keeps many from buying the game). It's not like Activision are too poor to keep up an online server for online co-op/battle, or that this would change the foundation of gameplay/design with absolutely no good impact, so it's fair to criticise it. I don't know if some tech limitation is keeping them from it, but I doubt that. If that is the case, they should just spit it out, then we'd know online is never coming and why. We'd know this is actually justified for a good reason.

What about fans who aren't in the 6-12 target audience and want to play with friends, and can't find any locally, for whatever reason? Do you really think none of us have tried to socialise with people and ask about Skylanders? And do you think seriously we should have to ask everyone we haven't if they play? Do you really think we should have to spend time on that if we really enjoy Skylanders and just want to play it more with others?

And again, I'd like to play with friends I make online as well. There are people I met online who I've been talking to for years, know a lot about and play other games with. It'd also be a lot of fun to go on here and quickly find someone to play with, maybe even start makeshift tournaments that could actually have a lot of people playing- I doubt anyone would attend if I started one in my area.

There are plenty of games that have online, but this is Skylanders. It's a potentially very expensive game and if you want to play each character, you need to spend a lot of money on it. It shouldn't ignore something like online play four entries in.
Not having online play if the experience doesn't even have any focus on multiplayer is excusable, because that'd take much more development for a possibly rushed and poor mode (Zelda games don't need one, and already have a polished single player, for instance), but Skylanders DOES have a partial focus on multiplayer: it has a multiplayer-battle mode, multiplayer co-op, and multiplayer-exclusive Survival modes. However, they're local only- the problem is that not everyone has met someone interested in/who owns the games or that they enjoy playing with. I don't and I've already tried to meet people. I don't even care about online multiplayer having a chat (and I think it'd be excusable if it wasn't there, since people can use Skype alongside the game)- I just want to do Battle Mode online, because I'm tired of fighting my family. Regardless of wether Battle Mode is more fun locally anyhow, it isn't bad to offer the option, and I think the positives it'd offer far outweigh the negatives.

And RadSpyro is right about the introverted kids who can't make friends. I was one of them. I always wanted to play Pokémon with friends. But I didn't know how to make friends with people then (still not good at it), didn't realise that I was even having issues with that, and I couldn't play Pokémon on the GBA with them.
But then Pokémon came out on the DS WITH ONLINE PLAY- and I exchanged Friend Codes with people when I heard they played Pokémon. It was kinda fiddly to sort times to play, but I felt like people started paying more attention to me, and we'd talk about the battles we had. I was happier with it. I also played Club Penguin online with people in my class, and that actually made me friends. If we couldn't play together at school- we rarely could, I wouldn't have made as many friends from it- we'd plan to meet up at certain times on certain servers. Playing online was awesome to me. I could play often with people and make friends because of it, instead of having to make friends (I didn't know how to when I was young, and can you seriously blame me for that?) then invite them to play games at my house or whatever.

You could argue I was introverted or there's a rise of introversion because of the way it is to socialise over the Internet, but the Internet is a thing now and you can't deny that. Regardless of what positive or negative impacts it left, we should now try to embrace the positives and find ways to lower the impact of the negatives, because the Internet isn't going away. Besides, I highly doubt it's because of that (but that's an unrelated rant).