All is Brawl
Nintendo Dojo, abbreviated as NDJ, was an online community website that was started by certain SmashBoards members. Initially started in 2007 as a Super Smash Bros. Brawl-centric site under the name All is Brawl, the site was renovated in response to Super Smash Bros. 4, and repurposed into a general Nintendo-centric site. The site started the "All is" network, designed and ran by Nealdt.
Site features
All Is Brawl's primary purpose was to bring the online community of Smash Bros. together and it allows for users to create various user groups (be it for crews or for socializing) and host their own tournament via a program known as tio tournament organizer. This feature was used for hosting tournaments for all three Smash games, as well as both online and in-person Brawl tournaments. The site was also home to its own ladder rankings system, where any user was welcome to join and challenge others to increase their rank. The ladder was updated on a weekly basis, and made use of the TrueSkill system, the same program used by Microsoft in its online ranking system. Another feature of All is Brawl was its chatroom, with 8 different categories of subjects discussed. This included a tourney chatroom, with four different rooms to allow tournament organizers and participants to communicate without interfering with other chatrooms or receiving such interference. Users could also upload videos via YouTube, such as technique/combo videos and recorded tournament matches. Users additionally had the ability to design their profile, leave each other shoutouts, write and post blogs, and use the site's forums and chatrooms for social and recreational purposes (in addition to their usage to discuss Smash).
In its prime during the early-to-mid Brawl era, the All is Brawl community was active and large, being the second-largest and second-most active Smash-centric site after Smashboards. Many competitive Brawl regions, such as SoCal, NorCal, and New England, used the site over Smashboards as a hub to communicate and coordinate with the smashers of their region, as well as the place to post about their tournaments and power rankings. AiB's ladder was additionally seen as the pinnacle of Brawl's online play, with many of Brawl's best players, such as Ally, ADHD, Nairo, and Anti, first making a name for themselves on the ladder, and continuing to frequent the ladder throughout Brawl's life.
All is Brawl was also famous for its very organized Brawl Stadium community. Smashers from all over the world came to post their records for single-player modes such as Target Smash, Home Run Contest, and Multi-Man Brawl. Smashers like Sin2324 were once active on the boards, along with OWLET, LinksDarkArrows, Nismoe Joe, marth1 and super-mod Nessy.
Decline, rename, and death
As the "All is" network aged, Nealdt slowly became increasingly more inactive and difficult to contact. All is Brawl started suffering downtimes starting around 2011-2012, that became long and frequent, spanning weeks with no warning nor explanation. Ladders became impossible to run correctly due to requiring Nealdt's presence to reset them. Server issues resulted in the mass deletion of old user blogs and messages, instead of simply buying more server space. The DDoS attack of late August 2013 brought down the site and damaged several parts of it. Finally, in November 2013, the entire "All is" network went down to a "service unavailable" page. The site reappeared on December 11th, 2013, explaining the downtime as massive database corruption resulting in a full-on server upgrade. Nealdt also vacated his position as the site's owner shortly after, with one of the site's original co-founders, JV, taking over.
With the approaching of Super Smash Bros. 4 and the shutdown of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection (making it impossible without hacks to play Brawl online, the site's then-main purpose), it was expected by most users that significant change would be coming. It was known (via mostly technical reasons more than official announcements) that the site would be renamed "Nintendo Dojo", and re-purpose its focus as covering Nintendo in general rather than just Smash, at some point in the near future as part of this. The site was officially renamed and moved to nintendodojo.com in October 2014; all previous content was carried over.
However, even with the release of Smash 4, the site continued to decline and become increasingly less relevant, instead of experiencing a resurgence like other Smash-related sites did. The site remained riddled with bugs and features that did not work, including a particularly infamous glitch where users were randomly logged in to another user's account (including potentially into an admin's account with the full control it would entail), and the complete inability to upload tournament results, while hired programmers were unable to fix these bugs. The site additionally failed to incorporate new features based around non-Smash Nintendo games, leaving the site still primarily Smash-focused despite its name and intended purpose, creating brand confusion among new users who joined the site expecting a Nintendo-based site rather than a Smash-centric site. The site's active userbase also continually shrunk, with many of it users that once used it as a hub to interact with other smashers moving onto using Smashboards, various Smash-centric groups on Facebook, and reddit's various Smash-centric subreddits instead, as these users grew dissatisfied with the site. And the site's once-prestigious and very active online Smash ladder became a shell of its former shelf, having little activity and no longer being populated by well-renowned players, with most smashers moving onto Anthers' Smash Ladder or just playing For Glory.
In its last year the site was mostly only populated by a few dedicated users who have stuck around since the Brawl days, with little activity of any sort, and was looked on by the greater Smash community as an obsolete relic of the Brawl era, if not forgotten altogether. According to the site's administration, it continued to hemorrhage money, while JV was becoming increasingly unwilling to fund the site, which lead to things such as the aforementioned hired programmers no longer being contracted, despite the site's many infamous bugs still remaining. Progress on improving the site stalled, with administrators having no timetable on when promised features and other improvements would be implemented.
On October 19th, 2016, JV officially announced on Nintendo Dojo that he would not be paying the site's server bill that month, and would no longer be financially supporting the site from that point forward, thus closing Nintendo Dojo down on the bill's due date unless someone else bought it from him. As of October 21, 2016, Nintendo Dojo went offline indefinitely.
External links
- Nintendo Dojo home page (Now defunct)
