Quite a few people would benefit from being able to change their PNID (especially those with the same ID as their NNID), has there been any research or development on that feature or are there some technical reasons for this to not be possible at all?
Unfortunately, there are technical reasons why this feature isn’t possible. I don’t know the exact specifics, but I believe it is related to the fact that Nintendo never programmed this possibility into the consoles’ account handling code because they never offered this feature.
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So the only way to use both accounts on a 3DS would be to wipe the PNID with the same ID as the NNID and create another one?
Unfortunately, yes, the only way is to create a new PNID.
One last question for the thread - if someone wanted to, would it be possible to “migrate” a forum account (stats, TL, etc.) to another ID?
Yes, I can merge forum accounts on my end if you’d like to.
Edit: Actually, I’m not sure whether this will work correctly. I have the option to merge accounts, but I think it keeps the stats of the target account, while you want to keep the stats of the source account. If this is something you want, I can look into it and test it on a local Discourse instance.
Update: In my testing, it looks like merging accounts actually merges together the stats like liked and read posts, so you will retain the stats of your current account. Just send me a PM if you want to merge your current forum account into a new one.
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Correct, this is the gist of it. Nintendo never offered this feature officially from what I can tell, and Nintendo Network is not exactly designed for this and lots of apps use things like your NNID username as a unique identifier
However there is remnants to suggest that this feature was either planned at one point or was possibly used in specific circumstances
If NNAS (the NNID auth server) throws the error code 0111 it triggers a (to my knowledge) unused popup message telling the user that their username was changed to whatever is inside the message section of the error response (up to the first 16 characters. More text can be used but the popup will truncate it)
This does also change the username of the local account, as seen on the profile selection screen and in future network requests. However, as mentioned, a lot of apps treat usernames as being unique identifiers so currently it’s not viable to allow arbitrary name changes. Maybe in the future if we can figure out work arounds for those cases, but I make 0 promises. Likely at most we would provide some sort of tool for us internally to change people’s usernames, for specific cases like people naming their PNIDs the same as their NNIDs
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It’s actually quite cool that Nintendo has looked at making the IDs a changeable thing, sucks that it never came to fruition though. At least the new account system that Nintendo uses lets people change everything except the birthdate.
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