You think it's impossible for the update to not brick Wiis it was supposed to when it's bricking Wiis it wasn't supposed to. This does not connect for me.

This is because the hard part would be detecting whether the console had been modded or not. You would have false positives, miss some, in short: it would be very difficult. Bricking a console is straight forward and simple once you've decided to.

EDIT: I suppose my last post was a bit unintentionally snarky: I actually don't understand what he was getting at, and would like a further explination.

Depends on how they're going about it, I think. There are a lot of different mods and homebrew stuff, and the programming for each of them would be different. It wouldn't seem far fetched to me if, say, the latest version of the Homebrew channel wouldn't get your Wii bricked, but one of the first versions would.

Yes, except then we add in that some get deleted, rather than bricked. Deleting them involves not only detecting them, which happens with the ones that get bricked, and then finding specifics about their memory locations and deleting them. So, basically, they had to have decided to delete this list of mods and brick these fuckers over here. So, if this is true, two people with the same mod will always get the same effect.

Does this seem to be what is happening? I honestly don't know, as I haven't been paying attention to the reports, nor do I have a group of modder friends to ask. I doubt it is, though, for previously stated reasons.

Let me rephrase; Nintendo has released patch after patch of consistently acceptable updates that have removed custom firmware and made your console 100% wholesome again. Every patch comes with the tagline of
Then, mysteriously, this one creates huge problems of bricking modded Wiis and a smaller portion of unmodded Wiis too. Instead of reacting with some sort of apology, they delete threads and say "Well if you didn't mod it we can replace it for you at no charge."

I would like to believe that Nintendo didn't do this on purpose but I just can't bring myself to do so.

Is the portion of bricked modded really higher than the unmodded, or is it an illusion?

And then, take into account that its very possible certain mods could cause this update to brick your system without Nintendo being able to predict it. It just depends on the nature of the mod, and how the updating/system works. I also doubt this, unless its a very major modification, but I don't know enough about the Wii's inner workings to say.

The difference here being that they attempted to do something stupid, i.e., fixing the hole that let the mods in, and it backfired. This appears to have been a substantially different type of update then the one before with the goal of fixing the hole. Thus the effects of previous patches are immaterial and the added fact that it got modded and unmodded consoles strongly suggests that it was a more or less honest fuck up.

That could just be a ridiculously incompetent PR department and really stupid moderators, or whoever gives the moderators their marching orders. The hope was probably that it was a small enough problem it could be dealt with discretely which was a stupid choice because now people go all conspiracy crazy. I can see not wanting to panic people into not updating if the problem was relatively isolated and waiting until there was a fix to announce there was a problem but that wasn't really the best option.

If it is I'm more than okay with them trying to repair the damage done, but they aren't.

Yeah, I think everyone agrees that this is a dick-ish move. I say dick-ish because I understand not wanting to pay to repair the consoles of some modders (i.e. pirates), and you do sorta have to expect this kind of treatment when you mod a Nintendo console, considering their very clear stance on the subject.

But still, they're the ones that fucked up.

See, I'd understand that if it weren't for the fact that Nintendo themselves are the ones who broke them. If I mod my console, and somewhere down the road it breaks, then fine, the warranty is voided. If I mod my console and some fuck purposely breaks it, I expect said fuck to pay for it.

Now, if it was discovered that you had stolen games on your console, then they actually have legitimate action they can take.