Have I mentioned that I pick the best times to go on hiatus?
This is old news for the regulars of the amiibo scene, but the most popular training method, First to Five Wins, has been patched. Previous to the 4.0 update there was a glitch that allowed trainers to spend roughly 25-30 minutes playing against their amiibo from level one, and it would result in their amiibo leveling up straight to 50 at the conclusion of the fifth match, assuming the human won every time. It was the fastest way to level up an amiibo, and every amiibo training guide recommended that method. In my opinion, it was the best way to train an amiibo: that’s how I trained my Rosalina, for example.
Unfortunately, 4.0 patched it out. There is still theoretically a way to utilize FTFW, but you’ll have to wipe your save data from your Switch, uninstall any digital copies of the game, put in a game card for Smash Ultimate, and disconnect your Switch from the internet. That would revert you back to version 1.0, release day of Smash, which still has the FTFW method. It’s also pretty expensive if you don’t have a game card of Ultimate.
There are theories that using the best-of-5 method and then simply turning Learning Off until the amiibo hits 50 would have the same effect, but it’s not clear to me that we quite know the effects of Learning Off. I may be out of the loop, but at this point it’s not certain what Learning Off does to an amiibo, or to the underlying CPU data.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll probably be phasing back into Smash. School is starting up again and I have some major life transitions going on, but once the dust is cleared on those then regular amiibo content should start up again.
Amiibo Doctor 