Three repairs, same fault each time, closed as "no fault found"
My Switch 2's right Joy-Con stopped charging in July. It has now been through three warranty repairs and has come back with the same fault every single time.
The first repair diagnosed a faulty battery and replaced the controller. The replacement arrived unable to charge. The second repair returned the console fully charged and apparently working, and it failed the next day once that charge ran out. That is three separate right Joy-Cons, two of them brand new replacements with different serial numbers, all failing identically on the same console. Three controllers do not share one battery defect. The fault is the console's right rail connector, and I set this out in writing before the third repair, with photographs and video of the controller connecting and disconnecting while physically seated on the console.
The third assessment has come back as no fault found, after testing that included approximately thirty minutes of gameplay. That is the problem in a sentence. The fault only appears once the charge the console arrives with is exhausted, which is exactly what happened in July. Half an hour of play cannot detect a console that fails to recharge a controller, so the testing was never capable of reproducing the fault I reported.
Getting it collected was its own ordeal. My parcel was packed and waiting from late July. Two collections were confirmed to me in writing and neither resulted in a driver attending, a phone call, or a card through the door. Both trackings recorded that the package was not ready for pickup, for a parcel that had been sitting by my front door for weeks. I was told to contact the courier myself to arrange a slot, despite the shipment being booked on the repair centre's own account, which meant I could not verify against it or change anything. When I explained that, the same advice was repeated.
I was also told that no goodwill of any kind could be offered.
Four months on I am still without a working console, and I have been handed back the same hardware with an invitation to get in touch if the problem continues. It will continue, because it has continued every time.
The staff I dealt with were polite and responsive throughout, and I want to be fair to them. My criticism is of the process behind them. If a fault is reported three times on the same unit, it should trigger a different kind of investigation rather than another component swap. Charging faults should be tested over a full charge and discharge cycle, not half an hour of gameplay. And when a customer supplies video evidence of the exact failure, the testing should be designed to reproduce what the video shows.