So should they just give up on cheating devices?
So should they just give up on cheating devices?
When it comes at the expense of legitimate user freedom, and is arguably useless? Probably.
Buy a gaming pc if you want freedom
What's the difference? An Xbox is essentially one already.
You don’t see the difference between an Xbox and a gaming pc running windows?
Sure there's a difference, an XBox sucks.
Besides that? Not particularly. The input devices are worse, the underlying hardware and software is worse, the fact it only supports a measly 60hz at 4K^1 blows. I used to love XBoxes and have many great memories of my original and 360, but ever since the XBox One it's just been a bloated, slow PC with a bad interface front for Windows.
I own one because occasionally I like to play Halo 5. That's literally it.
[1]: What Microsoft calls 4K which is like 2560x1440 upscaled slightly on the vast majority of games.*
I'm not gonna disagree with your reasons for liking or disliking a gaming console. Gaming consoles are for fun, your preferences don't have to make logical sense. But...
but ever since the XBox One it's just been a
bloated, slow PC with a bad interface front for Windows.
Yes but they didn't feel slow. The One does and so do it's iterations. They all run slow, download slow, and just feel sluggish to use. Even the Switch which is INCREDIBLY limited on the hardware front feels snappy and responsive.
Every console has always had worse hardware compared to a PC, that's a given, but almost all of them don't feel that way because the developers know the platform and can squeeze every last cycle out of the hardware. The One has NEVER felt nice to use. Ever.
That makes more sense, I guess. I've never used an XBOne so I don't have an opinion as to how responsive it feels.
It is truly awful. Menus take an atrocious amount of time to load, everything is buried several screens deep into massive UI elements that usually amount to huge boxes of solid color, the home screen itself seems to lag quite badly which is just embarrassing for a device that can also run Halo 5 at 2K/60hz without issue, is choking to death on a bunch of fucking boxes.
Yikes! And also, I really appreciate the clarification.
Yeah for sure man. I know a lotta PC guys give consoles shit (rightfully so :D) but I enjoy them too, my PS5 is the slickest thing I've ever used, and the switch is a remarkable little piece of kit, with some stumblings here and there, but yeah, between the severe dip in quality in the XBox One and subsequent iterations, and Microsoft's move to really amp up the experience for PC gaming on the XBox network, I just feel an XBox is a bad proposition these days. It's just a shitty PC that's locked down and you can't fix it.
Not really? I bought an Xbox when I couldn't afford a gaming PC, but beyond that, they are very similar.
Especially these days. Microsoft even sells a Xbox ultimate pass that works on PC and lets you play or stream many cross platform games. You can also play them on geforce now.
Xbox to me is just a cheap gaming PC with a kiosk OS.
Good point. I forgot Microsoft doesn't have any stake in that market and would never do anything to infringe PC user freedom.
You can play games on Linux.
Some games. Sometimes. Depending on the game, Linux distro, library versions, hardware driver support, etc.
I can also bake my own bread. But I'm tired of all the tweaking and debugging at the end of the day.
Most games. Most of the time. You make it sound like there's only a small subsection of games that can be played on Linux when that hasn't been true for some time now.
There definitely still exist games that have issues running on Linux, but they are few and far between now.
Quality versus quantity problem. The most popular games not made by Valve tend to not work at all, and a quick look at Proton DB shows of the top 100, only about 20% are in the "no issues" (platinum) category. Gold is "playable", and from experience, there is a lot of variability there. It includes problems that would lead to refunds and bad reviews on the original platform.
Gold is generally only minor issues. I can play most of the games in my library.
In my experience these days, across several dozen games in my Steam library (admittedly largely omitting competitive multiplayer games other than CS), it has been most games, most of the time, on a basic Ubuntu install on hardware I chose mostly without checking for Linux compatibility. If you want to play video games without paying Microsoft for user-hostile systems, Linux has definitely become a genuine option in recent years.
I have a Windows 10 install on my machine that I have been thrilled to discover I’ve only needed a handful of times in three years (mostly to disable the rainbow vomit RGB that Linux doesn’t recognize).
Unfortunately, anti-cheat systems usually don't work well with proton so "competitive multiplayer games" are exactly the sort of games that you would be more likely to have problems with on Linux.
you are on hacker news
I often make the mistake of thinking HN is populated mostly by ... well, hackers. While there's plenty of us here, most users are from the startup crowd, where "hacker" is more of a buzzword than anything.
Of course this makes sense, it's just something that slips my mind every once in a while.
The dissonance is really something at times. I get facepalms, giggles, sighs. I haven't made it to the acceptance stage yet and I have no plans to advance to it soon.
Microsoft is hard at work trying to control the software you put on it through code signing in the form of Secure Boot and signatures on user software. We haven't quite got Authorized peripherals excepting HDCP in the bluray-to-display path. You have kernel level anti cheat mechanisms there at the expense of private servers.
Microsoft is hard at work trying to control the software you put on it
Someone should probably tell the Visual Studio teams.
That really sounds like the argument of someone that never plays multiplayer games online. There’s no way you would say that otherwise.
I play online games every day, manage an EVE Online corp and general gaming community, so... maybe I just don't agree with you?
I meant skill based multiplayer obviously. Otherwise the controller story makes no sense
I'm sure that if I play whatever games you call "skill-based", you'll just move the goalposts again, so have a good day :)
I mean Xbox is already a controlled platform, you can't run unsigned code, etc.
in the hundreds of hours I've played of multiplayer console FPSs, which are what these controllers are marketed towards[1], I think I saw a player with a modded controller once. yes they got an advantage from it, but FPSs are mostly about how fast you can aim not how fast you can shoot, so it wasn't exactly game-breaking
also in Call of Duty at least, often semi-auto fire rates are capped at a human level anyway
even further, as far as I can see, you can't buy one of these controllers cheaply direct from china as you might expect to. from searching aliexpress and temu, I can only see a chipset for sale. it looks like your only option is to build one yourself or buy one custom built from a specialist site, but neither option is cheap and easy
IANAL so I could be wrong about this, but I'm reasonably sure third party controller vendors operate in a somewhat legally grey area and could be exposing themselves to a nasty lawsuit if Microsoft or Sony took exception to them, which mitigates the problem
basically it's barely a problem and this kind of action from microsoft is classic "product in decline" behaviour
macro controllers and AI controller inputs are a thing and are actually rampant in certain games.
Just look on youtube for some of the Street Fighter 6 cheat videos that have popped up in the last few weeks. Also if you play games like Apex, Valorant, etc, there are macro controllers that will not only perform movement tricks for you but will do things like correct aim for automatic fire drift/spread or even (on PC) home in on targets for perfect aim for you.
Cheat capability is cheap to buy these days and it's way more prevalent than you can imagine. It has basically killed off Escape from Tarkov already.
I just don't get it. I genuinely don't get it.
If you're cheating, you're not winning; the software or hardware is. What is the point? What do people get from this?
I cheat on games that i got cheap (or "free" via xbox for windows) because i want to "finish" the game, but i also have dozens of other things vying for my time and attention.
I also watch old TV shows at 1.2x-1.4x speed, for many of the same reasons. It makes the filler less obnoxious, i get roughly the same experience, and i can honestly say "i've seen every episode of <X>". Like Law and Order, for example.
He’s talking about cheating in multiplayer games
I guess sometimes it's just fun to lay waste.
Some people are just shitty. There are scammers, rapists, etc. Everywhere. Video games cheaters are just the scummiest people online.
I wouldn't go that far. you've got blackmailers, scammers, child pornographers, blackhats, ad-tech, etc
in some games there's a certain degree of "everyone else is doing it, so I have to in order to compete", which I can somewhat understand, but obviously the game has to get to that point in the first place, and a lot of that is probably just children
Case: I'm a 65 year-old retiree who's reaction speed is slow, but I want to play the game so I can relate to my grandson, and getting dominated left and right isn't keeping my interest.
Case: I'm a 16 year-old with low self-esteem who wants to show off an impressive k/d rate when I play with my friends, so I boost those numbers when we're not playing together.
Case: I'm an arbitrary player who has 5,000 hours in the game, of which no stone is left unturned. I cheat in order to get longevity out of the game and to make it novel in a new way.
Some people will be bullies their whole lives.
Also writing cheat software is a lot of fun. Great engineering problems.
Same applies to "pay to win" games, yet they make a ton of money.
Cheating is definitely its own kind of fun though - I remember cheating in single player games using something like a Game Genie back in the day. It's fun because you feel like you're "getting one over" on the game. In multiplayer it's a plague, but some people (mostly kids/teens, I hope) seem to be very amused by the angry reactions they get.
I agree with what you're saying except for the Escape From Tarkov bit. They are in a real pickle. They have a live service game they sold at a fixed price without any of the typical live service game monetization methods.
Battlestate games has no incentive to actually ban RMT and cheaters when they are first detected because a ban too quickly will break the economic model of the RMT cheaters. Who, once banned, will buy another copy of Escape From Tarkov. I know a few people who write game cheats for a living and they have multiple clients who regularly buy over 100 copies of Escape from Tarkov nearly monthly.
I think you're proving my point. Cheating is understood to be so rampant in the game at this point that legitimate players have backed off.
The wiggle video was catastrophic.
I bow to your superior knowledge
As we used to say at Blizzard: "Uninstall Cosmos, for the win"
So, it is possible that the manufacturers are infringing in some way, shape, or form, but collecting a judgment on it or enforcing an injunction against a Chinese manufacturer or marketplace is not going to go anywhere.
With software cheats, the lawsuits are usually over some kind of DMCA copyright protection circumvention, tortious interference, and the various generic unfair competition claims. For controller stuff and in certain software claims there might also be some patent issues there to raise in addition to those.
Generally, the guys operating out of China etc. are not going to care that much because only their US-based accounts are going to be at the mercy of US courts. It is not even that straightforward to enforce US judgements in EU countries for various reasons (e.g. in Germany, to enforce the judgment, Germany must have close analogue of the underlying claim under its own law, and the German courts do not construe this liberally).
I disagree that this is not a big problem. The cheat situation in online gaming probably worse now than it has ever been because the cheat providers have really succeeded in making them easy to use and access for the average user. IMO the companies brought it on themselves to some extent by breaking up the old decentralized server model, which was harder to use, but also was able to take advantage of massive numbers of volunteer moderators to regulate cheating and other bad behavior.
>I disagree that this is not a big problem. The cheat situation in online gaming probably worse now than it has ever been
in PC gaming, sure. for software cheats, sure. but I'm not talking about either of those things. I'm talking about modded console controllers, which is the focus of this thread
also, it's not really true that these sellers are outside of the range of copyright laws. while the specific sellers may well be, aliexpress, temu, wish, etc as platforms are all very much exposed to Western courts
Should have done this at the start of this generation before people invested in hardware which is now e waste
OK, maybe I'm biased here as a PC gamer who frequently uses a controller... but why not just allow both? Some games like Gears of War on Xbox already do this. Others, like Fortnite, offer crossplay and just show a symbol over each player's head.
Do mouse and keyboard players have an advantage? Sure. So do players with bigger TVs or Series X graphics or less worn controllers or the Elite controller. Big deal?
The PC ecosystem has had open control interfaces since forever, whether it's flight sticks or foot pedals or steering wheels or 3d controllers or all of the above. Both in coop and competitive games, people use whatever input devices they like (and can afford). Somehow the ecosystem hasn't collapsed.
I love my Xbox controller, but it's simply an inferior input for shooters. It's superior in many other genres (action RPGs, driving and flight sims, arcade battles, side scrollers). It all evens out.
I don't get the big deal here. Why purposefully handicap your player base instead of letting them use whatever they want?
And autofire... eh, seems like a non issue. Why not just give the weapons a max semi auto fire rate?
Problem is a lot of games give controllers aim-assist, and using one of these devices means the game still sees your input device as a controller so you get that aim-assist but you also get the benefits of using a mouse.
Real problem here seems to be games doing aim assist in multiplayer
I'm competitive. I simply won't play FPS that have aim assist in multiplayer. If a controller has a disadvantage to KBM, they should learn to use KBM, not give them a built-in aimbot.
This is such a PCMR elitist take. Have you ever actually played on console? By and large aim assist is very subtle, but it's required to have an enjoyable experience on console.
I don't think I could bear to spend ~ 10h / day at a computer, and then spend my down time hunched over a keyboard and mouse. I like a clean break, and a completely different experience.
You're welcome to be as 'competitive' as you like, but the rest of us want to come home, sink into their favorite recliner and casually enjoy a game for a an hour or two. It's a game. Games should be fun. I swear people act like their K/d ratio buys groceries.
Games should be fun, but I do think competitive modes should have separate lobbies/ranks/queues for MKB and controller (maybe per-controller, if they're different enough).
Aim assist is a big change to a game to me because it necessarily introduces an opinion about how much assistance controller users deserve into the equation.
I get that controllers are not as precise of an input mechanism as mice, but how much worse? How much does having aim assist allow you to play a style that PC players can't? E.g. some implementations of aim assist make quick scoping very strong.
It also just feels really crappy to watch a kill cam and know that if you had done the same thing, you would have missed because no aim assist. The reasons why make sense, it's not a logical thing, but it does feel bad. I would imagine dying to KBM flicks feels equally bad for controller players.
I do think aim assist should exist for controllers, I just don't think it should co-exist with KBM in the same matches in competitive modes. Console players don't seem to like having KBM players in their matches either, so that seems like a win-win.
Some games do have different matchmaking based on control type. The problem is some people use devices that let them use a KBM while pretending its a controller. While maybe some people use it to play some game that doesn't support KBM on console, there's definitely people that use them to get a leg up.
KBM is a huge boost.
Most games don't have a big enough player base to support separate matchmaking pools
For a person motivated by competition, opponents aim assists just kills the whole point of playing. That is not elitist, that is just being a person.
His enjoyment is for him as important as yours for you. He is in fact entitled to play only games he likes to play is setup he finds fair.
And he is fully entitled to express it out loud so that similarly minded people can bond or argue for existence of games they like.
Not every person plays cod. I guarantee if you loaded up siege on console you would see why mnk is a bad idea. Siege has aim assis and you can turn it off. Personally I have it off. But for new players and people who aren’t in the conventional sense “normal” they need a little help playing. And being competitive is different to abusing actual cheating and dropping 15k 0d in a ranked game against controller players.
> If a controller has a disadvantage to KBM, they should learn to use KBM
Can you see how Microsoft, maker of the xbox, might not share your opinion?
But Microsoft also makes Microsoft Mouse and Microsoft Keyboard!
Which is incompatible with couch play…
The exclamation mark was sarcastic.
Woosh. Went right over my head :D
Or maybe they could just ban KBM play.
I agree with this for consoles. I think the main issue is cross play. One solution would be to make cross play opt-in. It's not fair to either group.
That is kinda what they're attempting to do with their move here.
Not an issue if you use the claw-style of holding your controller
My guy, ‘aim assist’ is not aimbot. It assist in functions like precision headshot placement for something that isn’t point and click. Also what if that person is disabled and can’t use mnk. Guess what… you end up looking like a bigger moron for not thinking controller is good enough. If you want mnk sure play games that allow it. The problem is that people are using devices like xim and Chronus on console. Mainly PlayStation because they done police it. But you can program them to have aimbot and recoil control. I’m a game like rainbow six siege mnk on consol doesn’t belong. That is why it will never be cross play with pc. Pc is too tryhardy and toxic and most kids have consoles and want to play with people who have the same input.
You ever try playing a competitive shooter on controller without aim assist? It's not really doable, especially when playing against KB+M
"Why artificially limit yourself by playing a shooter with a controller?"
Because I want to sit comfortably in my chair. Because I much prefer the hand/wrist feel of a controller. Because my hands don't work well enough for mouse gaming. Because I'm choosing to play a game where the majority of players are on controller also with aim assist.
Also, at a high level, aim assist is a mechanic like any other that you can learn and use to your advantage. In CoD, good players will swipe their gun around from the hip to see if their aim slows down at all, can help detect players through walls or just dark corner campers
That seems fine? Some games do offer it for mouse too and I always turn them off. It's not really a limiting factor for most mouse users. Just let be an option that any one can toggle on or off. Maybe have two different leagues.
I'm not some hardcore shooter pro gamer either, just some dude with a $20 mouse and mouse pad full of cat hair. Aiming is not an issue at all and auto aim is just a hindrance.
Auto aim with a mouse is indeed a hindrance, yet auto aim with a controller is something necessary in many cases, especially as one gets older or brain gets cat hair in it.
It's a significant balance issue, auto-aim in a lot of modern shooters is so strong it's basically an aim hack. Even on controllers the game practically plays itself, but combine that with the precision (and more importantly turn speed) of mouse aiming and its straight up broken
Just ban those from multiplayer then
> Why purposefully handicap your player base instead of letting them use whatever they want?
for the same reasons giant corps do anything: Profit!
they think, and likely will, sell more "official" (i.e. premium price) controllers
Realistically though, how much financial upside can we possibly be talking about here? Many controllers the enable this "cheating" were also probably +1 buys as well, not lost sales of official accessories. I just have a hard time believing that controller hardware sales are the primary driver of this.
If you sell 40m consoles in a cycle, and an xbox controller costs about $60, so lets assume $20 profit to MSFT and you sell an average of 1.5 extra controllers per console sale.. that is $1.2b of profit at stake over the course of the total console cycle. That's over something like five years and they probably get a lot of those profits anyway. But it's not nothing!
I a hundred million dollars of profit per year a big deal to MSFT? No of course not. But imagine you are in charge of the peripherals division, or even all of XBox. Then I think it is not unrealistic.
I don’t think those controllers are actually the targets, financially speaking, here. They’re the excuse. The target is “normal” controllers that sell for less than Microsoft’s does and are bought by people around the world looking to save money when buying another three controllers.
"Why purposefully handicap your player base instead of letting them use whatever they want?"
Failing to do so creates a pay-to-win situation.
Now, you might be thinking, companies obviously have no problem with a pay-to-win situation. But you see, there is a critical difference; the companies want you to pay them to win. Paying a third-party, unapproved, unlicensed hardware manufacturer results in $0 dollars going to Microsoft for your pay-to-win experience, and that is just unacceptable.
That's the first-order answer. There's a second-order answer too, which is that even in a pay-to-win situation the company still needs enough control to put up a competent and plausible cover over the pay-to-win mechanics; imagine a game that is literally pay to win, that is, the only input to the "game" (such as it is) is literally how much you paid for it. This obviously wouldn't last long, the best they could hope for is a income trajectory that looks like the I Am Rich app [1], and with even modest cleverness a company can milk a pay-to-win situation much longer than that. And on this level too, there's a problem for Microsoft. The pay-to-win situation is extremely poorly tuned for retention of either the payers or the non-payers; the hardware maxes out the winningness pretty quickly for not much money and doesn't give Microsoft any opportunity to manipulate the non-payer's experience, creating a very hostile environment for players giving Microsoft more money.
You can add more detail to the model in a third-order analysis that considers the player's reactions to the manipulations of the software companies to avoid the negative effects of a simplistic pay-to-win model and the player reactions to the cheaters, and start modeling changes-over-time more explicitly, and it's not hard to see how having pay-to-win cheaters out of the control of Microsoft causes both Microsoft and the non-cheating players a lot of problems too.
I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I will give you the hint that if you draw it out far enough it becomes clear that it's actually a very difficult situation in the limit. As others mention, the hardware hackers can just move up a layer in the stack and resume their work. You'll discover this is not a place where there's a "solution", but that it's intrinsically an arms race, which is why this problem still hasn't been "solved", in either direction by the cheaters or the game devs, even after decades of work by both of them.
(The software fixes proposed elsewhere are not a solution, only another step in the arms race. A good step, and possibly a step worth taking, but only a step. It does at least pull down the skill ceiling you can buy access to, to the point a human might at least hope to stand a chance, but the risk of blocking a top-end player, which is also a player than can cause a PR stink on YouTube, rises steadily as you ratchet down the detection threshold.)
A basic wireless keyboard and mouse can be purchased for as little as $20. An Xbox controller is closer to $50.
Your pay to win argument would hold more water if the superior input method wasn't also available for less money.
My analysis included that point already.
They should simply split cross play into two groups:
1. Those with controllers
2. Those with kb/m or those 'emulating' kb/m
That's it. That's all that'd be needed to be fair.
With skill-based matchmaking, why does it even matter? Players should average 50% win/loss regardless of who they are playing against.
It can also go the other way, for example in Apex which supports both controller is currently considered stronger due to high aim assist, with a good chunk of pro players switching to controller.
The above-the-fold answer is "to not create an arms race" where one NEEDS to buy the keyboard and mouse in addition to the controller to be competitive. The below-the-fold answer, as others have said, is for profit.
Mouse and keyboard has more or less ruined the console version of PUBG. It's just too big of an advantage.
I disagree completely -- there's no significant money to be made here. Microsoft wouldn't even bother if this were a financial play, it's so small. Not that many people use non-Xbox controllers to begin with, and whatever licensing fees Microsoft will charge manufacturers may very well be offset by the costs of running the licensing program itself.
This seems very clearly to be anti-cheat. Advantages are not "trivial to detect" "after only a few minutes" -- there's tons of issues with false positives and false negatives. Any software detection, cheaters can learn how to go right up to the line but not cross it, and that still gives them big advantages, while genuinely really good players get unfairly banned.
This is a single-purpose gaming console, not a general-computing device. One of the big benefits of console gaming is precisely protecting gamers against cheats, which makes it different from PC gaming. Microsoft wants a fair gaming experience for everyone, which makes it more fun for everyone who wants to play fair. If your idea of fun in gaming is cheating, then use a PC instead.
> there's no significant money to be made here [...] Not that many people use non-Xbox controllers to begin with, and whatever licensing fees Microsoft will charge manufacturers may very well be offset by the costs of running the licensing program itself.
Ah yes, original (or licensed) game console accessories, the well known non-profit operation...
Yes, console prices are sometimes subsidized, but never accessories, quite the opposite. Or do you seriously believe that it costs MS or Sony $70 and more to manufacture a wireless gamepad?
An official Xbox controller is usually around $50 on Amazon, and currently $54.99 from Microsoft, and that price is very much in line with comparable peripherals from other companies on Amazon (Logitech etc.). The Xbox controller build quality is excellent, and when you look at all the features like custom low-latency headset audio and extension capabilities, it's nothing like the generic controllers that are $30-40 and often wired and made of cheap plastic.
The idea that Microsoft is making a huge profit off of their own basic controllers just doesn't hold water. If the basic controller cost $99 then sure they would be. But that's not what they're charging. (I mean, you can buy a pricey Elite controller if you want, but that's not what we're talking about here.)
Maybe it will eventually cost $99
I actually used to work with the team who made Xbox 360 controllers. Things have probably changed in the decade since, but back then I was told that MS was only making $3 or $4 profit per controller sold. Money was made in volume, not on individual units.
To explain this, imagine a consumer electronics device that costs $5 to make. The manufacturer then sells it to a distributor for $10. The distributor sells it to the store for $20. The store sells it to you for $40.
The original company making the device only nets the $5, but that doesn't include other costs. For example any fancy in-stores displays stands are put there by the manufacturer and come out for their initial $5 cut.
If that were the only reason, they could just ban them from online play. There's no good reason to also ban them for single-player experiences .
I think the reason is the complexity of it, of dealing with controllers that work for some things but not for others. It creates customer confusion and opportunities for sales deception, people will keep buying controllers they expect to "just work" and then get pissed off as soon as they go into multiplayer because they didn't read the fine print. It's not a distinction that your average Joe consumer should need to worry about.
Great example is Sony who have such a poor reporting system in place and mnk had destroyed shooters on PlayStation to a point I have crossplay off on siege. I see way more mnk on ps than I do on Xbox.
"Auto-fire is trivial to detect, as is a KBM setup where it doesn't belong"
[..]
"if they cared to disallow them after only a few minutes of profiling the player."
Definitely not trivial and a gross over simplification. It will create a whole bunch of grey area's and endless tweaking. Which in turn will lead to people getting unfairly banned. Meaning Microsoft will then need to investigate these cases to unban them.
Maybe don't ban them? Maybe mark them and force the player to explain the situation to their peers?
Bans revoke products paid for, but marking suspects forces them to explain to their peers the situation and lets them make the decision.
There have been several games that match suspected cheaters with other suspected cheaters, and I've always thought that was a pretty good solution.
That doesn't resolve the false positives, it just takes people who've been marked by an algorithm and puts them somewhere they're guaranteed not to have fun playing the game they bought.
> Maybe mark them and force the player to explain the situation to their peers?
I imagined someone trying to explain to a bunch 12 year olds that they dont cheat, while the kids throw random insults.
Or some random trolls who mark everything as a hack.
I guarantee you that the total profit generated from selling XBOX controllers is immaterial to Microsoft. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of hardware business models will tell you that this has nothing to do with selling more controllers.
It looks pretty clear cut to me - and just because MS is massive doesn't mean that someone somewhere hasn't seen this as an opportunity to improve their personal / department KPIs.
I'm not familiar with hardware business models though, so what do you think it is about instead? Reducing hardware cheating?
Potentially improving user experience but another big one is opening up consoles to the huge and still growing esports market.
See super smash bros tournaments/other esports tournaments. Controllers are restricted to certain types.
But tbf there's only so much that can be done with a controller, it's usually software based hacks that are the main problem.
Ah, I see you haven't ever stepped inside an Apple store, where DRMed dongles and cases are a multi-billion dollar business.
>Anyone with an ounce of understanding of hardware business models
This line is important, as there is a clear difference between Apple's high margin, high markup hardware business, vs consoles which tend to be sold at cost, or even at a loss.
And someone in China will no doubt find a way to make their controllers be detected as official, if they haven't already.
No one in China was able to make a 360 controller bypass Microsoft's digital signature driver controls for their dongle for 18 years now. I think we're past the point of "someone will just hack it". Not going to hack it.
First of all, it's definitely a "money grab". I am very surprised they allowed unlicensed controllers in the first place: other consoles used to make more from licensing accessories than from licensing software. I'd imagine they allowed it to sacrifice some profit to attract more customers with cheaper accessories and now they feel that they have enough customers already, very strange move at this point.
However, the detection methods you described are very bad engineering. Any statistical method will have two types of errors: false positives and false negatives and you cannot eliminate either. Inevitable false positives will do much more damage to the consumer perception of the platform than any removal of third party controllers could possibly do.
> Auto-fire is trivial to detect
How is this done? Input rate variability or something?
>This is a money grab
Found the person who hasn’t been tormented by a player with chronus
DRM is bad though. The cognitive dissonance on this one shall be the tipping point
Anything is trivial to detect as long as the malicious party is not aware that you are detecting it.
I disagree with this take. If a small percentage of users still cheat / have an unfair advantage after this move, it’s still a win for Microsoft because they’ve significantly decreased that pool of people to the point that average players probably won’t encounter them often, and they’ve done it without incurring additional development costs.
In my view this is clearly a move intended to solidify brand trust.
If this is really about cheating then the notice won’t appear for single player games.
> Auto-fire is trivial to detect
Tell me you've never worked on an anti-cheat without saying you've never worked on an anti-cheat.....
Why do you even say this if you really don't know it?
In short - you don't want false positives with anti-cheat, you can tolerate some false negatives. Input timings and sequences are impossible to use for this, as button mashers (it's a pseudo-sport) can press buttons at up to 20 times a second - far faster than auto-fire would. Regularity of presses just takes care of the most obvious auto-fire, but once again - there isn't a clear human-robot threshold. And most auto-fire will be far on the human side.
So you normally use a composite or layered approach. If there are enough signals of cheating on layer 1, you do more thorough checks on layer 2, 3, etc. The higher layers can be other players watching replays, ML, behavior-matching, and so on. Layer 1 can be "too lucky" checks, speed checks, ESP (extra-sensory perception/clairvoyance), altered memory, data packet manipulation, suspicious IPs, honey trap code paths/memory locations/impossible game states, skill inconsistencies, stupid values written into obfuscated memory, etc. All of those, by the way, have significant false positives on a large scale. But higher layers are almost always heuristics-based (human or machine), and with high false positives. So all together - not good, not easy.
KM setup is easier to detect as there are certain expectations such a set-up must meet for the user, which are a different set of expectations from a controller. But it's still harder than one might think. Analog triggers can be simulated, noise can be introduced in smooth mouse movement, button presses that aren't feasible on a controller can be disabled on the keyboard, etc. Once again - the issue is with false positives. You don't want to ban a person because they play the game more "cheatey" naturally than the hardware that fakes it.
Tamper-proof hardware with an auth mechanism is a really elegant solution for near 0% false positives. You can't mod a controller if you can't open it.
And I suspect that players wouldn't mind buying such hardware if it put them in authenticated/cheat-free lobbies.
What Microsoft might doing here is a slightly different topic. All I am saying is that anti-cheat is really not what you're saying it is.
You could also just require that controllers be signed with a model type. Let the people organizing the game decide.
Ya all want to play with cheats enabled on your Fuxsor Ceatboss 6000's. Go head.
WHQL - Gamer Edition! taxing hardware with cost increases passed on to the lucky consumers. Gee thanks Microsoft.
I think that this is a response to the rising usage of the Cronus and/or other controller modification tools that give players advantages (cheats).
For example one of these "Mods" for Cronus state that they are:
a dynamic, fully-automated Anti-Recoil system that transforms your in-game character into a laser-guided juggernaut we've affectionately dubbed as [BEAM]
Battling cheaters in video games is a never-ending chase, but I appreciate that they are attempting something.
I wish that a gaming company could figure out a less invasive way to detect these cheaters.
No, they are not doing this to stop cheaters. It might be a nice side effect. They are doing it because money.
They are most definitely doing this to combat cheaters. I tried out Cronus + KBM on my friend's Xbox S and it was comical. I had aim assist, no recoil and a keyboard and mouse. I was running 100:3 K:D on COD:MW2. If you don't think cheating is a big part of the reason you've never played console games competitively.
That's the problem though: pampering to competitive gamers ruins the experience for the vast majority of people, who just want to, you know, enjoy a game. Unfortunately, competitive gamers are the only ones that matter - they're the cash cows of this part of the industry, which now focuses on creating as many such players as they can, and milking them for all they're worth.
Consider how cheating was handled back before AAA games turned into videogame equivalent of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: if you were found cheating, you were booted off the server, period. There was no matchmaking bullshit, the games weren't nudging or limiting you to play on the ladder, against global ranking. Instead, you had local and international servers, public and private; you had neighbourhood servers, and servers run by groups of friends, and themed servers, etc. - in other words, servers were communities. As diverse and rich as human communities can be. And they handled cheating in ways communities do it.
On smaller / local servers, people wouldn't cheat because the community extended past the game to other on-line places, and/or to meatspace. Everyone was friends with each other, and being a cheating asshole is a fast way to lose your friends. Scaling up, you had all the mechanisms one also saw on discussion boards: some servers had owner or moderators ban anyone they didn't like; others voted. It was nicely self-regulating: servers weren't sticky, so being banned as false positive (or out of spite) didn't hurt. People didn't like power-tripping server operators? They'd switch over to a new server, run by someone saner.
Were there still cheaters? Yes. Assholes and griefers happened. But without a single global ranking to compete for, cheating was mostly self-defeating: there was no reward, no incentive, and you'd be just ruining the fun for yourself.
Yes, cheating is kind of a proxy reason why I don't enjoy multiplayer games. But the real reason is this: modern games feel like suddenly all the little soccer leagues were required to follow all the FIFA rules, were allowed only to play registered games, only to use pitches and equipment and balls and clothes that are certifiably up to spec, regularly audited - all because it might happen that our ad-hoc team of Sunday players would one day be visited by a World Cup team, and it would suck if we had an unfair advantage.
It's just ruining the game for everyone, for the sake of a small group of people running a racket.
This reminds me of Wildstar. The MMO was intentionally dedicated to hardcore players, making progression nearly impossible for casuals. They were pretty smug about it as I recall. It eventually died, as there weren't enough players paying micro-transactions to keep the servers online.
There's actually a Wildstart server emulator for those who want to play after shutdown - https://www.emulator.ws/
I think my wife would love to explore the game again, and I think we could maybe tune some dungeons so they're doable by just two players, but we're parents now and some things are just not possible anymore.
It declined remarkably quickly on release, as was completely predictable. Unfortunately, it had multiple problems, so difficulty fetishists could always point to the other problems.
Wildstar was the game that made me realize I was done with MMOs. Not only was I not really looking forward to the attunement flowchart (I love raiding but jeeze) but around level 12 I realized I didn't want to play the game you have to play before you can play the game. I've come to really appreciate round-based lobby games since then.
I don’t understand the relevance of this. Are you saying that aggressively targeting cheaters is pampering to wannabe pros or that not aggressively targeting them is pampering wannabe pros?
Another thing that has changed in FPS land is game modes making cheaters WAY more frustrating. It used to be that you get into a lobby, see someone cheating, and could leave and find a new lobby right away. Now with the extremely popular battle royale modes, you don’t encounter the cheater until 20 minutes into a match — via dying in a game mode where dying is “expensive.”
I'm saying is that it's a problem companies created themselves, and are subjecting customers to increasingly dystopian measures in a futile attempt to manage it.
Pro gaming and casual gaming don't mix well. Cheating is a self-solving (or at least self-regulating) problem if you let people freely associate and host games. Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking. It still can be solved in context of pro-gaming, but it requires some invasive means.
The right approach would be to treat casual and pro gaming as separate experiences. Casual players play casually without invasive anti-cheating measures; pro players sign up for the league, which comes with extra restrictions. This is exactly how it used to work in the past, and exactly how any non-computer competition works: casuals and pro players may be playing the same game, but their goals are different, and so the rules and experience is different too.
Unfortunately, as it always happened, the industry decided to do the exact opposite of the right thing, and is now forcing all players to play by the competitive pro-gaming rules. With the game designed around pro gaming, causal players no longer have means to host and moderate their own servers in a social fashion, thus losing the natural, non-invasive method of combating cheaters. The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer. As a result, casual players (which tend to be the majority) become exposed to competitive cheaters, which obviously makes the game extremely frustrating for the former. And to mitigate that, companies are employing invasive anti-cheating methods - methods that make sense when dealing with clubs and official matches, but are plain abusive and dystopian when employed remotely at scale.
Again, the right way to solve cheating is to keep casual gaming and pro gaming entirely separate - the same way playing soccer with your friends is an entirely separate activity from playing it professionally in a local team. Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Several of the assumptions in your post are flawed, which undermines your whole argument.
> Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking
This is untrue, cheating was until recently a huge problem for team fortress 2 which hasn't been competitive for years.
See also the huge cheating problems in the CoD games from the Xbox 360 era, which was before they were competitive outside of small, grassroots tournaments.
> The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer
Players overwhelmingly do not prefer server browsing. Games have consolidated on the matchmaking model because any game without it is dead on arrival.
The biggest example of a game with a foot still in both worlds is Counterstrike, where the overwhelming use of custom servers is for external matchmaking services with stricter anti cheat than Valves VAC.
> Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games. Check out a recent financial report from ActiBlizzard and see how much money they make from competitive games like Overwatch and CoD compared to their mobile sub company, King.
Pro circuits and pro game modes are advertising expenses, not revenue or profit centers. Arguably the biggest pro game in the world, Counterstrike, makes the vast ,majority of it's money selling lootboxes and taking a cut on skin trades.
> Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games.
This is actually very, very true. Most esports departments are not incredibly profitable (I actually worked for one of the biggest esports gaming companies for a long time and it was a constant source of friction how much money was spent on esports versus the return on it).
At the end of the day, cheating is a dopamine hit: killing the whole lobby in 2-seconds by holding down a button makes people feel good and you can't fight against that without some pretty drastic measures.
So I agree with the overall thrust of your argument here in that I far preferred the world of casual servers you could hop on with your friends, make goofy rules, ban whoever you wanted, etc., and I see how dissolving that into shared servers with automated matchmaking makes certain anti-cheat measures infeasible.
What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?
(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)
The vast majority of players are likely using the stock controllers or controllers they picked up at a normal store stocking pretty much only OEM or approved 3rd party controllers.
The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.
I really miss local multiplayer. Competitive gaming was other kids on your block. Good times, low stakes.
Wow you've captured well the feelings I have looking at modern gaming very well. In the 2000s I played on servers and chatted with people for weeks, over time we learnt how each other played and formed cooperative teams and had our own in jokes. Kind of like HN. Your description of "modern gaming" to get up a global ladder highlights the near equivalence of social media firms, facebook etc. with their likes, fllowers and doom scrolling. It makes me slightly sad if kids don't have those communities today.
To add:
If you buy a game and receive only a client without a server, you only bought half a game. Expect to rent the other half.
This is why I largely play single player games, or games at least with the option of bots.
I booted up the computer to take a break from the assholes, not to get shot by them.
If they were trying to combat cheaters, they wouldn't have released an official controller that allows generic, 3rd party, unauthenticated inputs: the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
It would be pretty trivial to hook up a Pi Pico through the jacks and USB ports to be able to make a KBM adapter like that. There just hasn't been a point making such a device when the xim/cronus works fine.
It might not even need the jacks, according to https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib... the USB-A ports accept HID gamepads.
"Pretty trivial" but only for the small percentage of people that are tech minded like that and who can be bothered; it's not an issue, not compared to laypeople being able to buy an off the shelf ready to use product.
Those off the shelf ready to use cheating products will still be there, they are just going to use a modified xbox controller instead of a third-party one because that's what microsoft allows.
The difference is Microsoft will now get more money out of the cheating products than before, not sure that sounds the right incentive but that's what is going to happen.
Those things cannot be fixed with software.
If this ban affects cheaters at all (after the next firmware update), the next Chronus could very well be a little box with a bunch of colour coded wires that you plug into an Xbox accessibility controller. All the cheater logic ("no recoil", mouse like precision on the analog sticks) would still work perfectly.
Yes, and once a company like xim makes one, they can sell it and laypeople will buy it off the shelves. This method doesn't require any internal modifications or anything, that's the whole point of the adaptive controller.
The creators of the xim will want to make a new product to sell if their old one no longer works. It might even be possible with a software update.
>They are most definitely doing this to combat cheaters. I tried out Cronus + KBM on my friend's Xbox S and it was comical.
I have sold a half-dozen Cronus Zen adapters in person via Craigslist/OfferUp.
Every single buyer claimed that it was for a friend, brother, etc.
> I have sold a half-dozen Cronus Zen adapters
Don't do that, please. Sell drugs or something, less damaging to society.
How is cheating in video games hurting society? I would assume it drives people off playing multiplayer games, but I fail to see how this would be bad for society.
I think it was a joke :-)
Cheating in anything is bad for society, mostly because it reinforces cheaters’ false perception that “everyone is cheating”
(FWIW I don’t think it’s worse than [some] drugs and I doubt GP does either)
I wonder what popular Twitch streamers are going to do once their Cronus Zen is detected.
But a new one that'll be built around an official controller, or respond correctly to whatever crypto they're using?
Possibly, I think the math on number of people that currently purchase controllers that will be blocked in the future is a very small amount of money compared to the possibility of losing that revenue to other gaming sources if that is the reason.
"Preserving console experience" really feels like corporatespeak to say "cheaters" without saying the devices in question (because then it raises visibility to those devices).
I think the "doing this for money" is the people who are currently not gaming due to rampant cheating in games like R6S, Apex, COD, etc.
That's a convenient metric. Or rather, the lack of it. My common sense tells me there are significantly more people using third party controllers than there are cheaters, though.
I think the metric is blocked controllers, which is a small subset of 3rd party controllers. So far the most common people complaining about this change is cronus and xim users not legit players.
Most 3rd party controllers that are being sold online are still compatible afaict.
I don't think it has affected xim or cronus at all. They use official first party Xbox controllers to handle authentication, and MITM them to inject inputs.
Instead the big one affected has been Brooks, who make very popular boards for custom fighting game controllers.
https://www.brookaccessory.com/support/xbox-Issue-update.php
Why wouldn't you think it's both?
they obviously care about money and selling periphials is money... but so is selling consoles.
If they can't control the cheaters in some fashion (losing battle and all that) then they will sell less consoles because why would people pay for that? (unless you're a cheater paying for it but that's besides the point).
The problem you have is that you think there's only one answer to this and the answers is the want to stop the cheaters AND they want money because cheaters affect both.
If the goal was really to stop cheater, they'd provide an API in their XDA to let game developers reject unauthorized controllers. That way, ranked matches could take advantage of this to make competitive games more fair. If people want to have more fun with cheats in a single player game using an unapproved third-party controller, they should be able to do so!
They've gone into every xbox owner's house and destroyed their property with prejudice. 3rd party controllers, all of them, including all never used to cheat become non-functional and worthless.
At that point I don't give a flying fig what excuse they are using. Neither should the law when it comes to wanton destruction of property. Property rights are a thing!
It is not all 3rd party controllers. It is "unauthorized accessory" controllers which excludes devices that are part of the "designed for Xbox” hardware partner program.
So become part of their cartel or die?
or join with the authorities to maintain law and order.
You spin it as "cartel" but why can't it be spun as Law & Order?
Or do you think that cheaters should have unrestricted control and the ability to destroy the economy of any given game? You think people will play on platforms that aren't working to keep things even?
This is the same argument for P2W games where you can just pay to be the best. A few people will argue for that as they drop thousands to get those "rare" loot boxes and the rest will say "it's no fun to play a game against someone who's paying to be better than they really are".
I don’t play online games. Are you telling me what I can and cannot do in a single player game?
To be fair, I think the vast majority of this is about online. Keeping a clean and hack free experience isn't just about selling proprietary controllers - it's also bout blocking cheating and keeping things sane.
(and single player games have Trophies which is online so... depending on how much you value pixelated trophies? those would be affected by "cheating in single player")
Remember... this is Microsoft. The same company that had YEARS of bad press because bad third party drivers was one of the largest causes of windows crashes.
So even if you never play online (I don't either) and only play single player games (FF and similar games here)? There's nothing worse than a shitty controller to ruin an experience.
It's possible some otherwise perfect controllers might lose their spot if they get "banned" because they aren't "upgraded" with "security chips" (or whatever) and you might be affected but in aggregate its something a company the size of MS has to take into account.
We'll see how it plays out but I'm not surprised (after reading comments about cheating stuff used by others in stuff like controllers).
You’re literally talking about creating a walled garden around what is currently an open ecosystem in which devices already purchased by people - including people with limited financial resources - will no longer work. All under the justification of ‘it solves cheating’. PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.
Not to mention the fact that eventually any hardware based controls will be circumvented - this is a device which converts mechanical actions to digital, so there’s nothing to stop physical control modifications.
The whole thing is either lazy, incompetent, or greedy, and won’t solve anything anyway.
> PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.
Have they though? Cheaters are rampant in most games, meanwhile consoles have been highly successfully in preventing cheaters from using things like wallhacks and aimbotting.
Please quantify "rampant". How likely is the average player to encounter cheaters?
Regularly when doing anything that touches online. And even stuff that doesn't touch "online", these days, normally involves trophies that you can cheat your way to getting.
Who cares about trophies enough to ban grey market controllers?
That's the thing, its not JUST trophies.
I'll agree that if it was ONLY trophies? Sure you might have an argument... but this obviously isn't only about that one thing.
Let me ask this... if trophies are low key "no one cares" (and that's not the case... plenty of people go out of their way to "100%" games and care about those stupid trophies) then what's the solution to allow "bootleg" controllers for only those people? how many people fall into that category? 25%? 15%? 5? 1? That's a low % of people to support a fragmented market - which is what MS would have to do - support a more fragmented market.
I think it's just too simplistic to say "M$ Evil and only wants money and I play online so I'm the only one that matters".
Supporting "grey market" means a more complicated product to support and that complication isn't going to be worth it for such a small subset of players.
Once you get into certain skill levels in matchmaking it is very common to run into cheaters, depending on the game. If you think about above average lobbies, the number of cheaters will go up until you get to another MMR threshold just due to the fact that the cheats enable people to move up MMR. The average low MMR players will see less, and the top of MMR will see less, but the middle-upper bracket cheating is very, very bad.
Companies are trying to battle this with anti-cheats, heuristics, shadowbanning, etc but it is still noticeable at above-average MMR.
PC gaming is loaded with tons of cheaters despite rootkit level anticheat systems. Having locked down hardware ecosystems reduces the rate of cheating, I've had far fewer times of running into cheaters on console games than on PC games.
How is blocking controllers anywhere close to rootkits? How is blocking controllers going to prevent hardware modifications to official controllers?
I'm just speaking to the idea of PC gaming has worked around cheaters, as if its a solved problem. PC gaming has such a massive cheating problem games are resorting to rootkit-like anticheat systems and yet there's still tons of cheaters out there. It is precisely because there's so much freedom out of the box on a PC that cheating flourishes there.
Blocking controllers isn't a rootkit, I agree. But acting like PC gaming has somehow solved cheating without needing restrictions on input devices and the like is disingenuous.
Blocking controllers makes the cost to have a hacked controller higher. It takes more effort to make a useful hacked controller, they have to source already built controllers and tear them apart, etc. Higher costs means it will be less likely to have people using hacked controllers. If you make the ownership of hacked controllers lower, you reduce the rate of cheating on the platform.
Using cheats on a lot of PC games can be free. If there was some magic that made the cost to install a cheat at least $100 do you think the rate of cheating will be lower, higher, or the same?
The goal isn't to eliminate all cheating, that's impossible. The goal is to reduce the rate of cheating.
"already purchased by people" Better talk to the EU that just forced Apple to negate a decade of iAccessories by forcing a switch to USB-C (which I support)
And even if "eventually controls will be circumvented" is true... making the barrier to entry harder gives them time to make back their investment (yes, the company deserves that). IE: DRM that eventually gets broken but not for a year can be the difference in the copies of a game sold being enough to make it a success or not.
The DRM also gives companies a path to suing companies that break the DRM. IE: Nintendo or Apple suing companies that jailbreak their stuff. Or you can be someone like Sony who has a PS5 that hasn't been jailbroken yet - making their platforms more resistant to cheating and thus more attractive to players who want a level playing field.
"won't solve anything anyways" Depends on your definition of "solve". If it takes 5+ years to fully jailbreak a PS5? Then that's successful. So even "broken" jailbreaks can be seen as successful in the long term.
There are negatives to these moves... but it's plain ignorance at best and dishonesty at worse to say there aren't justifiable reasons for companies like MS to take these steps.
> why can't it be spun as Law & Order
Law & Order is neither profit making nor competition destroying.
and a cartel isn't made to have a level playing field fighting cheaters. Cartels are made to make money.
you want to cut the Law and Order angle then you need to also cut the "cartel" angle.
Fact is that if XBox doesn't take steps then their platform becomes less valuable meaning less people want to play there.
"it's only about money" is a short sighted and overly simplistic answer just like "M$ is a cartel".
Microsoft's only motivation for anything is the maximisation of shareholder value.
There are things we in society don't allow corporations to do in their pursuit of profit. We codify those things in law. This thing they want to do is one of them.
"only" is a strong word and obviously not true. Mainly? Sure... but only? a company with thousands of employees "only" wants one thing?
And saying it's illegal is a bit too strong as well. Maybe in the EU but even then? The EU just made a decade of things obsolete when forcing Apple to switch to USB-C so saying "companies can't do that because illegal" obviously isn't true.
And what is illegal in EU is legal in America or vice versa... or brazil... or China... so saying "society doesn't allow" is too simplistic on that level as well.
In America it's illegal to break DRM. Companies like Apple and Nintendo do stuff so that you can't run custom code or use unauthorized attachments/parts/etc. if you break the DRM you can get sued as a company that provides that service.
And you haven't address the fact that MS, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, etc all have to have stable trustworthy platforms for gaming - that goes beyond "they only want money"- sure, they want money but part of getting that is having platforms people want to use. That they trust. That makes cheating harder and provides a level playing field.
Take a step back and realize that "greedy" companies aren't as simplistic as you want to make them out to be and even if they are "greedy"? They do have valid reasons to do shit like this.
Employees will want many different things and have many differing systems of morals of different strengths including some being totally amoral.
Microsoft is an organisation focused on maximisation of shareholder value. Literally anything they do contrary to that gets them sued for securities fraud. Any employee who morally objects to any action taken by the company can suck it up, resign or commit sabotage for which they will be fired if found out.
Microsoft management have to be ready to defend any and every action as being at the very least not detrimental to shareholder value in court.
> Law & Order is neither profit making
My sweet summer child
So they're willing to "authorize" all 3rd party controllers for no more than the cost of an engineer's time in examining each controller, regardless of who submitted it and paid?
Or can we acknowledge this for what it actually is, please.
If you don't have power over the software running on the hardware, it ain't your hardware. Force the consoles to be open and give power back to the users.
It’s always fun to see that viewpoint run face-first into real life, as it inevitably and immediately devolves into a cesspool of cheating that either drives everyone off the platform or loops back around to being forced to run anti-cheat software you don’t have power over.
These vapid comments about freedom And abstract notions of ownership always strike me as naively and comically libertarian
"Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client. Meanwhile, these draconian anti-multiplayer-cheating methods obliterate single-player-game freedoms by removing all potential for modding, which is the only good thing about the medium of gaming these days.
These vapid comments about convenience over freedom and short-sighted notions of corporate control over our devices always strike me as naively and comically authoritarian.
> If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client
Yep, but that would result in no games being commercially viable, and so no games existing.
So there needs to be a compromise in order for those games to exist.
It you want to play a mod friendly game, then… go play one? Lots exist.
Or invent a way to allow anyone to modify and run their game clients in any way they want to preserve abstract notions of freedom whilst also preventing them from modifying and running their game clients in a way that hurts the experience of others.
Good luck!
> "Won't someone please think of the children^W cheaters?" This argument is preposterous. If you want to solve multiplayer game cheating, there's no solution other than to make your game fully server-based and stream a video feed to the client."
This isn't really enough these days. There's proof-of-concept videos on YouTube of people developing ML-Image Recognition aimbots that move a physical mouse.
There is also the solution of running "competitive" games in person, and providing equipment to play on.
The time to do this was at the start of the generation or the next not mid way when people had invested in hardware. I think Sony already did this with the ps5, but from the get go so it’s fine
It’s just poor planning punishing xbox owners creating a ton of e waste
Heuristics that identify inhuman inputs.
Heuristics in competitive games will always bring their own sets of issues.
As it's an arms race, controller tweaks will adjust to be at the borderline of what the system detects, and on the other hand the 0.001% of the most dedicated players that actually beat that borderline will get pushined with a mere "no human can be that good" response, which is the worse outcome when the game's whole point _is_ to be that good.
In the speedrunning community there are plenty of players who can fairly reliably perform frame-accurate inputs (i.e. press a button exactly on a specific 1/60th of a second) so it seems to me that you would have a very, very hard time distinguishing the best legitimate players from cheaters.
Cheating in games - like web scraping - are both arms races where this only works well to a point. It’s absolutely possible to fake it.
This has always been my thoughts as well, and it seems like they have the data required, but I always think they are worried about some false positive issues. These companies should have the resources to build deployable models for this.
I generally agree with the accessibility arguments against doing anything for this, but if you are going to do something, I feel like "give dev's a way to opt into this check, limit to online play" feels like a reasonable system. That would allow fighting games in particular to not opt in.
Sony has something like this setup with screen recording, where some parts of games (cutscenes in some stuff) can't get recorded. It's annoying, but at least it's not the whole game, and the feature exists.
> give dev's a way to opt into this check, limit to online play
In theory, that would have less of a PR risk / impact, too -- if they provide it as a configuration option, they can shift the blame onto third-party devs. who change a value in some XML file somewhere.
(Not that I particularly care about Microsoft's PR, just thought it to be interesting commentary.)
I don't think this is even going to stop the Cronus. The Cronus already requires an OEM controller plugged into it to authenticate. If it does, a Cronus firmware update will probably figure out a way around it as it has an OEM device to work with.
For what it's worth, I own a Cronus and it's not nearly as much of an advantage as they sell it as. I bought it just to use as a fightstick adapter and it's kind of mediocre at that too.
> For what it's worth, I own a Cronus and it's not nearly as much of an advantage as they sell it as. I bought it just to use as a fightstick adapter and it's kind of mediocre at that too.
It can be pretty scummy in games that have strong aim-assist, however to achieve true scumbaggery you need to download custom anti-recoil scripts designed for specific games/guns. They can work really well in certain games.
If they were trying to stop cheaters they could just ban "unauthorized" controllers for online play. This would give a much more understandable message "Unauthorized controllers can't be used for online play to ensure that no player gains an unfair advantage."
If it's to stop cheaters, then why not disable the controller only during multiplayer?
Like QuickShot Joysticks with an automated NE555 fire?
This doesn't stop you using custom controllers.
It just means you have to pay Microsoft for the ports (which is available to anyone) rather than a 3rd party.
> players have been encountering error “0x82d60002”
OT: Microsoft should be banned by decree from showing naked error codes to people, I've been fighting them for decades now
At least you can google for the error code, instead of having to search for a textual phrase and wade through countless pages of not-at-all-related crap.
Or even worse, localized error messages. Good luck trying to 1:1 translate it back to English while remotely troubleshooting issues on your parents' computer.
Just write clear and explicit error message (like “Not a valid Microsoft controller”), you shouldn't need to Google it in the first place!
You should still add an error code, so that people can look for additional documentation about the error on your official doc, but having obscure errors and assuming people will look on Google to see if someone on reddit or stackoverflow has more idea about what the problem could be is criminal laziness.
Your choice is a) "0x82d60002: Using unauthorised accessories compromises your ..." or b) "Error: Using unauthorised accessories ..."
There is no c) "Not a valid Microsoft controller" option. Which one between a) or b) is more likely to lead to resolution? Note, Microsoft also offers phone and/or chat support to Xbox users.
Where do your two options come from, and what makes you think there couldn't be an alternative?
Also, what do your alternatives have to do with the question whether it's better or not for the error message to be localized?
And why are error codes supposed to be 32bits long in the first place?
TFA.
This is the typical lazy answer, but there's a problem here: We haven't been talking about the article itself since half of the thread though, so I don't know what you're referring to.
To get back to the topic, there are no reason why there couldn't be a good error message (there's no “two options” when you write your error messages) and if the error message is good enough so you don't have to Google it, you can and should localize it so the majority of the people of this planet could in fact read it. And you also want to put a error code available in case you still wanted to investigate about it, but there's little reason for this error code to be 32bits long unless you have 4 billion different possible errors in your app…
> At least you can google for the error code
And find what information? Try turning it off and on again, update & reboot, then clean the registry?
On contrary, incorrectly typed generic error message leads to that types of boilerplate. Numeric error code correctly entered and searched usually leads to either description of exact widespread problem and workaround, or absolutely nothing, very binary and efficient.
Oh I'm not really saying that's better, just that the above is the kind of pain I remember from using Windows.
The solution to every error code in Windows these days is sfc /scannow and dism /Online /Cleanup-image
printing (errc, strerror(errc)) instead of just `errc` would have costed them literally 0 seconds and would have helped a lot. Instead they removed everything but error codes and "Oops :("
I get better error messages from the firmware of obscure embedded chips than from Microsoft Windows
> Instead they removed everything but error codes and "Oops :("
According to the article, they didn't. The pop up has the error code and a descriptive error message. And no "Oops :(".
It really should be both. Code for more information/short hand and text so you know a little bit about why, right now since the issue may be quick to resolve.
Or just an “Oops :(” error message that’s even less useful.
An unknown error occurred.
No. The exact opposite. I'm sick of modern software telling me "something went wrong, try again later".
Unless every possible error scenario gets its own descriptive error, that error code is a necessity. And nobody is going to accept a dev adding error messages to every possible error, because localisation to 180+ languages will cost a fortune. Your choice is between "something went wrong" and "something went wrong 0x82939470". The first one is ungoogleable and useless, the second one will have resolutions on forums within a month of appearing.
Sure, I'd like every message to be descriptive towarsa the user, but that simply won't happen. Microsoft has an extensive API for formatting error codes already and if they pop up a 0xsomething, that means they were never going to bother with adding a descriptive message at all.
>Unless every possible error scenario gets its own descriptive error
I mean that's not out of the question, I force that in every codebase I use. The only one I find that difficult in is Kotlin, because it's a trash language that doesn't properly compose throwables.
> because it's a trash language that doesn't properly compose throwables.
Can you elaborate?
I don't get it, you can compose exceptions in Kotlin just fine.
I believe Jetbrains Compose adds some restrictions on try/catch but even then there are different ways you can communicate failure.
I'm always amused to read such strong opinions but I also don't know what you're talking about that would be Kotlin's fault.
Search all the *.h files in the Xbox and Windows SDK's for that hResult.
AKA "Partying like it's 1999"
All of the header errors are documented in multiple languages on MSDN, I only start searching header files when I'm desperate.
Microsoft doesn't document all of their errors, annoyingly, but at least the HRESULT structure gives some kind of indication of the source.
It ships with Visual Studio, but you can also download a tool to do this here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=100...
There's a web version I am aware of as well, but I think you have to work for MS to get access to it. I would speculate there's extra stuff in that one.
> Unless every possible error scenario gets its own descriptive error,
Yeah, that's kinda the point. Every error code gets its own text description. That's what I do, what my company does, with our code. Because technicians don't have the ability to look up error codes like engineers can. And even if they did, the ability to look up where/when the error code was generated doesn't tell you what to do about it.
Microsoft is just way below average in this area and counts on its locked-in customers not knowing how much better other companies are.
Internationalising every possible failure within a system, especially one as complex as Windows, into 110 languages seems needlessly intensive and complicated. Many details differentiated by error codes just aren't useful information to end users anyway.
I don't think Microsoft can document _every_ error, it's just not very realistic. I'd prefer it if they did, but lacking that, the error code works just fine.
that's not the exact opposite though, is it? what you want is what the parent commenter wants with an addendum
Except these days when you search "Error Code 0xdeadbeef" you get nothing but blogpam on "how to fix error code 0xdeadbeef. Download this garbage cleaner app. Run it. Restart." Etc.
Error codes are specific and can be looked up. The modern trend of "uwu we fucky-wucked up" cutesy error messages with no details whatsoever is inexcusable because of how much harder it makes to troubleshoot the error.
If error codes can be looked up, why can't the software displaying the error code just do the lookup and show a proper error message?
You are assuming that this is not the first instance of this error code showing, this is the only error affecting the device, the device has internet access.
The forums usually take a while and a while and a lot of back and forth to arrive at a solution that works for maybe 80% of people under most circumstances, but is usually more of a workaround than a proper fix. (And there isn't necessarily just one cause of the error code, or one solution. The console doesn't know which is which without situational judgment)
The error codes are sort of a self service mechanism for advanced users who want to try unofficial troubleshooting. They're not a substitute for a real patch fixing the root issue.
I suspect this gets pushback internally because the descriptive error message baked into the OS is often wrong or misleading. Having a code you can look up can provide a lot more context.
Sometimes it can - the only time I've had this work, I had a bluescreen, on next startup Windows told me it was because I needed a driver update.
I think there's some path where driver devs can publish updates and link them to BSOD stacks which lets Windows tell users if they hit a bug that is fixed by a driver.
This was like 10+ years ago and I've never hit the same flow again, despite encountering bluescreens every once in awhile, which I guess goes to show how difficult this problem is.
That is actually acknowledging responsibility.
Much more often I see : Oops, something went wrong
Or “you broke Reddit” style, where that’s never the case.
What? You mean, this whole time my teenage vitriol and emoji laden angst did nothing?!
Who cares about acknowledging responsibility in this instance. Isn't the point to provide useful information so as to fix the problem?
I like how bungie handles it. Known errors have codewords and if you see one it means they already know and documentation exists. It's also easier to connect with other players / support with your specific issue because general networking error ALFALFA will come up in different contexts than general networking error LENTIL.
I hate getting a 0x code from Windows because the search results are going to be completely useless, possibly not even for the program that I am trying to troubleshoot.
This. Serving cryptic error codes over issues that do have a proper wording is a big no.
“Using unauthorised accessories compromises your gaming experience. For this reason, the unauthorised accessory will be blocked from use on 11/12/2023,” read the pop-up on the console. It then advised the player to return the product to the store or talk to the manufacturer.
Interesting how they render the date, there will be players in the UK who will see that and think they can use their controllers until the 11th of December. I don't know why they didn't just use "12th of November, 2023"
That assumes it renders the same in all locales. Most likely it doesn’t.
Even if they do something locale-specific, Microsoft has a knack for fucking specifically dates up. For me Windows keeps falling back to using the backwards US way even though I keep correcting it to use the international way. I think this is because I prefer the US keyboard layout (I've no need for a GBP sign above the three, hash is much more useful), something causes that to leak out.
Also even if they have that nailed, it's still no guarantee. I'm not an Xbox owner but presumably you have a profile with a region (for payments/billing, tax etc) and a selected language. I'd be willing to bet a lot of Brits, Canadians or Aussies have selected "English (US)" language without really thinking through.
We'll see, but I think there will be quite a few confused people in a couple of weeks time regardless.
That is such a weird position to take on the matter, that offers literally no advantages and a several disadvantages.
if I had to pick between error code and text meesage, I'll pick error code.
why? localization fragments search results.
I've seen a lot of people struggling to solve their Linux issues because they were searching for errors and logs in spanish and search results are several orders of magnitude off.
of course, both are better.
No, error codes are far better then “something went wrong” as you can at least google them
IMO there is a right place for error codes such as this; in failure states that are too technical to explain to the intended audience, and for which diagnosis can be complex (so that dominant causes can be different from version to version). The other way these things fail that I think is common is to give no explanation and direct the troubleshooter to the logging system.
I would rather get naked error codes than nothing at all.
This is one reason the Steam Deck model of being an open console system is the future.
Some dinosaurs wants to preserve the old locked-down console experience, where you have exclusive games, controllers and digital stores. But its just worse for the customer in every way.
Good thing Microsoft didn't just buy a major AAA game company to decrease the odds of that working.
Microsoft still releases majority of games for Windows.
Sony buying them would be much larger problem.
Many of Windows games block Steam Deck linux distro to "preserve experience" and "prevent cheating".
Afaik this isn't true.
What some games have is a particularly invasive anti-cheat that's not supported on Proton. But it's not targeting Steam Deck in particular, it's just a side-effect.
What's not true? That games block open hardware with excuse of cheating prevention just like Microsoft blocks other hardware with same excuse on Xbox?
That's trivially verifiable.
For end user it makes no different whether it's a side effect or not.
If it is "trivially verifiable" then you should be able to provide examples.
Some anti cheat tools, such as "Easy Anti Cheat" are supported on Steam Deck, some are not supported yet. Perhaps some will never be supported. AFAIK these later categories are generally due to anti cheat hooking into low level windows functionality that Proton doesn't support. You could argue this is "blocking open software" but that would be a stretch since this behavior is generally better described as a lack of support rather than explicit blocking
None of it is due to game publishers including code that limits the hardware that windows runs on (blocking open hardware).
There are games that will ban your account if they detect Proton. Destiny 2 comes to mind.
I would grant that as an example of blocking open software, but since Destiny 2 can be run on windows on a steam deck, it doesn't seem to be an example of blocking open hardware (not that steam deck hardware is actually 'open'.)
Some games do or did specifically block proton. Roblox was one example.
But it is some, not many, a usually widely critized exception. Linux and the steam deck specifically are not regularly specifaclly blocked - why would they do that? It just would limit their customer base and annoy actual customers. Tu put actual effort into earning less money would be crazy.
The games that do not work either still use incompatible cheat detection, like you said, so we are talking only some multiplayer games. And the incompatible rest is just a technical accident that Proton will probably fix with time.
The day Valve falls, for whatever reason (greed, incompetence, some impossible to predict market shift/tech innovation... Gabe doesn't have decades and decades left as CEO after all) - the open world of PC gaming as we know it will probably fall, to be devoured by the Microsoft/Epic/Ubisoft/etc of the world.
Compared to most other tech/gaming companies, it's shocking how non predatory and customer friendly they are.
I've been able to maintain my digital library for almost 2 decades now, I've played those games on dozens of different hardware configuration without having to pay a single cent for it - compared to my other digital libraries, many of which (Wii, 3DS, PSP, etc) are completely lost to time.
I think Valve gets way too much credit. They haven't abused their market position as much as they could have but they did normalize always-online DRM schemes. CS2 skin trading is also a hive of illegal/underage gambling and scams.
If you want to valorize a digital games retailers, I would suggest GOG is a better candidate.
>I would suggest GOG is a better candidate.
I love the idea of GOG, and I ADORE that they're making old games available (GOG peeps, if you're reading this, civ 2 please!), but if I were a PC gamer I'd buy through steam just for proton compatibility on linux. It's that good.
As a steam deck user, I wish GoG would do something to better support it and linux. I bought CP2077 on GoG and now I kind of wish I hadn't. Everything from steam just works so well from the moment of purchase. I wouldn't even mind an extra step of having to load up GoG galaxy to download stuff and then have it set it up to run in the deck launcher. But getting stuff from steam is just so smooth. And things like the shader precompilation can really make a world of difference to the overall experience.
> I think Valve gets way too much credit. They haven't abused their market position as much as they could have but they did normalize always-online DRM schemes.
Always online DRM schemes were inevitable and even with Steam its ultimately the developer's choice. There's plenty of Steam games where you can just run the .exe from the folder without even having Steam running. And let's never go back to the bad-old-days of needing to download the latest patch from the developer's website.
> CS2 skin trading is also a hive of illegal/underage gambling and scams.
This is not ideal, but back in the day it was RuneScape scams, etc. I'm not sure whether it's actually better to have kids who've been wholly sheltered from gambling until they're 21 then be suddenly allowed to gamble. Ideally, we wouldn't have gambling for adults either tbh, but maybe there's something to the idea of needing to develop in a world where you're exposed to that kinda thing and are more immune to it when older? Or maybe its the other way around. Also kinda rings hollow if we're marketing trading-card games to kids, which are also definitely gambling.
> Compared to most other tech/gaming companies, it's shocking how non predatory and customer friendly they are.
That is a low bar indeed. Steam got its initial install base because Valve bought Counter-Strike and then made Steam a functional requirement to play it.
I mean this in the nicest way but "we used to hate steam you know" is some sure-grandma-lets-get-you-to-bed meme shit.
Alternatively, a way to put children to bed:
"Once upon a time, we enjoyed the right of first sale[0]..."
The trick is as a player you are not really the main customer of steam. You are the product. The customers are game developers, and they are as predatory toward them as any big corp online store. Not worse, but not better either.
Not every way; you have more control over quality and experience in a closed system. I mean yeah it sucks, but so does spending money on a controller that isn't good enough.
edit: I'm reading somewhere else it's to stop cheat enabled controllers. Wouldn't want to play multiplayer games if someone has an unfair advantage like that.
> you have more control over quality and experience
> I'm reading somewhere else it's to stop cheat enabled controllers
No, it's always been about revenue.
I never understand why people take company's word and run with it. Are they actually fooled? Of course, the company won't be blunt and say to the consumer: honestly, we force you to buy from us because it make us more money.
This is really weird "solution". They likely worked backward. Spotted a market opportunity, then brainstormed plausible justifications.
This remind of Apple claiming its anti-repair policy is there to fight theft. Repeat that enough times and you start to believe it.
Can't it be both reasons?
I think it would be naive to believe that this initiative was spawned out of another way than: "How can we reclaim market share from 3rd party hardware manufacturers?"
They are almost certainly coming at it from a revenue standpoint and then working the marketing spin in whatever way they think will resonate most their users. This is not a pro-consumer decision. It is monopolistic. "Curated" is a euphemism.
Maybe people don’t like playing video games with cheaters and they do like that their items’ value will plummet to near-zero if they’re stolen.
Maybe these are more relevant to most consumers than abstract complaints on Hackernews about “freedom.”
Have you considered that?
>Maybe these are more relevant to most consumers than abstract complaints on Hackernews about “freedom.”
It seems like the parent is complaining about people taking business' explanations at face value when there's a likely different motive, not "freedom".
> I never understand why people take company's word and run with it.
They aren't. The customers are the ones complaining about this. Microsoft is doing what its user base wants. People on XBox typically use a controller and do not want to face people on a KBM.
Sure, it's about revenue. That revenue is not from controller sales. Rather, it's about keeping it's customer-base happy, and the general sentiment from the community is that these tools aren't good for the overwhelming majority of players.
You might disagree with that opinion, but I can't take you seriously if you aren't aware of the general sentiment of the community and how Microsoft is doing what it's paying customers want.
If this was true then Microsoft could've made it so that you gave to have a certified controller.
Isn’t that what they’re doing with this change in policy?
A gaming device controller by Microsoft is nothing different from a gaming device controller by Valve.
The difference is that Valve allows you to use a gaming device from anyone.
And even if they wanted to block you, that wouldn't really work as you can either go around it (via the power of Linux) or just install Windows and make it work that way.
No, the future of gaming is streaming.
Just last week we had people getting banned from CS2 because of AMD driver features. Cheat detection is on every platform.
I don't know, I very much enjoy the dinosaur PlayStation 5 experience, significantly more than my gaming PC (that I only use for flight-simming now). I mean, if Steam unveiled a new Steam Deck-style box with all the power, support, polish and sales of Xbox at least, I'd probably agree with you, but at this point I can't see how open console systems are "the future". Steam Deck sells because it's a great portable gaming system that can run AAA titles surprisingly well (unlike the poor underpowered Switch), and only then because it's more open than the (not direct) competition.
Does this mean the end of custom accessibility controllers?
Sounds like it will be the end of 3P accessibility controllers yes.
Xbox has invested extensively in their 1P solution though: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...
It's modular and programmable
And more importantly, all the money goes to Microsoft.
I would bet that the Xbox Accessibility controller will never be profitable for Microsoft
It doesn't have to be profitable for them. It can just exist, be the only option, and prevent others from making a competitive or superior product, forcing others out of the business.
It would be a shame if someone with a physical disability needed to find a different accessible controller for each platform they play on because each one only supports first-party controllers though.
I don't have a disability serious enough to need adaptive controllers like this, but I do have RSI, and when I find peripherals that I can use with minimal pain I stick to them. I have to imagine many with more serious disabilities would feel similarly.
It does say "unauthorized", so I assume it should still be possible to get an official license to make a third party controller, though we'll have to see if that's actually going to be the case.
There are "authorized" 3rd party controllers and they claim they'll expand support for wireless devices.
This might be a sad day. Ben Heck has been making accessibility controllers for as long as I've been on the internet and I know the last few videos he's done on those have been based off a third party controller.
Its time to leave M$ completely. Switch to Steam gaming.
The Xbox is a computer. It natively supports keyboards and mice. Just give up on this idea of an anachronistic “console experience” already. It’s just holding players and games back.
This is a terrible experience for people who desire to sit on a couch with a controller. People specifically use devices that spoof their keyboard and mouse a controller so they can get in queues with controller players and retain auto aim. Some games allow native keyboard and mouse support, but then they’re queued with KB/mouse players.
How hard is it really to have two queues based on your input type?
Not to mention, there will always be a huge overlap between ok kb/mouse players and good controller players. This leads me to believe that normal skill based matching would be enough to keep the games interesting and challenging, regardless of which control scheme you decide to use.
> How hard is it really to have two queues based on your input type?
Basically impossible. Some players will always try to spoof it, either for an advantage or the challenge.
Isn't the problem de facto solved by matchmaking? The player that aims better will quickly win more and be elevated to the level of opponents on par with them. From the perspective of the player that loses to them, it's no different than losing to a regular player who aimed really well; you're quickly separated from them in the queue.
This wouldn't apply to games with only a few hundred active players but I think most proponents of this change aren't really thinking of those games.
> Isn't the problem de facto solved by matchmaking? The player that aims better will quickly win more and be elevated to the level of opponents on par with them.
Matchmaking decreases the odds you meet a cheater for low rank players, and significantly increases it for higher rank players -- and since there's fewer of them due to the Bell curve, they are going to feel the cheaters that much more.
If you just rely on rank and not on anti-cheat efforts, you'd be just destroying one of the loyal cores of the playerbase, one which is also quite vocal online.
From my personal experience of thousands of hours in competitive FPS shooters on PC, there is no point in ranking where playing against a cheater becomes fair or fun.
modern matchmaking includes streamers that pay for accounts that have purposefully lost repeatedly so they've tanked their rank so they can stream themselves pubstomping noobs.
Back in the day an obvious cheater would get booted from the server, nowadays, they literally record themselves doing it and nothing happens because it brings in an incoming to the company.
I can tell you which I prefer.
Problem is that console gamers are by default cheaters on FPS since all of them have aim-assist. If I were a competitive player I would be pissed off if a console player is higher in the ranking because of it.
Generally yes in any tier with a big enough pool, and has been my experience. I've been playing team based competitive shooters for over 2 decades, and while I occasionally notice an obvious cheater with amazing aim and improbable aim jumps during replays. My experience is that they often aren't very good at the game in general. Or at least, it's their crutch to play at my level. Cheating was a much bigger problem for me when I'd personally pick the servers I played on, but I hardly think about it any more. Modern match making tends to be pretty good at leveling the playing field. Cheating kind of sucks, but generally I don't notice on the games I like to play. Plus, there's just as much chance the cheater will be on my team as the opponent, so it evens out that way as well.
Isn't banning third-party controllers equally impossible then? It's the exact same check; just a question of what you do with the result of that check (block the controller entirely, or just switch to a different queue).
Again, this should not be news.
These "game platforms" (read: desktops whom are sold but never convey ownership), assume anti-enduder at every step of the way.
It was surprising MS allowed 3rs party anything at all.
This is why we need strong purchase-owner regulations. Cause this shit is a rental at best. Who controls it? The owner (read: Microsoft).
A lot of people locked down game platforms because they just want to have a seamless plug and play experience to play games without drivers, compatibility issues, or cheating. From the couch. On a 60” living room tv.
I certainly do, and so my gaming buddies. Every like 5-7 years or so we need to buy a new $400-$500 console. Seems like a good deal to me. We started back in the day on Xbox 360, now are on Xbox One, and sometime soon will migrate to Series X.
Making arbitrary peripherals not work is the opposite of "a seamless plug and play experience".
The masses are almost always willing to trade rights for 'ease'.
It's also how we get to IoT, cloud-tied software and hardware, and all sorts of anti-purchaser tech, to benefit the actual owner.
The longer I live, I realize that Stallman was right about tech. All of it.
Non-microsoft peripherals in my gaming universe are used for one purpose - to cheat and to tilt the otherwise perfectly level playing field into cheaters favor. I don’t care for their existence.
There’s a ton of other options to play games where non-standard “enhancements” are allowed, along with wall hacks, map hacks, anti-recoil, trigger hacks, etc. You and Stallman can use those.
Hopefully they ban mouse and keyboard too.
I prefer “my ball” to officially stamped and pumped to the correct pressure.
Nothing Apple hasn't been doing for years at much greater magnitudes without many objections from the tech crowd.
Makes me sick to the stomach, but everyone seems to love Steve Jobs, the genius inventor, that never actually invented anything and died of a treatable cancer because he actually was a complete moron and didn't get treatment, because "he knew better" and opted for alternative medicine. Which reminds me of the joke: "You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? Medicine."
Related: Wiimotes connect and function as bluetooth devices under both Linux and Windows but not Mac OS.
This feels like a new development. I regularly attached a wiimote over Bluetooth to my Mac in the teens. It was my go-to clicker for presenting slides. I needed a dedicated program to map the controller buttons to the inputs I wanted, but the wiimotes attached over Bluetooth without any extra hardware.
Wiimotes are broken on Apple silicon.
> Nothing Apple hasn't been doing for years at much greater magnitudes without many objections from the tech crowd.
I'm sincerely sorry that you retain this emotional bile to the degree that you're compelled to express it in an unrelated thread here. It's unpleasant to read, but I imagine it's far harder to live with.
What's an example of a standards-based USB device that works with Windows and Linux, but that Jobs blocked on macOS?
This has the added bonus of blocking non disposable controllers that use hall effect sensors that don't suffer from stick drift.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23799149/gamesir-g7-se-xb...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Fix+Xbox+One+Wireless+Co...
This controller is labeled "licensed". How do you know it will be blocked by this policy?
In the same way that Nvidia is going with it's 'founders edition', slowly squeeze out 'partner's.
US-based HN readers will know the experience of going to Best buy or Microcenter and having them offer you a warranty plan on your new controller.
The official Xbox controller is the one thing I've ever bought that it's worth getting the warranty on.
Anyone thinking that M$ plans to sell one controller per Xbox, is overestimating the reliability of those controllers.
I hope this bites console manufacturers back by raising awareness that hall effect analogs exist and why does sony only put them in 4x more expensive gamepad than the regular one without hall effect sticks. Source: dual sense broken over years 5 times, every single one from stick drift. We aren't throwing these controllers around. Regular use for gaming.
Yep. My brother who is quite talented at Call of Duty goes through one controller every 8-12 months. He's on his 4th or 5th now.
I wonder when Microsoft start selling ad pop-ins on Windows and Xbox. You know, for better and enhanced user experience.
This makes me so happy to be in Linux land free from M$'s grip.
You can stop using M$ if you want. It's not the 90's anymore. Every company could have a $.
Damn, won't be able to give my little bro the MadCatz every time. What's the world coming to?
Seriously though, this is awful. Hopefully we see more regulation of this sort of thing EU usb-c/removable battery style. I mean ideally we'd be breaking these companies up, but regulating them is a good step.
They'll still work fine. MadCatz is licensed. There are tons of licensed accessory vendors for Xbox.
Now that the Activision acquisition has been approved, they can start tightening the screws.
Saw the righting on the wall earlier this year.
Get out of M$ products.
Also: "Xbox's new policy – say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November" (79 points, 79 comments, 17 hours ago)[0], "Xbox is ending support for unauthorized controllers" (3 points) [1], "Microsoft May Drop Support for 'Unauthorized' Xbox Controllers, Accessories" (2 points), "Microsoft Appears to Block Unofficial Third-Party Accessories on Xbox" (1 point)[3], "Microsoft is cracking down on unofficial Xbox gear" (3 points)[4]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066858 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38065269 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38070427 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38073269 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38076461
What doublespeak! "Ending support" really means "blocking competitors"?
Tbf on one hand, 3rd party controllers are often absolute crap for all platforms, cheap shitty stuff.
On the other hand, this is just blocking out competitors/money grab as other comments have mentioned already. But I mean...why are people so upset they're doing it? Plenty of other companies already do this, especially Apple (which many of you seem to adore).
> Tbf on one hand, 3rd party controllers are often absolute crap for all platforms, cheap shitty stuff.
I don't think we are talking about the MadCatz controllers you gave your younger sibling.
This is 2023.
There are many third party controllers that are superior in every way to stock ones. I've got a few 8BitDo controllers that I use to play basically everything possible, since bluetooth is so ubiquitous now.
Microsoft just fucked all disabled people. Bravo!
And all the 6 people who play fighting games on Xbox.
If you want to enforce this in competitive e-sports situations...
...or allow a specific game to say "this server is 1st party controller only" or something like that, yeah, maybe, I can see the logic.
But a blanket block-out is obviously bullshit.
I honestly think that might be more damaging.
Third-party alternatives must be allowed, the problem is Microsoft changing the rules long after shipping the console, in a way that not all perfectly fine controllers could be updated to handle.
They just bought activation for $68.7 billion. They need to sell a lot of genuine xbox controllers to make up for that.
So I guess they'll be blocking their accessibility controller? You know, the officially sold Microsoft Xbox accessory that lets you arbitrarily map inputs to any other controller you have sitting around? To preserve the console experience?
I was always baffled how M$ actually took over the controller game on PC as well. But this is also pretty greedy and obviously just for the money. Like if people wan to buy some crap that breaks in 30 days they should be, the market should decide. They should also buy some innovative controller from "unauthorized" companies that just work.
I mean its great to have a standardized button layout but we pretty much had that even B4 Xbox was were basically forced on every PC gamer. Games and steam also support PS controllers but I read all the time that games are lacking the icons or that they do not work correctly.
I recently bought a Turtle Beach controller that has button below that act like stick presses, I think the elite controller have that as well but it was cheaper and has no stupid wireless I do not need. Anyway I really do not like the fact that they have to pay some licensing fees or need to get it officially approve from fucking M$. I remember back in the day were you could actually use any controller in games, I do not think it works like that these days. You need like xbox controller emulator and shit so I just buy them begrudgingly. There would be more innovation like the Steam Controller (just on better, from someone else, never used one but the layout made no sense to me like the buttons below the pad but it was a step in the right direction I think) if M$ would not had this monopoly on their controllers that never really change.
I don't think this will be enforced for long in europe.
Knowing how EU treated the iPhone, I’m sure they’ll have something to say about this.
Never let a crisis go to waste. An increasing number of console players are complaining about devices like the XIM4 being used to cheat or otherwise provide an unfair advantage. So now Microsoft can claim credit for fighting that while also increasing the number of first party or licensed hardware they sell seems win/win from their perspective I'm sure.
Unsigned third party controllers. Ie controllers that haven’t passed Microsoft’s certification program. There is a massive difference.
the second player getting the crap third party controller your grandma bought you for your birthday is ingrained in the annals of console gaming
we shouldn't stand for these blatant cash grabs, this also means you can't use better third party controllers unless they pay the microsoft toll
I'll rather stop playing than buy a console. PC is another world.
Why not block third party controls in the online components only, even allow a ‘ranked’ that requires authorised hardware.
This is a money grab and not anything else, presumably do this now, and start pumping out console exclusives ones the rage has died down.
What a load of trash. What MSFT is saying is, "We want you all to only buy our controllers."
With most games having crossplay, what "console experience" even exists anymore? Making people buy expensive ass controllers so they can be worked by someone with a cheap mouse and keyboard is not the "console experience" people want.
Please take this as your daily reminder that you do not own many of your computing devices without going to extraordinary lengths which may make them inoperable on the actual owner's network.
This does indeed preserve the console experience, basically this is the gist of it!
Making gaming competitive kills one more way to have fun (competitive gaming -> cheats -> anti cheat measures -> less fun for the casual).
Seems strange that they're doing this mid-generation, rather than when coming out with new controllers/console.
Last time I remember this happening was in the middle of the ps3's lifecycle, and I had to return a generic controller because of it.
Title checks out as the "console experience" is getting routinely shafted by a giant corp who is the one that actually owns the hardware.
Blocking the Brook adapter is how you lose the entire fighting game community over night. I'll be unable to use the majority of my fight sticks now.
its not an issue because they will have to leave the market soon due to an inability to provide a product customers will pay for
Have they blocked the Elite controller or whatever their $200 option is? I bought one and the A button has never functioned properly and several other interactions are frequently full of frustration. Doesn't that compromise my game experience too? Oh, it makes them money? Oh nevermind.
It's disappointing, but not surprising. This is the same console which pioneered charging to play games online, while providing no value, simply because they can get away with it. Locking you into their more expensive controllers is totally on brand for them.
Some spreadsheet hero who has never played a game in their life is looking for a promotion.
This is nothing new in the console space. They have always had a brand standards for accessories since Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis. This is just the evolution of consoles always being online.
I can honestly say, at least with Microsoft they will ask nicely. Nintendo on the other hand will brick your devices out right.
Pretty sure this breaks lots of consumer laws in europe. Not sure where the US is up to with its consumer protection (nowehere?), But if there is anything nice to be said about the crankies in Brussels it's that they come down hard on this behaviour.
Thinley veiled attempt to extract money from sales of third-party peripherals. This would be trivial for manufacturers of cheat hardware to work around. All they have to do is modify first-party hardware. Only difference is now MS profits from it.
Cheaters are scum but as someone who doesn't play many competitive games, I'm sick of being forced to make sacrifices to help deal with them.
If they were restricting controllers from the start, that would be one thing, and controller exclusivity is something every console manufacturer right back to Atari has always thought about from the very beginning - mostly for cash-grab reasons, but also, much later on, with this very excuse. It's why the original XBox's USB controllers were a different shape.
But to me this feels like a clear-cut case of interoperability, unilaterally and unconditionally removed after the fact of the sale of both millions of consoles and controllers (both first-party and not). Are they sure they want to do that? Now?
This also reminds me very much of Sony's removal of OtherOS in the PS3, and I draw the analogy with what happened to the console's security afterwards very much in mind.
This is a money grab with the polish of a pro-gamer cheat-cleanup.
Why do I say that?
Microsoft can fix most of the 'cheats' that a software controller can implement in software. Auto-fire is trivial to detect, as is a KBM setup where it doesn't belong. Out of the ordinary joystick characteristics/speed/hysteresis/range would make it obvious to them which controllers are aftermarket if they cared to disallow them after only a few minutes of profiling the player.
and the fun point I bring up with regards to this : the determined cheaters will just pin-out a 'qualified authentic' controller to any choice of small prototyping boards and just re-create a 'Cronus-like' device higher up the device chain without detection, and this will continue until Microsoft implements software side detection via some sort of clever profiling scheme.