Does this mean the end of custom accessibility controllers?
Its time to leave M$ completely. Switch to Steam gaming.
Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
211–220 of 371 posts
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#212Some spreadsheet hero who has never played a game in their life is looking for a promotion.
[dead]
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#213Now 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.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#214Nothing 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…
Related: Wiimotes connect and function as bluetooth devices under both Linux and Windows but not Mac OS.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#215This 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 aft…
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.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
So should they just give up on cheating devices?
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…
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.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bef…
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…
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.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
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.