Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"
nme.com
nme.com
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.
Of course this makes sense, it's just something that slips my mind every once in a while.
I can also bake my own bread. But I'm tired of all the tweaking and debugging at the end of the day.
There definitely still exist games that have issues running on Linux, but they are few and far between now.
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).
Someone should probably tell the Visual Studio teams.
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.*
but ever since the XBox One it's just been a
bloated, slow PC with a bad interface front for Windows.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
If you're cheating, you're not winning; the software or hardware is. What is the point? What do people get from this?
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.
Also writing cheat software is a lot of fun. Great engineering problems.
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.
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.
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.
The wiggle video was catastrophic.
[..]
"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.
Bans revoke products paid for, but marking suspects forces them to explain to their peers the situation and lets them make the decision.
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.
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?
for the same reasons giant corps do anything: Profit!
they think, and likely will, sell more "official" (i.e. premium price) controllers
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'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.
Can you see how Microsoft, maker of the xbox, might not share your opinion?
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.
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.
KBM is a huge boost.
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.
"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
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.)
Your pay to win argument would hold more water if the superior input method wasn't also available for less money.
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.
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.
I'm not familiar with hardware business models though, so what do you think it is about instead? Reducing hardware cheating?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
How is this done? Input rate variability or something?
Ya all want to play with cheats enabled on your Fuxsor Ceatboss 6000's. Go head.
In my view this is clearly a move intended to solidify brand trust.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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".
Law & Order is neither profit making nor competition destroying.
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".
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.
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.
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.
My sweet summer child
(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).
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.
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.
Companies are trying to battle this with anti-cheats, heuristics, shadowbanning, etc but it is still noticeable at above-average MMR.
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.
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.
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.
Or can we acknowledge this for what it actually is, please.
These vapid comments about freedom And abstract notions of ownership always strike me as naively and comically libertarian
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.
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!
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.
It’s just poor planning punishing xbox owners creating a ton of e waste
"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.
Most 3rd party controllers that are being sold online are still compatible afaict.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't do that, please. Sell drugs or something, less damaging to society.
(FWIW I don’t think it’s worse than [some] drugs and I doubt GP does either)
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.
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.”
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
I booted up the computer to take a break from the assholes, not to get shot by them.
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.
The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
It just means you have to pay Microsoft for the ports (which is available to anyone) rather than a 3rd party.
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.
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.
> 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.
Maybe these are more relevant to most consumers than abstract complaints on Hackernews about “freedom.”
Have you considered that?
It seems like the parent is complaining about people taking business' explanations at face value when there's a likely different motive, not "freedom".
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.
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.
Sony buying them would be much larger problem.
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.
That's trivially verifiable.
For end user it makes no different whether it's a side effect or not.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"Once upon a time, we enjoyed the right of first sale[0]..."
If you want to valorize a digital games retailers, I would suggest GOG is a better candidate.
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.
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.
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.
[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
OT: Microsoft should be banned by decree from showing naked error codes to people, I've been fighting them for decades now
“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.
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.
I get better error messages from the firmware of obscure embedded chips than from Microsoft Windows
According to the article, they didn't. The pop up has the error code and a descriptive error message. And no "Oops :(".
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.
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.
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?
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…
And find what information? Try turning it off and on again, update & reboot, then clean the registry?
Much more often I see : Oops, something went wrong
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
AKA "Partying like it's 1999"
Microsoft doesn't document all of their errors, annoyingly, but at least the HRESULT structure gives some kind of indication of the source.
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.
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.
I believe Jetbrains Compose adds some restrictions on try/catch but even then there are different ways you can communicate failure.
Can you elaborate?
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.
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.
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.
Basically impossible. Some players will always try to spoof it, either for an advantage or the challenge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23799149/gamesir-g7-se-xb...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Fix+Xbox+One+Wireless+Co...
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."
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?
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.
Xbox has invested extensively in their 1P solution though: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...
It's modular and programmable
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.
...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.
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.
Making gaming competitive kills one more way to have fun (competitive gaming -> cheats -> anti cheat measures -> less fun for the casual).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can honestly say, at least with Microsoft they will ask nicely. Nintendo on the other hand will brick your devices out right.
Get out of M$ products.
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.
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
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.