4 ms·

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. O

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?

butlike 3y ago
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.
narinxas 3y ago
> 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
- HelloMcFly 3y ago
  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.
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    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.
  - georgeecollins 3y ago
    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.
mathieuh 3y ago
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.
- solardev 3y ago
  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.
  - fishtacos 3y ago
    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.
  - cheeseomlit 3y ago
    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
- katbyte 3y ago
  Real problem here seems to be games doing aim assist in multiplayer
  - snarfy 3y ago
    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.
jerf 3y ago
"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.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
Server6 3y ago
Mouse and keyboard has more or less ruined the console version of PUBG. It's just too big of an advantage.
kipchak 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
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.
- reaperman 3y ago
  With skill-based matchmaking, why does it even matter? Players should average 50% win/loss regardless of who they are playing against.

butlike 3y ago

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.

narinxas 3y ago

> 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

HelloMcFly 3y ago
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.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  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.
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  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.

mathieuh 3y ago

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.

solardev 3y ago
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.
- fishtacos 3y ago
  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.
- cheeseomlit 3y ago
  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
katbyte 3y ago
Real problem here seems to be games doing aim assist in multiplayer
- snarfy 3y ago
  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.

jerf 3y ago

"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.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

Server6 3y ago

Mouse and keyboard has more or less ruined the console version of PUBG. It's just too big of an advantage.

kipchak 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

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.

reaperman 3y ago
With skill-based matchmaking, why does it even matter? Players should average 50% win/loss regardless of who they are playing against.