Xbox's new policy – say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
Why is this sort of behaviour allowed?
Yet another move by MS contrary to the ‘see we arent the same company as we used to be’ vibe they’ve tried to cultivate.
If you believe their claims about that, I have a bridge to sell you...
The fact of the matter is if you’re allowed to plug in any peripheral into a game console, you can and will get prolific cheaters in a multiplayer environment.
Maybe only bring in this check if your console is not in offline mode? And please make it cheap to actually get certified.
Regular accessories that don’t alter gameplay can and should always be an option for a user. If a certification process has to happen to use the accessory online, so be it, but I hope this doesn’t hurt the market too much.
Edit: I’m aware that Xim currently uses controller authentication to work and therefore this specific change may not affect it. I wasn’t claiming that this would get rid of Xim, but arguing that a huge reason for this change is to begin the process of cracking down on rampant cheating in online multiplayer games (shooters in particular).
Or only if you're playing a multiplayer game?
That way a game can check that API whenever cheating matters for that particular game - which may mean different things: playing with strangers, playing certain 'competitive' modes, getting achievements or high scores, etc.
XIM and similar tools are grey market - they do not care for compliance, nor do they mind breaking the terms of service to work. Thats the entire fucking point. They are workarounds for people wanting to either cheat or who want to hack their device for greater freedom of input.
These people will.be unhindered by this change, because XIM has an excellent history of spoofing a controllers input to the console. The people who will really miss out are the younger or poorer people who will have cheaper 3rd party controllers or unofficial adapters. Less freedom for the user. More money for corpos.
Sometimes I wonder if this is hackernews or corponews
The "money play" is a cut on digital sales, and balancing subscription fees with the cost of services rendered. I can't imagine how little they make on accessories/certification to be the reason behind this move. I think this is the start of set of changes that culminates in hardware verification for the (leaked) revision of the console.
> because XIM has an excellent history of spoofing a controllers input to the console
That it does now, but Microsoft can upload firmware to their devices and have full control of the software it runs on.
Call of Duty is one of their biggest games, and I think being a platform that nullfies Xim and Cronus will convince people to play those games on that platform, especially with Crossplay off and the games being free on Game Pass. This makes more sense as a "money maker" to me (i.e. fuelling Game Pass subs).
[1] https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...
I'd wholly bought into that narrative. Over the past year, I've become so opposed to Microsoft that I'm likely to make my next laptop purchase a MacBook, even though I'm a longtime PC gamer. I just refuse to use Microsoft products anymore. Apple might have their own issues, but at least they're up front about who they are.
For people downvoting, you've never played a fighting game against someone with a modded controller to do frame-perfect combos with a single button press.
The older K&M convertors would require a wired controller to be connected to them so they could pass the auth check.
All it will do is send it back to those days and remove choice for gamers who want to use unofficial controllers for legit reasons such as some of the fighting sticks on the market.
How pissed would we be if MS forced keyboard manufacturers went though validation before they would work in Windows and tried to claim its for the users protection against hardware keyloggers?
EDITED: to give some additional points
Or teach people to solder the microcontroller themselves.
Yes, there will always people cheating no matter what. But as long as you reduce their numbers substantially, it is worth it.
That's exactly what people did back in the day, First-sale doctrine allows for this (Heck some modders I knew back in the day simply brought them in bulk at wholesale). Modders either brought controllers retail, modded them and put a mark up on them, or people would send in their own controller to be modded.
But those selling wired K&M convertors just decided they would pass though the challenge/response commands to a offical wired controller the user would have to purchase themselves (saves the manufacturer the need to purchase them).
> Or teach people to solder the microcontroller themselves.
There were plenty of sites with open source rapid fire microcontroller firmware and install guides for those who didn't want to pay others to mod their controller for them. It was simply VCC, GND, each of the trigger inputs, a connection to the sync button, and a connection to one of the LEDs to give feedback to the user which mode the controller was in. Heck it was on the skill level needed to mod a PS1 and those services were ten a penny. Heck it got to the point where drop in PCBs where being created where castellations on the PCB were in just the right spot to solder.
> The older K&M convertors would require a wired controller to be connected to them so they could pass the auth check.
This seems like it'll barely be a speed bump. A bunch of folks will have to get new cheating gear, which will be a temporary reprieve, but most probably will do just that.
It seems as of now, MS are only targeting unofficial controllers that circumvent the existing auth check (which some of the full custom built cheat controllers as well as other unofficial 3rd party controllers.
So (imo) it will have very little impact on cheat controllers at all and will mainly affect those who just tried to save a few bucks.
By this do you mean a mouse and keyboard? And you consider this to be cheating?
For the others, I feel like banning all third party peripherals is just going to disadvantage kids like I was who always had hand-me-down madcatz controllers because we couldn’t spring 3x the price for the official sony ones.
If this is such an issue, perhaps the game makers could balance it out a-la mario cart and detect likely cheaters and handicap them until the game balances out?
Yep! The way they tried to get around this was by allowing you to only play with people using the same type of controller, but you can mod your keyboard to look like a controller and get in regardless. It is a HUGE advantage for those game modes. I played pretty competitive Halo 3 for several years, including a couple tournaments, and on a controller I get completely steamrolled by a decent player with an M&K. There are other games with other examples but the ability to point and click vs using your thumb to make similar micro-movements on a thumbstick is just night and day. Apex Legends had similar issues where particular movements aren't even possible on a keyboard! If you have to register with a controller I think that could solve a lot of these issues for gamers.
I do understand what you're saying about madcatz though, and appreciate that controllers are expensive. What I'd really like is to introduce this limit to official controllers and then slowly allow third-party companies to offer official alternatives. Or, even better, only have this restriction for online gaming. I don't care what people do offline!
30 seconds of searching. https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/sc8blk/contr...
I never got to show them they were wrong, me and a few friends offered to run a LAN tournament but they never took up the challenge... Now it looks like they post on forums complaining about M&K "cheaters" :).
If M$ had done this initially then the "madcatz controllers" of this generation would probably have been compliant already, and maybe would cost a few cents more to manufacture as a result.
I'm on your side, cheating is a huge issue for multiplayer games today and something needs to be done about it, but it sucks that it might cause some less fortunate people to be caught in the crossfire.
It's common for games to be tuned specficially for controller, and using mouse and keyboard 'gets around' the shortcomings of the less precise controller but still take advantage of the affordances games give controller (like increased aim assist or magnetism)
Not including the fact if you control the hardware you know things like max trigger presses per second, so if you detect an order of magnitude more than you assume possible you'd catch hackers there too.
Edit: I'm not saying I have all the answers here, but modded controllers and M&Ks made to look like controllers have been a bane in my online gaming life for years so I'm keen for any steps moving towards fair (competitive) gaming.
Third-party accessory manufacturers are the real target here. While I appreciate Microsoft's desire to crack down on cheating and make sure players will only use high quality peripherals rather than AliExpress specials, enforcing cryptographic attestation to lock competitors out is not the right way to accomplish it.
[1] https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap...
Yep! And let's not forget eSports is booming and these online tournaments have real cash prizes nowadays. There are incentives to cheat and reducing third-party hardware might help reduce that.
You cannot mod a real-life machine gun to shoot 10x as fast by changing the trigger; the whole design would resist the attempt. You cannot make a real-life human body make a 180° turn in 10 ms and then stand still; the laws of mechanics won't allow that.
If you want a guaranteed balanced game, the game code should observe these limitations, no matter what controller is used. What is possible in the game world should not depend on that.
As long as games allow for inputs that give an unfair advantage, people will find ways to use that unfair advantage. They will take apart a certified controller, connect the buttons to devices that produce fast repetition, connect the thumb joysticks to devices that allow faster movement, etc. There is no way to plug this hole, like the analog hole in sound recording. The only way is a correct model.
Some combination of heuristics (target acquisition time, moving target tracking, etc) would probably be the only way. But what if a player is genuinely exceptional - should they be punished for that?
This is obviously possible since they're able to ban unofficial peripherals
It needlessly creates e-waste of these products, and likely disproportionately impacts those less well off who's only option would be to pick cheaper, unlicensed accessories.
Given the rising competition from Valve (they have solved the hard problem of running Windows games on Linux), and Sony (the Xbox exclusive selection this generation is a joke compared to the Playstation), and Microsoft's own bone-headed decisions, I'm really bearish about the long term prospects of the Xbox brand. They'll probably rebrand as a cloud gaming service soon enough.
The status quo these days is encrypted binaries that kill performance and kernel level spy modules. No thanks.
Whatever Valve does works for Counter-Strike and Dota 2, with 1.2 million online players this very instant. A bit arrogant to say their system is a joke. It is evidently good enough.
One can only convince me of their true values when they choose them when it's inconvenient to do so.
Xbox sells very poorly, and it doesn't look like they're trying to improve the situation
For those who don't know, it's near impossible to get licensed if you're not a large company. Nintendo is currently the only console now that doesn't do officially licensed accessory checks.
I had spent about a month trying to add PlayStation support only to find out that they have authentication checks every 8 minutes leading to always having to unplug and plug your controller back in.
I don't know... I had just been really excited to make a solid keyboard adapter that would work for all major consoles and this is extra bad news on top.
It also allows you to effectively nullify recoil through custom scripts uploaded to it. It’s everywhere in multiplayer PvP games on console.
Valve seems to have done a pretty good job dealing with this in their games. Surely there exist more sophisticated anti-cheat mechanisms than "just ban third-party accessories"?
This seems like the kind of thing that is repeated so much because some people want to believe it, and most of the time I bet it's people who haven't played a Valve multiplayer game ever.
I will say, I think the biggest problem contributing to high levels of cheating is the move away from dedicated servers. I actually find that VAC is historically very effective at catching cheaters, but with a necessary lag between detection and bans -- and that lag used to be handled by server admins.
There's no way to prevent that from happening with software changes.
If people want to plug random usb controllers, this doesn't stop them. It just means that Microsoft gets to charge you for the adaptor rather than a 3rd party.
You do lose a lot of features that way though, such as a reliable global ranking, since it would be easy to create a room with only your friends and allow eachother to rank up quickly.
It's also a huge coordination issue if you want to arrange a game of 50-100 players who aren't all total strangers to eachother.
But the alternative seems to be in stripping the ancient practice of gaming of its social functions and turning it into a faceless slot machine where the only goal is to win enough times to increase a mostly meaningless number on a screen.
Currently, most third-party accessories correctly use their own USB VID:PID pair and are recognised as controllers by virtue of correctly implementing the USB HID protocols. By deciding to block anything that isn't approved by Microsoft, they'll necessarily have to whitelist a set of VID:PID pairs for devices that have been approved, and so unapproved third-party accessories will just fake their VID:PID pairs and present as another device.
Once this happens, there's no way of blacklisting the clones without impacting the genuine devices, unless they further have undocumented identification methods e.g. incorrectly responding to standard messages (e.g. the PS3 controller reported an incorrect number of axes, but would return data correctly when queried) or adding non-standard packet types.
I know because I had to try implementing it for my project https://keyboard.gg
Sometimes you have to wonder about all the energy required to make the materials and components to make these products just for a software update to render them all useless...complete waste.
Why not allow a longer lead time? Or deny any new made devices going forwards whilst older ones are EOL? I feel there are many better solutions than "sorry pls throw away thx".
I'd really like to see studies of the human impact and cost of what a single software update can do - my understanding is it all ends up in landfill to rot and hardly anything is recycled.
Turn off crossplay and you don't find games with reasonable latency.
Most affected will be those with "hitbox" products that are mostly self-made or hobbyist-focused devices at least, which they'll be the most angry and vocal about it decrying the affront.
It'll just cause a sea of current Chinese crap-gadgets to hit the landfills, then Chinese manufacturers will clone whatever security chip Microsoft mandates, and start shipping them again by the millions.
More companies should go full-Apple with their software and their hardware.
Maybe then we'll finally get something done from regulators.
If you really want this protection then you can just lock it down yourself.