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Comment by PebblesHD | Hacker News Reader

>> or using a M&K for Halo where headshots are instant kills on Swat/Snipes game modes

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?

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> By this do you mean a mouse and keyboard? And you consider this to be cheating?

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!

It's very funny to me, as in the 90s when console FPSes first started coming out there were always debates on PC vs Console in school, and whether mouse and keyboard was better than joypad, I guess now everyone knows the answer

I don’t think anyone ever thought joypad was better for first person shooter accuracy. Especially in the 90s when console FPSs barely involved aiming.

They really did. The amount of PlayStation people who talk about how they would "smoke" PC players if cross play ever happens.

30 seconds of searching. https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/sc8blk/contr...

Ah right. Should have posted my reply here. "Cocky console gamers".

MWII ramped up the aim assist so much that MnK is the inferior option, regardless of platform.

Oh yeah, when a pro gamer uses a controller it's notable (Can you believe X uses a controller too?!). And some game modes which were just clearly designed for a controller (one shot to the head kills, no reticle bloom, no need to zoom) become completely broken when you have both.

Was that ever in question? Perhaps to cocky console players who never used a mouse, but not players that started off on PC with mouse & keyboard...

I grew up playing Quake back in the mid 90s with M&K, so when the PS2 and XBOX came out and multiplayer shooters became really big (Halo, CoD, Medal of Honor...), I had a lot of experience playing these kind of games, but most people in my school had a console. It wasn't even cocky players, every one of them thought that mouse & keyboard was worse.

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" :).

The problem is really that this wasn't how it worked initially. To make a meaningful dent on cheating controllers it won't be possible for most controllers to be updated to be compliant as they don't have the hardware required to implement the correct protocols, and any simple software workarounds for specific controllers to continue working will just be exploited by those designing cheating controllers.

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.

> By this do you mean a mouse and keyboard? And you consider this to be cheating?

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)

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