Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wernercd | Hacker News Reader

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To be fair, I think the vast majority of this is about online. Keeping a clean and hack free experience isn't just about selling proprietary controllers - it's also bout blocking cheating and keeping things sane.

(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).

You’re literally talking about creating a walled garden around what is currently an open ecosystem in which devices already purchased by people - including people with limited financial resources - will no longer work. All under the justification of ‘it solves cheating’. PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.

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.

> PC games have cheaters since forever, they’ve worked around that problem despite having less operating system and hardware control.

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.

Please quantify "rampant". How likely is the average player to encounter cheaters?

Once you get into certain skill levels in matchmaking it is very common to run into cheaters, depending on the game. If you think about above average lobbies, the number of cheaters will go up until you get to another MMR threshold just due to the fact that the cheats enable people to move up MMR. The average low MMR players will see less, and the top of MMR will see less, but the middle-upper bracket cheating is very, very bad.

Companies are trying to battle this with anti-cheats, heuristics, shadowbanning, etc but it is still noticeable at above-average MMR.

Regularly when doing anything that touches online. And even stuff that doesn't touch "online", these days, normally involves trophies that you can cheat your way to getting.

Who cares about trophies enough to ban grey market controllers?

That's the thing, its not JUST trophies.

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.

PC gaming is loaded with tons of cheaters despite rootkit level anticheat systems. Having locked down hardware ecosystems reduces the rate of cheating, I've had far fewer times of running into cheaters on console games than on PC games.

How is blocking controllers anywhere close to rootkits? How is blocking controllers going to prevent hardware modifications to official controllers?

I'm just speaking to the idea of PC gaming has worked around cheaters, as if its a solved problem. PC gaming has such a massive cheating problem games are resorting to rootkit-like anticheat systems and yet there's still tons of cheaters out there. It is precisely because there's so much freedom out of the box on a PC that cheating flourishes there.

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.

"already purchased by people" Better talk to the EU that just forced Apple to negate a decade of iAccessories by forcing a switch to USB-C (which I support)

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.

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