I have a similar device for my PC. It enables me to use my joystick on a game that won’t allow it because I also use a G13 game pad. Using the device makes it possible to fly in a game that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to. The issue is that the device also can abuse aim-assist on PC and others. I’ve tried it out, it’s almost a no-recoil, no bullet deviation, soft aimbot. I can tell most top players are using one because their guns are laser beams compared to everyone else. In a 32 player match at least 2-4 people on each side are using one. All the same scores, all the same guns and play style. I don’t see how they don’t get bored with it. When I used it the thrill of an earned victory was gone. Didn’t like it at all.
i enjoy a good aim assist for a game that is played best with a controller (i’d like one for skywalker saga for example). but having aim assist when playing competitively on pc, it just doesn’t feel earned in a way.
and outright banning any use of these devices makes me want a console even less.
making the game fair for everyone requires either aimbot on controller and none on mouse or no crossplay at all, but i still dont like banning input methods.
another solution would probably be to limit aimbot to casual titles, and whoever really wants to get competitive just has to buy a mouse.
halo music intensifies
A mouse is far cheaper than these controller emulators.
I use similar software on PC solely because it allows independent remapping of Xbox Elite controller paddles. That is, I can map them to key presses directly instead of mapping them to another button on the controller. Previously I had to map another controller button to a key and then remap the paddle to that button.
But it also happens to use a virtual controller driver that can be used with the mouse and also abuse aim assist. And thus was hit with some anti-cheat blocks recently. So now unless I want to uninstall and reinstall that software between certain games I can’t play some at all.
Edit: the software I was using was ReWASD. Turns out both Microsoft’s official app and Steam’s Big Picture Mode controller settings now do about 80-95% respectively of what I need from remapping software. (Microsoft’s implementation of Shift buttons is incomplete and theirs doesn’t work over Bluetooth. The MS app also doesn’t allow you to map different keys contextually – for long presses, double presses, etc)
Good, took them long enough. Hopefully they also retroactively ban those users they’ve detected with it, too.
EAsports players in shambles
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As first noted by the Call of Duty news channel CharlieIntel, the latest update to the PlayStation 5’s system (24.01-08.60.00) software blocks the Cronus from connecting.
The update is “NOT mandatory,” Cronus claims in a notice on its website, so Zen players can hold off and keep playing.
The Cronus Zen, which costs $100 or more and is available on Amazon and at GameStop, among other outlets, does claim to offer accessibility and third-party compatibility options for players.
Activision’s anti-cheat Ricochet tool called out “third-party hardware devices” that “act as a passthrough for controllers” in a blog post about its April 2023 updates.
The same went for Ubisoft and Bungie, none of which called out the Cronus Zen in particular, but were signaling efforts to block it and similar devices, like the XIM and ReaSnow S1.
None of these companies have offered a patch to the behavior of people who want to spend more than $100 and risk lifetime bans to earn undeserved points worth no tradable value.
The original article contains 453 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Is this thing the real reason playing Destiny 2 PVP modes sucks so much?
Aim in shooters needs to matter less.
If this is a mechanical advantage in every fucking game, and it can be faked by trivial tweaks, despite decades of counter-engineering - just solve the problem. Stop making bullets go exactly where the crosshair is.
Oh, does that make shooting people harder? Does it introduce randomness to the game? Tough shit, plan better. Get the drop on people. Get closer. Use your alleged l33t skillz to adapt to the tiniest goddamn mote of uncertainty, versus treating every game from the last twenty-five years like it’s instagib Unreal Tournament plus distractions.
This hyper-focus on one twitchy action, across an entire genre, is like we never moved past “mash the A button as fast as possible.” Yes, that’s a skill check. You can be good at it and teach others to get better at it. There’s even bizarre scenarios in speedrunning where superhuman pace becomes mandatory. But it’s trivial to fake. Autofire has been around since the 80s. The PC Engine made it a feature on the standard controller. Metal Gear Solid had a character call it out by name, saying the game could catch you using it! And yet if MGS4’s flashback reached that far, Otacon would have to explain to the audience what the hell they were talking about, because the entire industry decided it was a pain and moved on.
And look, compare fighting games. The genre blew up, went through several radical changes, enjoyed an indie golden age, and made a huge commercial comeback. Did any of them ask for more than eight joystick directions? Overhead 3D titles like Power Stone, sure, but in terms of inputting special moves - input methods have only become more refined, and so has the typical player. Nobody’s learning what “quarter-circle forward” means from a drawing printed on the arcade bezel. Speedrunning, pushing games to their limits, has tricks that work in the range of a few degrees. But those games didn’t start asking for sixteenth-circles. Or expecting you to manually arc your fireballs. Or tie your fists to the left and right sticks, directly, even though that sounds hilarious. The push has been toward simplifying inputs, because the actual meat of the game is making decisions. The only reason not to have one button for each attack is the value of reading your opponent to predict what they’re doing. Even in a game that’s two characters flat onscreen - the real skill is figuring out what to do next.
“I wanna shoot that guy” is not much of a decision. Some of the backlash against console autoaim was from how little there was, beyond that, in early shooters. Not a one of them let you move like in PC shooters, so the skill ceiling was drastically lower, and the controls for what little you could master were so clunky and ill-fitting that we still haven’t really fixed them. Joysticks and other relative-position controls are just not appropriate for point-to-point inputs. No more than a mouse is appropriate for moving your guy. We tried that, it sucked, we stopped.
But instead of fixing games so that this precision-gap does not matter, we’ve watched the whole industry agonize over who plays who, and spy on their customers, and demand everybody buy first-party controllers.
If you click while your crosshairs are over a guy’s head, you win, the end. Even if you were spinning in circles like an idiot. And all this bullshit does is ask: were you, a human player, really the one spinning like an idiot? Are you sure it wasn’t a robot picking the right millisecond between victory and defeat? No we do not care that guy had you dead-to-rights for five straight seconds, and was unloading a machinegun into your midsection for one of them. His crosshair got real big and a lot of those shots missed because that’s just good design… in exactly one context. You can take seven bullets to various limbs and still get instant flawless accuracy, because you were standing in place and wielding an expensive rifle. Y’know. For realism.
Fixing all of this can be as simple as reducing accuracy every time you move the crosshair.
Holding an angle? You’re golden, just get the timing right. Flick shot? Yeah right, good luck. Install whatever aimbot you want, it won’t do better than situational awareness. Pretend it’s the same as the third bullet out of an automatic, or firing while strafing, if that keeps you from pointing fingers about how hard I must suck, to dare suggest this generational and genre-wide issue should diminish your godlike ability to click on heads.
