For what it's worth, I own a Cronus and it's not nearly as much of an advantage as they sell it as. I bought it just to use as a fightstick adapter and it's kind of mediocre at that too.
I bought it so I could use my PS3 fightsticks in Soul Calibur 6. The Brook adapter works(worked, past tense soon?) way better and is way more cost effective.
The Cronus might make you a little better at a game if you're already really good. If you're bad at the game like me, you're still going to be bad at it.
The poster claims to somehow know how much of an advantage it is. Wonder how that knowledge was acquired? I am sure that too was perfect innocent and just “that one time”. Then why all the hand-wringing about these cheats getting blocked?
I don't think that's true at all!
> The poster claims to somehow know how much of an advantage it is. Wonder how that knowledge was acquired? I am sure that too was perfectly innocent and just “that one time”.
They didn't even say they tested it online.
And you're making a claim that's impossible to disprove. Oh if they say they cheat regularly, they cheat regularly, and if they say they tried it out of curiosity, they're lying and they cheat regularly.
> Then why all the hand-wringing about these cheats getting blocked?
Because it's going to get blocked in all situations. Single player? Blocked. Fighting games? Blocked. Games with friends? Blocked.
They're not blocking cheats, they're blocking the controller itself. (If the block works on this model.)
It can be pretty scummy in games that have strong aim-assist, however to achieve true scumbaggery you need to download custom anti-recoil scripts designed for specific games/guns. They can work really well in certain games.
"Preserving console experience" really feels like corporatespeak to say "cheaters" without saying the devices in question (because then it raises visibility to those devices).
I think the "doing this for money" is the people who are currently not gaming due to rampant cheating in games like R6S, Apex, COD, etc.
Most 3rd party controllers that are being sold online are still compatible afaict.
Instead the big one has been Brooks, who make very popular boards for custom fighting game controllers
https://www.brookaccessory.com/support/xbox-Issue-update.php
It would be pretty trivial to hook up a Pi Pico through the jacks and USB ports to be able to make a KBM adapter like that. There just hasn't been a point making such a device when the xim/cronus works fine.
It might not even need the jacks, according to https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib... the USB-A ports accept HID gamepads.
The creators of the xim will want to make a new product to sell if their old one no longer works. It might even be possible with a software update.
The difference is Microsoft will now get more money out of the cheating products than before, not sure that sounds the right incentive but that's what is going to happen.
Those things cannot be fixed with software.
I have sold a half-dozen Cronus Zen adapters in person via Craigslist/OfferUp.
Every single buyer claimed that it was for a friend, brother, etc.
Don't do that, please. Sell drugs or something, less damaging to society.
(FWIW I don’t think it’s worse than [some] drugs and I doubt GP does either)
Consider how cheating was handled back before AAA games turned into videogame equivalent of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies: if you were found cheating, you were booted off the server, period. There was no matchmaking bullshit, the games weren't nudging or limiting you to play on the ladder, against global ranking. Instead, you had local and international servers, public and private; you had neighbourhood servers, and servers run by groups of friends, and themed servers, etc. - in other words, servers were communities. As diverse and rich as human communities can be. And they handled cheating in ways communities do it.
On smaller / local servers, people wouldn't cheat because the community extended past the game to other on-line places, and/or to meatspace. Everyone was friends with each other, and being a cheating asshole is a fast way to lose your friends. Scaling up, you had all the mechanisms one also saw on discussion boards: some servers had owner or moderators ban anyone they didn't like; others voted. It was nicely self-regulating: servers weren't sticky, so being banned as false positive (or out of spite) didn't hurt. People didn't like power-tripping server operators? They'd switch over to a new server, run by someone saner.
Were there still cheaters? Yes. Assholes and griefers happened. But without a single global ranking to compete for, cheating was mostly self-defeating: there was no reward, no incentive, and you'd be just ruining the fun for yourself.
Yes, cheating is kind of a proxy reason why I don't enjoy multiplayer games. But the real reason is this: modern games feel like suddenly all the little soccer leagues were required to follow all the FIFA rules, were allowed only to play registered games, only to use pitches and equipment and balls and clothes that are certifiably up to spec, regularly audited - all because it might happen that our ad-hoc team of Sunday players would one day be visited by a World Cup team, and it would suck if we had an unfair advantage.
It's just ruining the game for everyone, for the sake of a small group of people running a racket.
Another thing that has changed in FPS land is game modes making cheaters WAY more frustrating. It used to be that you get into a lobby, see someone cheating, and could leave and find a new lobby right away. Now with the extremely popular battle royale modes, you don’t encounter the cheater until 20 minutes into a match — via dying in a game mode where dying is “expensive.”
Pro gaming and casual gaming don't mix well. Cheating is a self-solving (or at least self-regulating) problem if you let people freely associate and host games. Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking. It still can be solved in context of pro-gaming, but it requires some invasive means.
The right approach would be to treat casual and pro gaming as separate experiences. Casual players play casually without invasive anti-cheating measures; pro players sign up for the league, which comes with extra restrictions. This is exactly how it used to work in the past, and exactly how any non-computer competition works: casuals and pro players may be playing the same game, but their goals are different, and so the rules and experience is different too.
Unfortunately, as it always happened, the industry decided to do the exact opposite of the right thing, and is now forcing all players to play by the competitive pro-gaming rules. With the game designed around pro gaming, causal players no longer have means to host and moderate their own servers in a social fashion, thus losing the natural, non-invasive method of combating cheaters. The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer. As a result, casual players (which tend to be the majority) become exposed to competitive cheaters, which obviously makes the game extremely frustrating for the former. And to mitigate that, companies are employing invasive anti-cheating methods - methods that make sense when dealing with clubs and official matches, but are plain abusive and dystopian when employed remotely at scale.
Again, the right way to solve cheating is to keep casual gaming and pro gaming entirely separate - the same way playing soccer with your friends is an entirely separate activity from playing it professionally in a local team. Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?
(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)
> Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking
This is untrue, cheating was until recently a huge problem for team fortress 2 which hasn't been competitive for years.
See also the huge cheating problems in the CoD games from the Xbox 360 era, which was before they were competitive outside of small, grassroots tournaments.
> The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer
Players overwhelmingly do not prefer server browsing. Games have consolidated on the matchmaking model because any game without it is dead on arrival.
The biggest example of a game with a foot still in both worlds is Counterstrike, where the overwhelming use of custom servers is for external matchmaking services with stricter anti cheat than Valves VAC.
> Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.
Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games. Check out a recent financial report from ActiBlizzard and see how much money they make from competitive games like Overwatch and CoD compared to their mobile sub company, King.
Pro circuits and pro game modes are advertising expenses, not revenue or profit centers. Arguably the biggest pro game in the world, Counterstrike, makes the vast ,majority of it's money selling lootboxes and taking a cut on skin trades.
This is actually very, very true. Most esports departments are not incredibly profitable (I actually worked for one of the biggest esports gaming companies for a long time and it was a constant source of friction how much money was spent on esports versus the return on it).
At the end of the day, cheating is a dopamine hit: killing the whole lobby in 2-seconds by holding down a button makes people feel good and you can't fight against that without some pretty drastic measures.
I booted up the computer to take a break from the assholes, not to get shot by them.
If you buy a game and receive only a client without a server, you only bought half a game. Expect to rent the other half.
The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.
they obviously care about money and selling periphials is money... but so is selling consoles.
If they can't control the cheaters in some fashion (losing battle and all that) then they will sell less consoles because why would people pay for that? (unless you're a cheater paying for it but that's besides the point).
The problem you have is that you think there's only one answer to this and the answers is the want to stop the cheaters AND they want money because cheaters affect both.
As it's an arms race, controller tweaks will adjust to be at the borderline of what the system detects, and on the other hand the 0.001% of the most dedicated players that actually beat that borderline will get pushined with a mere "no human can be that good" response, which is the worse outcome when the game's whole point _is_ to be that good.
At that point I don't give a flying fig what excuse they are using. Neither should the law when it comes to wanton destruction of property. Property rights are a thing!
These vapid comments about freedom And abstract notions of ownership always strike me as naively and comically libertarian
These vapid comments about convenience over freedom and short-sighted notions of corporate control over our devices always strike me as naively and comically authoritarian.
Yep, but that would result in no games being commercially viable, and so no games existing.
So there needs to be a compromise in order for those games to exist.
It you want to play a mod friendly game, then… go play one? Lots exist.
Or invent a way to allow anyone to modify and run their game clients in any way they want to preserve abstract notions of freedom whilst also preventing them from modifying and running their game clients in a way that hurts the experience of others.
Good luck!
This isn't really enough these days. There's proof-of-concept videos on YouTube of people developing ML-Image Recognition aimbots that move a physical mouse.
You spin it as "cartel" but why can't it be spun as Law & Order?
Or do you think that cheaters should have unrestricted control and the ability to destroy the economy of any given game? You think people will play on platforms that aren't working to keep things even?
This is the same argument for P2W games where you can just pay to be the best. A few people will argue for that as they drop thousands to get those "rare" loot boxes and the rest will say "it's no fun to play a game against someone who's paying to be better than they really are".
(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).
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.
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.
Companies are trying to battle this with anti-cheats, heuristics, shadowbanning, etc but it is still noticeable at above-average MMR.
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.
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 $100 do you think the rate of cheating will be lower, higher, or the same?
The goal isn't to eliminate all cheating, that's impossible. The goal is to reduce the rate of cheating.
And even if "eventually controls will be circumvented" is true... making the barrier to entry harder gives them time to make back their investment (yes, the company deserves that). IE: DRM that eventually gets broken but not for a year can be the difference in the copies of a game sold being enough to make it a success or not.
The DRM also gives companies a path to suing companies that break the DRM. IE: Nintendo or Apple suing companies that jailbreak their stuff. Or you can be someone like Sony who has a PS5 that hasn't been jailbroken yet - making their platforms more resistant to cheating and thus more attractive to players who want a level playing field.
"won't solve anything anyways" Depends on your definition of "solve". If it takes 5+ years to fully jailbreak a PS5? Then that's successful. So even "broken" jailbreaks can be seen as successful in the long term.
There are negatives to these moves... but it's plain ignorance at best and dishonesty at worse to say there aren't justifiable reasons for companies like MS to take these steps.
Law & Order is neither profit making nor competition destroying.
you want to cut the Law and Order angle then you need to also cut the "cartel" angle.
Fact is that if XBox doesn't take steps then their platform becomes less valuable meaning less people want to play there.
"it's only about money" is a short sighted and overly simplistic answer just like "M$ is a cartel".
There are things we in society don't allow corporations to do in their pursuit of profit. We codify those things in law. This thing they want to do is one of them.
And saying it's illegal is a bit too strong as well. Maybe in the EU but even then? The EU just made a decade of things obsolete when forcing Apple to switch to USB-C so saying "companies can't do that because illegal" obviously isn't true.
And what is illegal in EU is legal in America or vice versa... or brazil... or China... so saying "society doesn't allow" is too simplistic on that level as well.
In America it's illegal to break DRM. Companies like Apple and Nintendo do stuff so that you can't run custom code or use unauthorized attachments/parts/etc. if you break the DRM you can get sued as a company that provides that service.
And you haven't address the fact that MS, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, etc all have to have stable trustworthy platforms for gaming - that goes beyond "they only want money"- sure, they want money but part of getting that is having platforms people want to use. That they trust. That makes cheating harder and provides a level playing field.
Take a step back and realize that "greedy" companies aren't as simplistic as you want to make them out to be and even if they are "greedy"? They do have valid reasons to do shit like this.
Microsoft is an organisation focused on maximisation of shareholder value. Literally anything they do contrary to that gets them sued for securities fraud. Any employee who morally objects to any action taken by the company can suck it up, resign or commit sabotage for which they will be fired if found out.
Microsoft management have to be ready to defend any and every action as being at the very least not detrimental to shareholder value in court.
My sweet summer child
Or can we acknowledge this for what it actually is, please.
It’s just poor planning punishing xbox owners creating a ton of e waste
Sony has something like this setup with screen recording, where some parts of games (cutscenes in some stuff) can't get recorded. It's annoying, but at least it's not the whole game, and the feature exists.
In theory, that would have less of a PR risk / impact, too -- if they provide it as a configuration option, they can shift the blame onto third-party devs. who change a value in some XML file somewhere.
(Not that I particularly care about Microsoft's PR, just thought it to be interesting commentary.)
It just means you have to pay Microsoft for the ports (which is available to anyone) rather than a 3rd party.
For example one of these "Mods" for Cronus state that they are:
a dynamic, fully-automated Anti-Recoil system that transforms your in-game character into a laser-guided juggernaut we've affectionately dubbed as [BEAM]
Battling cheaters in video games is a never-ending chase, but I appreciate that they are attempting something.
I wish that a gaming company could figure out a less invasive way to detect these cheaters.