The End Of XIM? How Activision, Ubisoft And Others Are Cracking Down On Cheaters

First-person shooters may have originated on the PC, but for many years they've been most-played on game consoles. PC gamers typically use their mouse and keyboard to play the games, while console gamers are expected to use the standard controller the system ships with. Playing FPS games on a gamepad is sub-optimal, as the analog stick is a relative input device, and modern games ship with many technologies to assist players using pads.

Some console games have official support for mouse and keyboard input. Usually, that includes separate queues for pad players and keyboard players, or some other option to allow folks twiddling sticks to be set apart from the ones wrangling a mouse. However, certain unscrupulous fellows use specialized devices to jump into what are supposed to be controller-only games using a mouse and keyboard.

Your author purchased a similar device many years ago, the SplitFish FragFX Shark 360. It included a "nunchuck" with the left-hand buttons and an analog stick for movement, as well as a wireless mouse with Xbox buttons on the side. It was a great device for playing Resident Evil 5 and 6 as well as Lost Planet 2, but I never even considered taking it into online play. It's not hard to imagine how easy it would have been to pull off headshots in Halo SWAT.


Unsurprisingly, Ubisoft and Activision refer to XIM and Cronus devices as "cheat devices", and both companies have been taking steps to deal with them. In Rainbow Six Siege, if you trip Ubisoft's new MouseTrap detection software (released yesterday), you might see the warning above which promises continually-increased input lag while playing with an "unsupported device" attached to your system.
Activision is taking a more direct approach in Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 and Modern Warfare 2. If the company's home-grown Ricochet anti-cheat software detects the use of such a device, it will issue a warning to the player using the game's notification system. If that warning isn't heeded, the player could be banned from online play.

Meanwhile, over in Bungie-land, the developer of Destiny 2 is also looking into the use of these devices. The company told The Verge back in February that it was "currently investigating" third-party input devices, but as of yet it doesn't seem to have taken any action.