Director’s Take: Addressing Unapproved Peripherals on Consoles

news.blizzard.com:

Hey everyone! Senior game producer Adam Massey and lead gameplay engineer Daniel Razza here, subbing in for Aaron this week. We’re going to share some updates on fair play for console players in Overwatch 2 regarding the issue of unapproved peripherals.

Our goal is for Overwatch 2 to be a great experience no matter what platform you play on. The game feels best when matches are close and competitive, and everyone plays on a level playing field. To help achieve this, we’ve tailored the game experience on console by adding console-specific features such as aim assist, which helps bridge the difference in precision of aim between a mouse and a controller.

Unfortunately, some players on console have been using devices that allow them to use a mouse and keyboard while tricking the console into thinking that the inputs are coming from a controller. While some use different peripherals for accessibility purposes, some players take advantage of aim assist while using peripherals that were never intended to benefit from this feature. For our purposes, we call these devices “unapproved peripherals.”

Today, we’re going to look at how we detect the use of unapproved peripherals and the actions we’re going to take to level the playing field for all players.

Figuring out which players are using unapproved peripherals has been a challenge for us to overcome. These devices are designed in such a way that consoles are unaware of them, and often have anti-detection features designed to make them even more elusive to catch. We have been carefully studying these devices to ensure we have high confidence in our ability to detect who is using them.

While we won’t go into specific detail on exactly how we detect these devices, we can say that our detection has already been in place for multiple seasons, passively gathering data for us to analyze.  Now that we have gathered the data we need, we can finally talk about how we plan to deal with the use of these unapproved peripherals.

Based on our