There is a special kind of hate that I have.
It's toward those things that are actually excellent pieces of equipment on the surface. Something that gives you bliss, but due to something dumb, some little flaw, it's completely unusable. It's 99.99 percent of the way there, but it's that 0.01 percent that kills it.
For me, one of those things is the Xbox controller. I originally wrote this with the Elite Series 2 in mind, but really, this extends back to the original Xbox One controller.
I think the Xbox One/Series controllers are--ergonomically--some of the best controllers ever made as far as my hands go. The button action is nice and tactile. The grips are comfy. The stick layout mirrors that of the GameCube, where the left thumbstick is right where your left thumb naturally rests. (This has been one of my gripes with Sony's controllers for ages now, I have never EVER liked where the thumbsticks are on their controllers. I've grown to mostly tolerate them.)
This isn't surprising, after all--the Xbox 360 controller was one of the best controllers of its time from an ergonomics standpoint. The One/Series controllers merely build upon that.
Where the whole thing utterly falls apart, though, is how the internals are designed. Rather than having the entire controller on a single PCB, the One (and Series) controllers all use a sandwiched design with a front and rear PCB, splitting the controller's functions between the two. For the most part this works, but where it gets weird is the face buttons.
I assume to accommodate the very aggressive curve in the design of the One controller, the B button interfaces with the rear PCB, and is the only face button to do so. The other three face buttons interface with the front PCB, and those are the ones that gave given me trouble.
You see, my main issue with the One controller is that you really have to press down on these buttons to get them to register a consistent press. If you press them slightly off axis, the button may not register properly, even as you've gotten the tactile feedback that communicates yes, you've pressed the button. This may not be an issue if you're a gamer with bigger hands and a tendency to press down hard on these buttons. But if you're someone with a lighter touch and smaller hands, this becomes a problem.
I've noticed this problem getting worse with wear, yet it doesn't seem to be fixed with the usual refurbishment process. I've cleaned up the pads, cleaned up the rubber membrane, but yet the problem persists.
I first noticed this with my Xbox One X's controller back in 2020. The controller was well out of warranty, so I took a leap and bought a Series controller from Target because they were on sale and they had a blue one. Initially? It was much improved!
But a few months later, it started happening again. This time, damn it all, I was going to make Microsoft answer for this. Except that never happened. You know why? Because--at least at the time--Xbox controllers purchased separately from a console only have a warranty of 90 days. You heard that right. (Verge article talks about extending the warranty for the Elite S2, but it's there to confirm that yes, the warranty was at one point at least 90 days.)
I threw the controller in a drawer and never really thought about it again for a good long while. I picked it up to play some Elden Ring mostly because the way it fudges inputs doesn't really affect that game so much, but it's still just disappointing to look at. The Xbox controller is such a damn comfy controller and would be one of my favorites if it was just internally designed better.
But how? Simple. Look at Nintendo and Sony, and look at how the PCB contacts for the buttons are designed, and copy them. The way Nintendo and Sony design their contacts, it's able to detect a button press even if you don't press it perfectly. As long as you press the button down and get that tactile bump, the button has been pressed. It's not intermittent at all.
Microsoft themselves are capable of this, because they've shipped good controllers with good buttons! Yet for some reason, they've lost the plot entirely with the One controllers.
Anyway, this would have ended here, but I'm a glutton for punishment and acquired an Elite Series 2 from a good friend of mine. As you can probably expect, in short order, it began having the very same issues, except much worse. I had to press the buttons dead on or they wouldn't register properly.
But instead of just shrugging, I decided I wanted to try and fix this. No one has found a real fix for these, but there was a promising one of trying to find some way to put a spacer in between the membrane and button to try and increase pressure on the membrane when it pushes down. I tried this, and while it improved the problem, it didn't fix it. It just went from "significantly worse than my Series controller" to "a touch worse than my Series controller".
As insult to injury though, I decided to try dusting off the Elite S2 to give it a run in Helldivers 2, since I could see the paddles being immensely useful. Guess what happened? The damned sticks began to drift.
I simply do not have words for the level of rage I felt. Not at the friend who gave me this controller, but at Microsoft, who seems hell bent on designing great controllers with a tragic flaw that they seemingly just completely refuse to fix. People have been talking about these issues for years. Years! And nothing has changed. The controllers still have the same damn flaw. And considering the Elite Series 2 retails for $180, this is downright criminal.
If you go looking on reddit for people with problematic controllers, they're everywhere. You'd think these things have damn near the failure rate of the Xbox 360. And Microsoft's solution is to just replace them with something that is just as defective.
Guess they never understood the definition of insanity.