XBOX The Verge: Xbox players are fed up with forced crossplay against PC gamers

[CerebralTiger]

Xbox players are fed up with forced crossplay against PC gamers

Xbox players are struggling to avoid cheaters.

www.theverge.com

Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters.

Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don't have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. "Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?" asked one Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched.
"Forced crossplay is a scam by Microsoft," reads another post in Microsoft's Halo Waypoint forums. "Forced crossplay is a mistake," says another Redditor, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Warzone are both suffering from an influx of cheating, largely because they're free-to-play titles so it's easy for hackers to create a new account following a ban. While there's an option to disable crossplay in Warzone, if you try to load into a playlist on Xbox it will ask you to re-enable it. Whereas on PlayStation you can simply dismiss the prompt and continue to the playlist with crossplay still disabled.

Microsoft's decision to force crossplay in its own Halo Infinite title runs against previous commitments from the company's head of Xbox. "I'll never force somebody in our games whose playing with a controller or a mouse and keyboard to play against somebody with a different control scheme," said Xbox chief Phil Spencer in an interview with Gamespot in 2016. "Mouse and keyboard rotation speed is faster than controller. We know that, you'll lose."

Nothing has changed in the classic arguments between mouse and keyboard players and controllers. Xbox players simply want the option to be able to opt out of crossplay, and not to have to be forced to play against PC players. A lot of PC players would also like to avoid controller aim assist in games like Warzone and Halo Infinite.

Gotta say, I feel for my Xbox brethren. Thankfully, things aren't this way on PlayStation.

#CrossplayBandKaro