Why do you never hear about stick drift in the PS2?

The Xbox One has been beset by constant problems with stick drift, both with official controllers and 3rd party. Meanwhile the PS2 has been around for ages but you almost never hear about stick drift in the PS2. Why is that?

A deeper discussion of stick drift, from an Xbox One perspective:

[TheXeroLink]

This is why some of us older gamers used to rotate the sticks around a few times when we were playing and things felt wrong, and then all would be as it should be

[nfffan]

it's interesting to note that this is technically a documented feature, as in the instructions it mentions rotating the joysticks once after plugging them into the console.

[GrandSupremeDaddyo]

I remember having a controller with drift issues and it always seemed odd to me that such a problem was so easily fixed by just fully rotating the stick a few times.

[Xoilen]

For those wondering why they stopped making quality controllers, it’s because they want controllers to be a $70 a year subscription instead of a one time purchase

[Dark]

This was also one of the reasons for some of those loading screen minigames. Not only was it a way to entertain people as they waited but many were used to get the player to move around the joysticks in case of drift

[josephchristianruiz]

I just repaired my cousin's PS5 Dual Sense 5 controller. The drifting issue was onto the right analog stick where he's experiencing a horizontal drift. Upon checking his potentiometer, there were tiny hairline scratches onto the graphite sensor, and there were exposed traces causing the drift towards to the left. So it could be that the quality of the powdered graphite sensor inside the potentiometer wears off and gets scratched when dust gets inside.

I was able to replace it and it worked like it's brand new but the sheer hassle was the contact film for the buttons, I gotta clean it multiple times before every front facing buttons could work again.

Alot of companies design our products through timed obsolescence, they don't really want our things to last so that we could end up buying another replacement for it. I just hope guilikit could come up with a conversion kit for the DS5 analog stick so it's magnetized rather than the traditional graphite potentiometers where in it wears off and causes the drift again after 1-2 years.

[AlamoOriginal]

Im new to this kind of information, but i could vividly tell that the only problems i often had more than i can remember with PS2 joysticks is not stick drift but how fast it is the rubber worn out and become sticky

[ashton]

Many of the PS2 OGs either were told or found out for themselves that this would often be a direct result of rage quitting and tossing the controller. So every time you did and then noticed the joysticks were a bit off, you knew exactly why and spun them around a few times to recalibrate it.

[vincentthest]

It has always been so weird to me that I've never even conceived the idea of stick drift throughout the thousands of hours of ps2 games I used to play when I was younger. But could happen after only dozens of hours playing Nintendo switch, it is a sad regression.

[siberx]

This kind of automatic calibration has been standard on controllers/joysticks for decades (since before the PS2) and is also present on various other controllers such as Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Potentiometers always have some manufacturing variability so you need a calibration mechanism no matter what; very early controllers for 8/16 bit consoles and PCs might have had no mechanism or a manual one (same with early PC gameport type joysticks with DOS and early Windows), but anywhere you have a controller interpreting the signals it will do this kind of calibration.

Actual noticeable stick drift happens because the resistance of the potentiometer can wear out in a _nonlinear_ way, so that the centerpoint is no longer exactly halfway between the two positive and negative extremes of the stick's possible positions (it will, electrically, be slightly to one side and thus won't match the physical position when centered). No amount of automatic endpoint calibration can resolve this, although a more comprehensive manual calibration step where you explicitly set the center position can help a bit more. Some systems do in fact set the center-point on boot up or controller connect (by assuming the sticks are at the center point when the controller is first powered on), but I'm not sure offhand which consoles and devices do this.

The nonlinearity and bias at the center for a worn stick can be mitigated to a degree by having a "dead-zone" around the zero position; your experience of the PS2 "not" having drift likely more relates to how the control curves and deadzones are tuned on either the controller, console, or the games you're playing and nothing to do with the analog sticks themselves (which basically all operate on the same wear-prone principle) and more to do with the particulars of the software environment and stack you're running and testing with. In other words, some part of the PS2 controller, console, or games you're playing are using very large deadzones to mask any potential drift which eats up some of your stick range and is especially noticeable in games where you need to make small, slow adjustments to the stick's position near its center.

Some joysticks (such as the Nintendo Switch Joycons) are even more prone to this problem owing to the geometry and small size of their potentiometer wiper surfaces, but all potentiometer-based joysticks are affected to one degree or another and all get worse as the controller gets worn. The only controllers that are actually immune to this are those using non-contact sensors such as hall effects (magnetic) to measure stick position, which do not have any electrical surfaces that wear over time at all. The sticks can still get mechanically loose, but center should always be center no matter how old the controller is.

Unfortunately, such hall effect sticks are quite rate. They were (as far as I recall), used on the Dreamcast controllers as well as some versions of the early PS3 Sixaxis (not Dualshock) controllers, but are not otherwise used in any mainstream first-party console controllers. There are now a couple third-party manufacturers making hall effect gamepads (GuliKit's Kingkong 2 and 8BitDo's new Ultimate Bluetooth controllers) so if they're compatible with your preferred console, you do now have at least some options for drift-free controller gaming.

[AZREDFERN]

I never had stick drift up until the 360. I bought a Razer controller, and it started drifting after a few months, so I went back to the stock controller. I switched to PC after that. But it is crazy to see they don’t use the most basic self zeroing tech anymore. Something basic every stock controller up until now had.

[gulmulmiah]

This is a classic example of when things were built to last. Nowadays electronics are made to last a few years, so when it breaks of you go to but the new model. The greed of capitalism.

[BionicTenshi]

The only time i had it was because the joystick was physically broken, replaced the potentiometers and as brand new.
Neat feature we had then, this just proves that newer tech isn't always better.

[MotoringBoxTV]

PS2 controllers also had a button combination you could press which would reset the analogue stick calibration. I don't recall the exact combination, but it was possible to do it whilst holding the sticks off centre to automate games. EG. hit the reset combination whilst holding the left stick a little bit to the right, and the right stick fully down... then let the sticks return to centres... made GT3 think I was slightly turning left and applying full throttle constantly. I completed some of the oval endurance races using this trick with an overpowered car riding the walls 😁

[yaboishrek]

I think part of it is also that older games used bigger deadzones for there games (the amount of distance you had to move your joystick in any direction before the game would recognize an input). With games advancing more and more and especially in FPS games where deadzones have decreased so much to allow for more precise aiming, it’s only natural that the minimal stick drift that was probably present in old controls but never noticed due to the big deadzones games used to have, is now being noticed because of the way games are being developed currently

[Deh_]

This is actually cool af. Grew up on ps2. Went to 360, the Xbox one and now series 2. But I always wondered how my childhood controllers hold up better than a new one

[contramachina]

amazing. ps2 controllers also had those futuristic pressure sensitive buttons. what an amazing controller. what an amazing console

[kiiro]

Gamecube is the same, but the calibration is done by software on boot. The manual tells you to keep the sticks centered on boot, otherwise you end up with a wrong center point and you have to unplug and replug the controller to recenter it correctly.

[Ruftinator]

That's actually pretty sick! I also really like how the buttons on a Dualshock 2 or high quality 3rd party PS2 controller are pressure sensitive. Big shame that we've got some really feature rich controllers nowadays yet they can't do the same things that controllers that are way older already did

[mmmmmthai]

It basically auto calibrates itself to correct for bad readings. It most likely has a tolerance level at the edges where there is the max input but it has a range, so that it can be adjusted.