Modding Controllers – Seeking a Competitive Edge

You always try to get an advantage over your opponents in a competition, whether it’s board games, sports, or video games. It might be deciding on a strategy, practicing your skills or game knowledge, or buying a new headset to communicate and have better situational awareness in a game. The more comfortable you are with your setup, the better you’ll perform. Especially in competitive FPS games you really want to have any advantage you can get. This could mean anything from hand positioning to having stick extenders on your controller’s analog sticks to having four extra buttons on the back of your controller.

I never liked the original sticks on a PS4 controller. It feels like they’re slippery and don’t know if they want to be concave or convex. That’s why a few years ago I decided to swap those out for Xbox One sticks, which are not only concave and more comfortable, but also slightly longer than the PS4 sticks. The process of changing the sticks requires you to open the controller, which can be daunting at first, but it’s quite easy once you get the gist of it, there’s some great tutorials on YouTube. Just have to be careful and not break anything.

 

 

Whereas playing with keyboard and mouse you have all the buttons you need and then some, on controller your movement in FPS games relies on the two analog sticks on your controller. If you want to crouch or jump, for example, you’d have to either change your button layout, play with a different hand positioning, like claw, where you press the face buttons with your index finger, or just take your thumb off the analog stick and sacrifice your ability to aim for the duration of pressing the button. I know it sounds a bit over the top, but in a game where the difference between getting a kill and getting killed is a few tenths of a second, it does make a difference. Having buttons on the back of your controller lets you have your thumbs on the sticks at all times while having the back buttons act as jump, crouch etc., which has revolutionized playing competitive shooters with a controller.

 

 

There are companies, like Scuf and Battle Beaver, that make modded controllers, letting you choose and customize a controller that fits your needs. Different stick shapes, lengths, paddles or buttons on the back, grips, color, everything’s customizable. However, they don’t have auto-fire or other kinds of macros that would be considered cheating. These controllers are really expensive compared to normal stock controllers, starting at around 100€ with every customization raising the price. The price of fully customized controllers might go as high as 200€. I did my own controller modding the cheap way: buying Xbox One sticks from Amazon for pocket change and a back button mod kit for around 30€. Only drawback is that there’s a chance of damaging your controller if you’re not careful. That being said, the mod kit had very detailed instructions on how to install the back buttons, so I had no problem with the installation.

Having back buttons on my controller has definitely made playing FPS games like Call of Duty more comfortable, although the buttons still take some getting used to. Having the ability to jump and aim at the same time gives you a huge edge over your competition and has helped me win more gunfights and all-around perform better. Besides fast-paced FPS games I really haven’t found a use for the back buttons, I mean you could still use them, but when you don’t have to have your right thumb on the thumbstick at all times you might as well just use the normal face buttons.

In the end, I don’t know how much the more comfortable analog sticks and back buttons actually help me and how much of it is just mental. I know those things have affected my playstyle allowing it to be more aggressive as my movement is more agile. Without them I would probably still do just fine as I would adjust my playstyle to be a bit more passive.

As far as recommending controller modding to others: if you think you can do it, go for it. There are detailed tutorials on YouTube about opening a controller and putting it back together. I think you can’t really break anything unless you use brute force and really try. In the end, having a more personalized controller feels nice, since it’s specifically custom made for me, by me. It’s not just some controller anyone can grab off the store shelf. It’s comfortable, it has features that I want. It’s just the way I like it.

 

Photos taken by the author.

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