Controller drifting to the right

Technical Support
1

Hello!

As of recent (within the past month or so), I have been noticing a right drift on my left control stick. The thing is, it’s only in Overwatch. When I’m on the Xbox Home or any other game or app, it doesn’t drift, but as soon as I open Overwatch and scroll to the right, it drifts and just keeps scrolling until I touch it again. I decided to buy a brand new controller because it was bothering me so much, but to no avail. My brand new one right out of the box drifts to the right. I never had this issue with my old controller before a month ago. I also noticed by looking closely at my left control stick that if I push it to the left, it goes about 1/4 of the way to actually process anything. If I push it to the right, the slightest movement to the right, it processes the movement but then just keeps going, hence the drift. I’ve read other articles saying that the dead zone is barely anything so it’s more sensitive, which is fair, but in the Xbox Home it goes about 3/4 of the way before processing anything. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me as to why it’s so sensitive, especially since it’s a brand new controller, updated and everything too. I hope this issue can be fixed because this didn’t happen when I first downloaded the game and it’s very annoying to me. I’ve tried doing a ton of research, but nothing seems to have the answer. I also don’t want to open my controller because I’m not that much of a tech wiz and don’t want to make it worse because I noticed some people who tried fixing their controller by opening it and it made it worse. I also don’t know if this is just a bug issue within the game or my xbox itself, or it could be the controller, but it doesn’t seem to be since the drift doesn’t happen anywhere else. Please let me know if anyone else is having this issue or if anyone has any solutions! Thank you so much!

P.S. It looks like the left control stick is centered and not leaning right or anything. It very possibly could be leaning oh so very slightly to the right, but that wouldn’t make sense since it’s brand new.

2

Have you tried resetting any controller sensitivity settings back to default in Options > Control?

3

The menus on the Xbox version (and assumedly other console versions but I only know Xbox for sure) have almost no dead zones [1] for their joystick controls. I would highly recommend navigating all menus with the D-Pad. You could also spring for an Xbox Elite controller with it’s own programmable dead zones (among other features) but $200 is a lot of cake for a menu annoyance. If I was king of console OW dev I’d probably set the dead zone to about 30% on menus.

TL;DR: Known issue since launch on console, probably never going to be fixed.

[1]: Dead zone is the term for having a small area of a joy stick that doesn’t have any effect. The smaller the dead zone the less you need to move the control stick before your character/cursor moves. A large dead zone means you’ll need to tip the control stick all the way to the edge to see any movement.

4

Are you talking about resetting it in the game, or somewhere in Xbox settings? I have tried resetting my controller sensitivity settings in the game itself, but I’m not sure if Iam able to within Xbox settings

5

I was recommending within the game, but I believe there are some settings in Xbox system settings to check as well. I don’t have specific details.

6

Yeah, I knew there were basically no dead zones lol. I did a ton of research to try to figure it out and someone suggested changing the assist aim or something like that, but that didn’t help either. It’s just weird because this hasn’t been happening up until a month or two ago, so I wasn’t sure if it was a bug from the new update or something. It is annoying to have to use the D-Pad though lol. I just want it to be like how it used to be where I can just use the control stick. But yeah as much as I’d like an Elite Controller I don’t have the money :joy:

7

im gonna uninstall this game if my controller is gonna keep on drifting regardless if I use d pad or not whats the point of playing