About the awful quality of the Joycons

[kenjab]

RaptorChrist said:
I had never heard this referred to as "drift" until the recent debacle with the Joy cons. I'm assuming this means to have loose joysticks? Does the joystick being loose cause it to give false, "wobbly" input at it's neutral position? Does it cause it's ability to fully extend in any given direction to diminish? I'm curious about this because I have always felt that the Switch joy sticks were subpar. They are very small, with a small range of motion, so it never felt as satisfying to use as any other modern controller.

To clarify, the drift has nothing to do with the physical sticks themselves.  Those still "feel" the same.  The difference is in how the console registers the movements of the sticks.  The best way to see it is in the joystick calibration screen.  The calibration screen shows where the system senses that the stick is pointing, via a cursor on a square.  So when you push the stick up, on a proper working joy-con, the cursor goes to the top of the square and when you let go of the stick, the cursor immediately goes back to the middle.  If you have a drifting joy-con, the cursor slowly moves back to the middle ("drifts") after letting go of the stick, or it never goes back to the middle at all.  So when you're playing a game, the character you're controlling on screen will move even when you're not touching the analog stick.