Back when I used to play on the switch every day for several hours, I never had any issue at all with drifting. Several years later as I played less often, it started happening. Then when I didn’t play for nearly a year, once I tried it again all of my joycons were unusable.
In the early years if was really confusing to me why everybody complained about it so much and I never had any issue, but it eventually caught up with me too. I just don’t know if my anecdote is a coincidence or if it really is more likely to drift when you don’t use it as much.
I only use mine to go on Tetris 99 binges every couple months and I’ve had a few joycons go bad
Had mine since 2019 and my main joycons I usually use and I played the shit out of it until I got my steam deck. All 3 sets I have, still have zero stick drift.
Like I played it A LOT so maybe my version of a lot is not the same as those with stick drift?
How did you store them? Did they have any risk of getting more dust inside?
I had them plugged on the switch itself that was sitting on its dock, plus other joycons in a drawer.
If they were out in the open it was simply just dust collecting on them.
I think there’s something to the sitting idle angle. My launch joycons started getting drift 4-5 years ago. I did the usual clean out, then cut some plastic to put more pressure on the stick back plate and they were surprisingly fine. Two years ago I picked up an OLED, and my primary switch got very little handheld use after that.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I grabbed my launch switch to upgrade the firmware and run some tests. The sticks were basically unusable. I have a couple sets of Hall effect sticks laying around, I guess now is as good a time as any to put them to use.
Seeing a teardown of the Joycon and how similar to the Switch 1 the sticks look was the main reason I gave up on purchasing one for now. ☹️
Maybe the small changes they made or quality improvements in materials will be enough, but the drift problem was such a major pain in the OG Switch that I don’t want to risk dealing with that again.
