
First (to be exhaustive), the spring of the stick's rudder broke or disengaged a couple of weeks ago, so the stick didn't twist back in central position anymore. That was annoying, but it didn't make it unusable once I set a large dead zone to that axis.
But yesterday, all the buttons on the right throttle stopped working. At first, it only happened at full throttle and they weren't even detected by the Saitek software. I have a lot of important things, on those buttons: boost, FSD, reversing the throttle, silent running, thrusters and panel controls on the HATS, panel tabs on the pinky spin... So at first I could still use them when I pulled the throttle back a bit, but after a while even that stopped working and the buttons were only detected when the throttle was at 0.
To make sure it's not a software problem, I tried it on my Mac with a program called Joystick Show that detects and displays all the buttons and axis, and the problem reproduced there too. So definitely a hardware issue.
I filed a ticket on MadCatz site asking for a replacement, but for now I'm without a controller. So I'm virtually without E:D too, because I hate flying with the mouse and keyboard.
That fucking sucks and demonstrates how shit the build quality of this product is! But now that everything's built in China with the cheapest components and workers, what else can we expect?
