Sometimes developers add "features" into games that no one really wants. Some of them are unobtrusive or turn out to be something that people would have wanted if they had thought of it. On the other hand, sometimes they're terrible and bad and make me want to burn my computer. Let me tell you about my most recently reopened pet peeve. Upon booting the new Homefront because of the free weekend and clicking through the menus and trying to get everything optimized to actually run on my toaster, I noticed that my mouse was behaving oddly. No, not the ghost clicking (that's, uh, something else and weird and my only answer so far is interference so... anyway), it felt like I was struggling to line up shots. My soft movement seemed to go too far or too short and I had to drag my mouse (on high sensitivity settings) to turn quickly enough. Sure enough, there was mouse acceleration/smoothing at play. I've hated fighting with my own mouse since at least the dark days of the Lost Planet 2 PC port, which while great fun suffered from a control scheme only a console peasant could love (that is, using a controller was better than the KB+M controls), complete with dreadful mouse acceleration. Fortunately, I thought the old devil was dead and I would have to find something else to be crotchety about, like those darn kids. I was wrong.

Now, many of my other pet peeves, like regenerating health or various UI/graphics elements, can function to the benefit of a game; certain games or genres need certain things, like the colored outlines in Overwatch which would bug me in ARMA. However, I cannot for the life of me come up with a reason why anyone would intentionally ask for mouse acceleration/smoothing. I'm sure there are some people who don't notice or care either way, but for someone like me who uses their computer (and, by extension, mouse) an unholy amount of the time, you're basically just screwing with my input. It's like if someone tied a bag of rocks to your legs and was like "I fixed your legs being inconsistent, so that's a job well done, right?" You may have fixed some complaints about jitters or twitching or sensitivity, but you messed it up for everyone who didn't have a problem.

Agree? Cool, leave a comment. Not sure what any of this means? Fine, leave a comment. Disagree? Uh... okay.

8 years ago

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Does mouse acceleration or smoothing bother you?

View Results
Yes
No
What even is mouse acceleration?
Insert meme garbage answer here.

Agree ò.ò

8 years ago
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I always turn off smoothing when it's an option in-game, or in the config. Same goes for motion blur.

8 years ago
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in some game motion blur is great but in other, well just wtf

8 years ago
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Motion blur is another; some games it's like "you moved your mouse, good luck seeing anything" and others it's more tolerable. I like motion blur (generally) in racing games, because it makes things feel faster, but otherwise I think it's an annoyance.

8 years ago
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8 years ago
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Mouse acceleration will make it so that mouse movement won't be 1:1. In games what it effectively means is that if you move the mouse a certain distance fast, you'll make a larger movement in game than if you were to move your mouse a certain distance slowly.

8 years ago
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8 years ago
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8 years ago
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You tend to sacrifice a great deal of precision with mouse acceleration on, for anything but very small movement, making it very bad for shooters and other action games.

And it's not that you move the mouse 1cm on your pad you move it 1 cm on screen, it gets "scaled" (based on your mouse sensitivity). But with mouse acceleration off, your movement is always consistent.

8 years ago
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Acceleration is something else. As one Steam user, Obfuscated, describes it well, "With mouse acceleration, the movement is based on speed. Meaning, if you move the mouse 1 inch, slowly, it'll move one distance. If you move it still 1 inch, but fast, it'll move a lot farther." So basically faster speeds and slower speeds of movement change the scale. For someone like me that's very jarring. It's not the same as scaling; DPI on your mouse and various other settings (sensitivity mainly) change that. I have very high sensitivity/DPI usually, so acceleration really screws me over because it's hard for me to do really small moves with how high my sensitivity is. I know I could turn it down, but I'm that guy who sets the sensitivity to max with a controller because it's too sluggish and I like being able to move quickly with little space because my desk is an eldritch horror of clutter.

8 years ago
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I've come to associate mouse acceleration with bad ports more than anything else. And yes, it's a pain. Very slight mouse acceleration is something I can live with, but heavy mouse acceleration will make a game unplayable.

8 years ago
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I'm sure there are games with acceleration that I haven't even noticed have acceleration. That's fine. It's heavy acceleration, especially without the option to turn it off, is just a pain.

8 years ago
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8 years ago*
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For me it depends on the game and the implementation. More exploratory / visual-atmospheric / narrative-based games in first-person perspective I believe benefit from smoothing and acceleration, and can help to achieve a more cinematic experience. The implementation still needs to be done in a way that doesn't make the game feel laggy and unresponsive, however.

Games with a lot of action that require precision and split-second timing at the very least need to have the option to turn it off if desired.

8 years ago
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Good point; a walking sim doesn't typically need twitch shooting accuracy, so it's less annoying there. That said, I mostly notice it in shooters, where the precise aiming is lost because of too much acceleration.

8 years ago
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If I can't have raw input for mouse then the game goes straight to trash. Any kind of blur effect and low FoV deserve the same fate.

8 years ago
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8 years ago*
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Regenerating health/MP can be a good thing, like in most hack-and-slashes, but obviously in many shooters it's insanely fast; I usually like some, so I don't have to heal/medkit/checkpoint every time I get scratched, but at the same time many games (like Dark Souls) would be ruined by it.

Mouse acceleration, on the other hand, is trash.

8 years ago
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Acceleration and smoothing don't deserve being options at all, the way my mouse work should be only dictated by its hardware.
I didn't buy a gaming mouse with high DPI just to use it at the lowest settings, in order to avoid getting my game fucked up by those unnecessary options.
Furthermore, considering that such options are usually found on console ports... #pcmasterrace

8 years ago
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Everytime, I'm experiencing all sorts of weird mouse lag or delays with the mouse acceleration/smoothing turned on. Always working better when it's turned off, heh.
Kinda the opposite of what that feature is supposed to do O.o

8 years ago
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it completly ruins some games for me, Atari's gosthbusters has one of the worst one i ever seen and cant be removed, i tried everything :c

8 years ago
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