A Comeback for Mouse Acceleration

Gamers Are Finding That Mouse Acceleration Can Improve Their Gaming Performance, Even Though It’s Not the Most Popular Setting.

First-person shooters have a stigma around mouse acceleration. While varying mouse sensitivity does have a learning curve, mouse acceleration shouldn’t get the same disdain. Eventually, mouse acceleration might be the norm for large-map shooters.

Mouse Acceleration: What Is It?

When you move your mouse fast or slow, your mouse’s sensitivity increases or decreases accordingly. If you’re making tiny movements, it sluggishes the cursor movement, and if you’re swiping fast, it speeds it up. You’re left with inconsistent and unpredictable sensitivity as a result. In shooter games, it’s challenging to tell how much you should move your mouse because you don’t know how fast your mouse is moving.

Acceleration isn’t the same for every mouse. Windows’ “Enhance Pointer Precision” is the infamous acceleration implementation that every basic aim improvement guide tells you to turn off. Many professional players use Quake 3 because it offers highly customizable acceleration, rather than hindering their performance.

What’s up With Mouse Acceleration?

Since Counter-Strike has dominated the FPS game market, mouse acceleration has declined. In Counter-Strike 1.6, almost every serious player uses CPLmousefix.rar to remove mouse acceleration on Windows XP. This CPLmouseFix.rar file was created by a Cyberathlete Pro League esports participant.

Mouse acceleration now has a rather poor reputation due to Counter-Strike’s popularity and its community’s strong opposition to Windows’ terrible implementation. There are plenty of tactical FPS games without mouse acceleration settings out there, but ID Software has continued to add mouse acceleration to this franchise.

A Lost Art Is Being Rediscovered: Mouse Acceleration for Gaming.

There’s only one way you can adjust your mouse, so it’s not very versatile. It’s difficult to get the best of both worlds when balancing “low” and “high”. It is difficult to switch between large targets while staying precise.

Taking cues from Quake players who are skilled at the game and use mouse acceleration, aiming communities are rediscovering mouse acceleration. Among FPS games, Quake has the most professional players using mouse acceleration. There are lots of times where you have to flick down for a rocket jump and then precisely snipe an enemy right after.

In games like Counter-Strike, turning 180 degrees and flicking towards flying targets are rarely needed, so mouse acceleration isn’t needed (but it can still be useful). Other games don’t follow this rule since enemies fly everywhere, come from behind, and come from multiple angles at once, so it’s a pretty similar experience to Quake Games.

With mouse acceleration, you get the advantages of both worlds instead of just one middle-ground that’s neither fast enough for precision nor slow enough for large turns. Using mouse acceleration keeps your sensitivity low when you want to be precise, but it increases it for large turns when you’re moving fast. In any case, it will add to the challenge of finding the right settings.

Find out what FPS gaming mice have to offer for accurate aim. A high-quality mouse can make or break your aim.

Mouse Acceleration Is Worth a Try!

We’re rediscovering one of the hottest aiming secrets: mouse acceleration. If more pro players start seeing the potential of mouse acceleration in other games, it might be the next big thing.

Practice makes perfect aim, though. Whether you use mouse acceleration or not, practice is the key.

Author: Khate Dizon