Mouse Acceleration? - Page 5

On June 19 2010 07:50 calvinL wrote:


cooller, rapha, cypher, zero4, fox, all of them being extremely high level quake players, use accel

On June 19 2010 07:50 calvinL wrote:


cooller, rapha, cypher, zero4, fox, all of them being extremely high level quake players, use accel

On June 19 2010 07:54 kineSiS- wrote:
NVM. I lie. It took me Weekend + Sunday which is 4 Days. And I think I didn't use acceleration. But its necessary sometimes for quick turn arounds. O_O And yes back then I did not use a Razer s o its possible I didn't use acceleration.

On June 19 2010 07:52 Wr3k wrote:


Go ahead and let me know how many top CSS players or SC progamers use accel.

On June 19 2010 04:55 Wr3k wrote:With mouse accel if you move quick to the left several times and then need to move back to center slowly your mouse will end up on the left end of your pad while the cursor is center justified.

Additionally with mouse accel if you need to simply quickly move to a specific point on the screen it will begin to decrease cursor movement speed exponentially with respect to your hands deceleration, increasing the time it takes you to click on specific points by a significant amount. Do you really want to be slower?

Yes, at first it will take getting used to, you will feel awkward for a week or two but once you get accustomed to the new settings your accuracy and speed will increase significantly and you will rid yourself of that horrid need to pick up your mouse all the time after doing large sweeping motions.

With mouse accel enabled the ratio of X to Y changes depending on how fast you move over X distance with your mouse (I.e. your sensitivity is variable depending on your movement speed). This prevents your body from getting a sense of where specific points are on the screen without seeing the cursor. Someone skilled with mouse accel disabled could probably look at the screen a couple times and then macro a base with their eyes closed since points on the mousepad correlate to points on the screen. With accel enabled no such relationship takes place.

On June 19 2010 08:16 kzn wrote:


Well, yes. You've defined yourself right to your conclusion. The whole point of mouse accel is that if you move quickly to the left several times you dont have to move an equivalent distance to get back to 'center'.

Theoretically, with someone who is perfectly trained to use mouse accel, you can make any series of movements and get both your cursor and your mouse centered in one movement.*

*Although this would only really be true with a mouse accel that linearly modified your sensitivity with response to speed, rather than a stepwise accel function that is more common these days.



This is only true if your mouse speed operates parabolically. With or without mouse accel, if you go from a given speed to a stop instantly, your cursor will stop instantly. Technically, such an act is impossible, but the acceleration players are capable of placing on a mouse is such that the deceleration time could be brought so low as to make the sensitivity modulation during that time irrelevant.



This is only true because mouse acceleration significantly increases the complexity of the calculations involved in predicting the cursor movement generated by a given mouse movement. If it were possible to spend sufficient time as to master a given mouse acceleration function, it would be very slightly superior to playing without.


With mouse accel disabled you have a linear relationship. If you move the mouse X distance the cursor will move Y pixels regardless of how quickly you cover X distance. Your sensitivity is simply the ratio of X to Y.



Bolded is false, unless by "no such relationship" you merely mean that the relationship with mouse accel on is nonlinear.

There is a relationship, and it is theoretically possible to master it as we master linear relationships, but the effort involved is exponentially higher.


I do not make these arguments to claim that mouse acceleration is a good idea. In almost all cases, it is not - but in theory mouse acceleration is an advantage.

On June 19 2010 09:03 Wr3k wrote:1) Someone who is perfectly trained at returning the cursor to the center will have to artificially slow some strokes down to return to center effectively.

In a gaming situation moving your hand at specific speeds is a major hindrance.

Considering many games including SC require alot of quick actions that must be executed as fast as possible, you would really have to be superhuman to not eventually lose your point of origin.

2) Mouse speed does operate parabolically in the hands of a human. The human hand cannot instantly achieve velocity nor instantly stop and is therefore more or less parabolic when a quick smooth stroke is made.

On June 19 2010 09:26 kzn wrote:


Yes, but playing without accel on represents a permanent artificial slowing of movements at every point in time where your mouse speed is limited by your own ability to move it accurately.



Only if you aren't used to it, and this is only necessary if your main goal is to avoid lifting your hands. This is impossible to do perfectly in practice whether your mouse accel is on or off, so its really a moot point.



Nobody I know of thinks about their "point of origin" when playing SC, or anything else. At any point where a mouse action is required in SC (or something else), there are only three things that matter:

1. Where is my cursor?
2. Where does it need to be?
3. Can I make that movement without lifting the mouse?

The only question in there that can have a "bad" answer is 3, and mouse acceleration makes the totality of possible movements within a given space (namely, your mousepad) larger, and thus unequivocally makes the answer to 3 "good" more often.



It most definitely does not. We take our mice from rest to nearly maximum velocity within less than a second, and perform the reverse at the same speed.

On June 19 2010 09:38 Wr3k wrote:2) If you truly have mouse acceleration disabled & your mouse is 100% accurate (X:Y ratio of mouse movement to cursor movement remains constant) you will never have to pick up your mouse. (The mousepad and screen points of origin remain in sync).

On June 19 2010 09:49 kzn wrote:


This is only true if your sensitivity is such that your mousepad, scaled by DPI and sensitivity, represents more real estate than your screen displays.

This is not a given.

On June 19 2010 06:55 hoborg wrote:


This is why I'm trying to switch to no accel - it hurts my hand if I have to keep recentering my mouse!

But I'm still having the problem where there is accel in SC2 even though there is not on my desktop.

Can anyone please help me out be performing a little test?: Open up a custom map in SC2 and move your mouse on the mousepad in tiny rapid circles, keeping the mouse in the same spot. Does your cursor stay in the same spot or does it drift off like on my computer? I'm curious as to if SC2 has acceleration permanently on or if I've got some setting incorrect on my computer.

On June 19 2010 07:52 Wr3k wrote:


Go ahead and let me know how many top CSS players or SC progamers use accel.