Let me start by saying that if you want to truly practice aiming, then you should play a game like Quake Live which demands that you aim in a variety of different ways to take advantage of both the different weaponry and different ways you might encounter enemies. Few games can provide you with the same amount of variety in aiming, and I have found that it’s an effective way of strengthening my aim in other games. It has both taught me good habits and helped to reinforce them, and is probably the only reason I feel at all comfortable about writing this article. It has taught me the importance of setting my sensitivity to a value that works for my play style and that gaming mice are indeed a little better for gaming than regular mice. With this article I am attempting to write out all of what I’ve learned about aiming from playing Quake, but I will mention other games as well.
Setting yourself up for success
The heading might give you visions of shopping on your favorite website for a shiny new mouse, keyboard, and mouse pad, then configuring it all to your liking, but that’s not what I mean by setting yourself up. I mean the decisions you make in a game. I remember being new to the FPS genre, seeing an enemy and not even having the dexterity to aim anywhere near where they were. Hopefully you’re a little more familiar with the mouse than that, but regardless, the tips I’m about to give should help reduce the need for excellent dexterity.
Setting yourself up for success requires that you have some grasp of when and where you might encounter an enemy. This requires that you are already familiar with the game and know the layouts of the maps as well as common routes enemies might take. Say for example, you’re playing Counter-Strike on Dust 2 and you’ve spawned on the terrorist side. If you’re in view of the double doors you can position your crosshair where you may expect an enemy to pop out and when they do it’s simply down to timing. Of course any experienced counter-terrorist player could probably kill you just as quickly, but that’s beside the point. You can use this idea in nearly every situation in the game. As you walk, look towards where the enemy might pop out. If you’re feeling comfortable with this, then try to keep your crosshair in line with the height of a potential enemy’s head (assuming the game has locational damage). This seems like an obvious thing, but it’s easy to forget.
This technique is taken to the extreme in competitive Quake Live duel. For example, a lot of the better players will know a map so well that when they’re on a point of a map where there are multiple spots where the enemy could show up, they know that given the situation that the enemy is in (weapons available to them, health and armor, what items are available on the map, etc.), they can fairly accurately predict the direction the enemy might be coming from. After killing their opponent, they can fire off a few rockets at one of the spawn points and hope to deal some more damage to their opponent right away.
There’s one practical (but limited) trick I can describe to help you aim without requiring much dexterity, and that’s to make small corrections by strafing left and right. Now, keep in mind that aiming in this way will often be less effective than if you were simply able to aim well with the mouse alone (if you were pro at aiming). On the other hand, you may find strafing to be a more reliable way of making corrections. In practice you’ll end up mixing in strafing and moving the mouse to achieve a result that works best for you.
Another thing you should keep in mind for games where moving forces you to be inaccurate, is that you often drift for a moment after strafing, meaning that you don’t come to a complete stop right away. You can often tap the opposite movement key to come to a stop quickly. It’s a small optimization, but every bit helps.
I could describe situation after situation but just keep in mind when you’re playing that if you’re needing to make huge adjustments to where you’re looking after encountering an enemy, that you might have been able to set yourself up better beforehand. The point is that you should play smart rather than relying on your dexterity with the mouse to save you.
Hardware and Sensitivity
I used to be really skeptical of gaming mice, thinking that, so long as you had a comfortable mouse you were fine. There is some truth to that, but I now know that there is some truth to the fact that gaming mice work. Their sensors are optimized to allow for faster movements, and there is often lower latency for the information to reach your game. Still though, sticking with what you’re comfortable with is pretty important. Also, don’t get tricked by the insanely high DPI ratings of some mice. There’s a reason a lot of the Quake pros still play with their mice at 400 DPI. If you want to learn more about gaming mice, this is one place you can start.
When aiming, I think the most important thing is repeatability and reliability. When you move your mouse x distance and expect it to move you a certain amount in the game you need to be able to reliably move that mouse x distance again and again. One way to make this easier to to lower the in game sensitivity. Think about it for a minute: if you’re moving the mouse 1 cm, and then the next time you try to move it the same way, it’s being moved 1.1 cm, then you have an error of about 10%. Now if you make it so you need to move 3 cm for the same action, and then you repeat that action and move it 3.1 cm, you now have just a 3.3% error and you’ll be so much closer to your target. The increased distance could feel awkward at first, but given time your body will adjust. With mice we have the luxury of being able to move them as much and as quickly as possible. Take advantage of it!
In terms of evaluating the hardware you have, one thing that recently come up for me was that I found that I was using a mouse which had its sensor in a strange position. I found that when I swept the mouse left or right, that I got unwanted vertical movement as well. Pretty annoying. You can also try moving your mouse extremely quickly in one direction. Poorer mice might freak out and won’t be able keep up.
Note: At least in the Quake community, sensitivity is often compared by quoting a number in cm / 360°, or the distance required to make your crosshair move 360° around the screen.
Locational damage
In 2004, fps_doug and Pure Pwnage coined the phrase “boom, headshot!” This is because locational damage was starting to become a huge new concept in FPS games. Hopefully you realize this, but in a lot of games shooting the head deals more damage. Go for it if you can, but reliability is pretty important as well. You’re no good to your team if you died because you spent all your time trying to line up the perfect headshot.