Many games benefit from playing with a low sensitivity. Lowering sens is a common method of improving lower skilled players aim. This article is not to debate or pitch that idea to you. Fact: Some players want low sens. Fortnite building cockblocks this to a degree. Buckle up because this requires a massive preface due to how gaming in general treats mouse acceleration.
If you play with low sensitivity in fortnite your building game may suffer. This is primarily because there is ~zero delay between placing build pieces, meaning you can spin around really fast and build a 1*1, stairs, floor and whatever. It is gated by the speed you can rotate. Sure it spazzes out at time and fails to build but overall it is ok. Having a low sens is also a detriment in close in fights where players can get behind you, which happens reasonably often because of building. In other games a low sens from this perspective can make little to no difference. The enemy approaches from the same direction and cannot get behind you outside of very usual circumstances.
The biggest downside to low sensitivity in fortnite is building. There have been posts on reddit about good streamers and the sensitivity they use. Often it is relatively high compared to what good players in other games use. The posters in these threads generally agree that higher (to a point) is better, primarily because of building. While you can get used to anything, low, high or medium, it may come at a trade off for you. Mouse acceleration is a way to mitigate this and allow you to have two sensitivities.. sort of.
Any mouse or aim guide worth its salt will tell you to disable mouse acceleration. These mouse setup guides will show you how to disable it in your drivers, in windows, using registry patches, using mikec mousefix.. and so on. And these guides are correct. Windows acceleration (Enhanced pointer precision) or driver acceleration is in general horrible. It is uncontrollable and so unless it happens to be the type of accel you like it is quite useless. And at this point you don’t know what you do like, or why you even want mouse acceleration. You don’t want this acceleration and unless you happen to play quake 3/live (and take it quite seriously) it is highly unlikely you have ever seen the type of acceleration you want.
Many top players in quakelive (and quake3, only referencing live from this point) use mouse acceleration in one form or another. Most use accel. Some use low sens with higher acceleration, others use mid-high sens with low acceleration. The game has built in acceleration support that give players control over how the accel curve is setup. Windows acceleration (enhanced pointer precision) is a flat curve which suddenly doubles the pointer speed. Logitech acceleration is linear but never caps the speed, leading players to spin out. Quakelive gives players the ability to set the base sensitivity, rate of acceleration, sensitivity cap and accel offset. Sensitivity cap sets the maximum sens the mouse can accelerate to which stops the aforementioned problem of unlimited acceleration. Acceleration offset allows players to put a delay before the acceleration curve kicks in. This means your mouse moving at 10cm/s behaves the same as 20cm/s and then from 20-40cm/s has accel. This allows much more control over what you get. If you are interested there is a good discussion here that includes math.
Until somewhat recently this has only been available in quakelive or other games influenced by it. This is a very limited market and even if you liked mouse accel in quakelive using it is a potential detriment unless you only play quake as you could not easily bring it into other games. There are other reasons as well – Modern shooters do not benefit much from acceleration as much as faster, arenafps style games. A solution has existed for a while outside of quake in the form of a driver, however after windows 7 this broke and needed to be run in test mode. The barrier to entry was far too high.
This is a perfect opportunity for epic to implement mouse acceleration in fortnite. They have done so partially in unreal tournament 4 and fortnite players could benefit from it hugely.
You can have more than one sensitivity. You can have low sens for aiming and higher sens for building in a way that is seemless. You could use a dpi switch/toggle but this tends to be jarring. Simply moving the mouse faster to rotate faster becomes intuitive very quickly.
In short.. no. If this was the case the top quake players would not be using acceleration. Acceleration in the form of advanced pointer precision or logitech accel can have a negative effect because it is uncontrolled. Being able to set where accel starts, how quickly acceleration is applied and where it stops is important. Muscle memory is generally the argument levelled against mouse accel and in the cases of “bad” accel this is possibly true, although people can get used to anything if they want to. Perhaps the argument is that mouse speed is not linear with accel and this stops muscle memory from forming – however there are many things in lift that muscle memory applies to that are not linear like static mouse speed so this argument doesn’t really hold up. Being able to control acceleration allows you more flexibility with your setup. You can aim slow and build faster. You can have slow long range tracking and closer range snappy shots.
It will take some getting used to, but not as much as you might think given you don’t use ridiculous numbers.
There is now a driver that that uses intercept. This means that you no longer need to run test mode in windows. Installation and setup is straight forward. Readme.txt in the download file has the simple installation instructions. Upon launching the interface application (2. application (64 bit)) and you will be presented with the following window. Do not touch the fields flagged orange. Power is the style of acceleration and in general you want to try linear first and probably not change it. The assumption on setup is that you have your base sensitivity set low and want to have accel for building and quickly turning. If you already have mid-high sens you need to lower this in game first. Strongly suggest not changing the sensitivity setting in this app and leaving it at 1. This makes adjusting the graph much easier.
The checkbox at the bottom turns the driver on/off.
We are going to segue a little and “find” a number for low sens. Firstly set your mouse DPI to >2000 if you use lower than this usually. There is a technical reason for this due to how the driver implements acceleration. If you were previously happy with your sens and simply want to add acceleration on top of it you can work out your new in game sens with higher dpi. If you used 0.2 in game and double your dpi you need to halve your sens. Make sure to set your in game sens before continuing. If you want to pick a low sensitivity number to use have a decent sized mousemat, between 40 and 50cm wide, go ingame and set your sens to a number that allows you to start on one side of the mat and turn around 360degrees. This gives you a sensitivity that allows you to turn 180 from almost anywhere on your mat without running out of space. If you are new to low sens this is a good place to start.
Although I don’t imagine there will be many high sens players reading this if you are and want to try low sensitivity and mouse acceleration in fortnite I strongly recommend playing without mouse acceleration at low sensitivity first. Generally I dislike the idea of changing sens incrementally in order to get used to it (build muscle memory @20cm, lower sens, build muscle memory@25cm, lower sens, etc) but accel is next level changes and you won’t be able to accurately adjust acceleration without playing low sens sans accel first. The change from using your wrist to using your arm is something you need to get used to first.
Finally on to the newly installed driver and app.
The acceleration field will be the first stop. This defines how fast acceleration occurs. A higher number equates to faster acceleration. A high enough number causes this to behave in an almost binary manner. To start set this to 0.025 > Press preview changes – an additional line will be drawn to show the acceleration value you have added. 0.025 should be a gradual increase. To feel this press the Save Changes button. You now have accel. This is a mild version of logitech driver accel which is much more agressive. Not super useful. You can test this by moving the mouse slowly, taking note of how far you rotate in game and moving the same distance quickly and noting the amount of rotation.
Next we will set the Sensitivity Cap. This is the maximum speed the mouse can gain. Set this to 1.5 which gives you a maximum of one and a half times your base sensitivity. We can now see that the graph is clipped at 1.5. This may be harder to feel depending on your setup but should be visible when you move the mouse faster – it stop accelerating and moves at a constant speed. You can come back and change this later.
You can play with this, however because fortnite has a decent amount of long range pixel aiming I suggest putting in some sort of offset. Think of this as a deadzone on a joystick, however for the mouse and acceleration it is setting the speed where acceleration start. This way you can move the mouse slowly for longer range pixel shots without acceleration interfering. Now this is a personal choice and needs some tweaking and fine tuning. Have it set high enough so you can aim at longer range without accel kciking in.
Another way to go about setting this is to have a setting..
Wrote this ages ago, never finished.
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