Yeah, the Valve team (and me, I'm the OP) are specifically pushing hard on this -- an emerging best practice is to always allow simultaneous mouse & gamepad input.
Specifically, I'm thinking of how Call of Duty Black Ops III gives controllers a whole bunch of aim assist so they don't get dunked on by people using mouse+keyboard. Guess what used to happen if you plugged in a controller and played with the mouse?
In an ideal world, the fix would be to not give half your players an aimbot, but you just know the product manager wouldn't go for that. Looks like they ended up adding a patch that tries to figure out whether you're actually using the controller.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackops3/comments/44yfri/pc_aim_as...
Shooting someone in and FPS with a mouse is literally just clicking on something, do you need help clicking on icons?. It is not difficult until the target gets very small or is moving in a specific unfavorable way. Those are both situations where auto-aim tends to help less, like ignoring far targets or aiming at instead of ahead of moving targets. Then there are the times I have been lined up for a perfect headshot only to have the auto aim pull my gun of course and blast center mass giving the enemy precious seconds to respond with their rocket launcher or equally fatal weapon.
No, this is the ideal world. Mouse users have more manual accuracy, couch gamers can still have fun vs. mouse users. Combating fringe cases (how many people actually plug in a controller and a mouse at the same time..?) makes no sense. This 'divide' worked like a charm on Titanfall.
There are good reasons to have both, and no reason to unplug either of them except to work around a buggy game.
How many people actually unplug things when they, uh, don't need them for a second or two?
I leave my monitor plugged. I leave my power cord plugged. I leave my keyboard and mouse plugged. I leave my headphones plugged. I leave my hard drive plugged. I leave my ethernet cable plugged. Why should I not leave my controller plugged?
There's nothing more frustrating than running out of batteries in a controller and the game just locks you into mouse input... on a living room PC.
Not that anyone but speed runners actually would do this to themselves.
But if what you want is just exactly the Valve Steam Controller model with more heft, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
As in, being able to jump back and forth between controller and mouse, with all the visuals changing too. Hopefully it catches on more.
Running around with a joystick to suddenly see keyboard prompts pop up when I aim is a bad user experience, even if it is relating the truth.
I would like to see games detect the steam controller and default to using the controller visuals even when there is mouse (or keyboard) input.
I've been spending some time lately making control layouts for old games (and using it as an excuse to replay the original Deus Ex), and while the configurator works really well, it still has some issues around getting users up-to-speed with their selected layouts (letting the profile adjust the "controller HUD" popups would probably go a long way towards this).