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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

This can have some hilarious outcomes though.

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...

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> 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.

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.

> how many people actually plug in a controller and a mouse at the same time?

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?

Your controller will turn on and off to save battery and when batteries run dry and need to replace them.

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 all controllers run on batteries. You can get wired Xbox controllers for example.

I use wired Xbox controllers on pc.

> fringe cases (how many people actually plug in a controller and a mouse at the same time..?)

There are good reasons to have both, and no reason to unplug either of them except to work around a buggy game.

Heck, on a laptop, you can't even unplug the "mouse" (touchpad).

Many would disable auto aim and aim assist because it is generally terrible and makes using the mouse harder.

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.

There were also some games where the player just runs faster when holding both w and up arrow on the keyboard plus forward on the controller.

Not that anyone but speed runners actually would do this to themselves.

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