Mouse Problems

Look no further! You have just bought a brand spanking new 120$ 10k dpi gaming mouse to frag down all your clan in cf but, lo and behold, when you plug it in and start playing, the aim is all wobbly and shaky and you cannot shoot to save your life?

Well, slant has a solution for you!


To fix this problem: simply set your usb port polling rate lower! Some of the newer gaming mice have the polling rate set a 1000hz or 500hz default. For some reason (which to my understanding mostly relate to crossfire being a sh*tty game), the high polling rates will make your aim shake! The lower you set your rate at, the least jittering you will experience!

Now before you go crazy and set your rate at 32hz, you must know two things about lowering your polling rate:

1. The lower the polling rate, the higher the response time! Here are the exact stats I stole from gotfrag:
125hz = 8ms (default)
250hz = 4ms
500hz = 2ms
1000hz = 1ms
and so on.

2. On some mice, notably older ones which have low malfunction speed (wmo, ime 1.1a, ime 3.0, mx300, mx500, etc), the lowering of the polling rate will also lower your "perfect control" speed. For example, on the ime 3.0 and 1.1a clocked at 125hz, the mouse will lose perfect control at around 1 m/s, a speed which you will often hit if you game at low sensitivity. When you clock it at 1000hz, however, the "perfect control" speed zone will upgrade to 1.6 m/s, which is rather acceptable to low sensitivity gamers.

The trick with these mice is finding the balance between jittering and responsiveness/malfunction speed
A wise man told me 250hz is a happy compromise, and that is the polling rate i recommend for most mice, as it offers very slight jittering and still delivers good responsiveness at a higher malfunction speed.

Make note that most newer gaming-grade mice have very high malfunction speed, even at low polling rates, so you may not even have to worry about that!

Some newer mice also have polling rate changing options in their driver, so that makes it easy to modify and play around with. For the rest of you mortals, I will link to the programs I used to change my polling rate and verify it (Disclaimer: playing with your polling rate may lower the life expectancy of your hardware or fry your mouse or usb port, so I will not be held responsible for what you kids do to your computers!):
Hidusbf, used to modify your polling rate can be downloaded here.
Mouse rate checker, used to verify what polling rate your port is effectively functioning at, can be found here.

On a final note, I do believe this is known by some people, but it seems to me like most of the community is in the dark concerning this, as I was until very recently. It helped my aiming (especially long range) immensely and I do believe many would benefit from this.
I would also like to point out that crossfire possesses some VERY odd acceleration issues, which I think should be brought to the attention of the community so that we may unite to force the developers to fix the aggravatingly high positive and negative acceleration present in the game coding.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask to me.

I have mouse problems also.