A question about mice and Overwatch

General Discussion
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I’ve never really been able to quite properly vocalize something about Overwatch that bugged me.

I don’t know the proper terms to describe it, so I’ll have to use color as an analogy.

Imagine in your mind a spectrum of colors. These colors represent your sensitivity with your mouse.

With red being too low, and blue being too high.
In games like Call of Duty, battlefield, the Metro series, the Crisis series, Apex, the far cry series, GTA, the borderlands series, the Bioshock series, the Deus ex series, the Dead space series, RAGE, Skyrim,and even in Minecraft, you can find a happy minimum in sensitivity. You find your “green” sensitivity between red and blue. Your “goldilocks zone” your “green zone”

However in Overwatch it seems like you don’t get green in the middle of red and blue. You get “purple” which is like both, red and blue, too high and too low at the same time.

I haven’t played another game that has this particular problem, so I’m not sure where to start even asking questions.

(It’s not input latency I know what that feels like, and this isn’t it. Nothing’s delayed, it’s just the wrong sensitivity regardless of what I put it at.) It’s functional, technically but it’s far from ideal.

It feels… stiff, clunky, sloppy. Like everyone in Overwatch lore, has fine-motor-control issues.

It’s like each individual value that you could have for sensitivity is tightly coupled to a single static, turning speed.

It feels like you can only aim in discrete angles, based on your sensitivity, instead of just allowing any arbitrary angle.

To elaborate with and arbitrarily simplified metaphor, it would be like trying to shoot an enemy that’s 0.5 degrees to your left, and you can point your mouse exactly there, but you can only move in increments of whole degrees. So you always overshoot who you’re trying to aim for regardless. But if you lower your sensitivity by half a degree “however you determine that” you get to the point where you have to drag your mouse across your desk 7 times to turn 90°. You end up being a sitting duck.

Again, those aren’t litteral values, but it’s an analogy that explains the feeling.

Can anyone explain this behavior? I don’t know what it is, or why Overwatch is the only game that I see this behavior in. Other shooters just feel more free and flexible, why?

It just always struck me as bizarre. Why is Overwatch “purple” when other shooters are “green”?

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What lmao

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Is there a particular character you’re having trouble with? I think some of them have their own sliders for certain situations.

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I have this exact problem. I have high presion mouse input, I run the game at 200 fps, my dpi is 800 with 6 sens. I have a very expensive gaming mouse and use a large mouse pad.

Even with all of that, I still have this issue.

Maybe I’m just bad at the game idk.

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I really thought this guy was about to suggest a mouse hero

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This is due to no movement acceleration and a lot of vertical aiming. This makes it difficult to have a perfect sens for all situations. In reality, you are better off running a higher sens and try to get more accurate with it.

In other words, bring the Goldilocks zone to you. This means be more accurate at high sens or more reactive (faster) at low sens.

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Best sens for u will change depending on how close or far the target is from u. Higher is better when they r closer but will overshoot when aiming at someone far away. Lower is better when they r far but will take a decade to track up close. U just gotta figure out a good middle ground.

Also watch the video surefour made on mouse accel as it opens up another option to play with

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No. All characters in Overwatch.

That’s what I mean. What you’re describing is what I called a “green” game. Where you can find a happy middle ground. In the middle of OW between too high, and too low, is both.

In Overwatch, a theoretical sensitivity “x” is perfect for tracking people at “y” distance, but as soon as theyre at “y × 0.0001” distance you overshoot and or undershoot. With other games you can just have one sensitivity and it’s good for multiple ranges. You don’t overshoot because you can just move slower. You don’t undershoot because you can move faster.

It feels awkward, and stiff. Almost kind of like using a controller in that you can’t just aim where you want. You have to kind of wait to get over to where you want to be looking. But you can move your mouse at any speed but your character will still only turn at the one fixed rate.

I just want to scream and tell Overwatch to get out of the @#$&ing way and let me just aim where I’m trying to aim.

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Dunno what your exact problem is but IMO most of the mouse related issues are indeed caused by input latency. I know not many people do this, but as soon as I started playing OW on windows 7 with almost every services turned off and DWM disabled, the floaty mouse feeling went away.

You can’t get a similar mouse feeling like that of windows 7 anymore due to windows 10/11 having DWM integrated in their OS. Although I’ve heard that W10 LTSC and Windows server 2022 both having lower DPC latency. Thus making it more ideal than W10/W11 for competitive gaming.

Aside from that, the biggest factor in producing consistent mouse feel IMO is maintaining a stable frame rate, as well as having a high refresh rate display. So if you can consistently maintain 144FPS on a 144Hz monitor or even 240FPS on a 240Hz monitor, your mouse feel should be more consistent.

Different DPI of the mouse as well as the sensor themselves seems to affect the mouse feel too for some reason. You basically need to play around with a lot of things until you find this “goldilocks zone” that you’re after. I’ve found mine with what my system/hardware is capable of, you’ll eventually find yours too after optimizing everything.

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Because most shooters let you ADS which changes fov/magnification level whereas in Overwatch you only have the option to Aim down sights with 3? characters.

Do you play Reinhart or something? I come from games like Chivalry and MOrdhau. I know what playing with a capped turn speed regardless of your mouse sens. feels like so describing OW as that isn’t really accurate at all imo.

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Sounds like why I went through and adjusted every characters sensitivity.
Some characters are MUCH better at close to mid range, and their sensitivity should be a bit higher for close turn mid fight and etc since you could be hugging people in such fights.
So I adjusted number for everyone, and snipers whether ana or widow are pretty much the same numbers.

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I used to get a similar “locked to an angle” feeling when I used to play with disable display scaling on high DPI settings checked. Even though that was one of the most common advice on how to improve FPS according to YouTube. I’m finding that aiming feels more “free” now and it has become easier to micro adjust ever since I stopped using that setting.

I still disable fullscreen optimization though because from what I understand, fullscreen optimization will always introduce some level of minor input lag on Directx 9 games. If you’re playing Directx 12 games, you’re actually better off using fullscreen optimizations though, since the engine is very well optimized for it.

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I know what you mean, no matter what I do it feels a bit “off” to one degree or another. OW 2 feels ostensibly worse, but I suspect this is more a tuning issue.

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I’m at about 5 - 6 at 800 dpi on most characters but some just need adjustments based on how they play. IE I wouldn’t use 5 sense on genji, I’d use 6. Moira I use around 7. Ana and McGee I use around 5…

But I might put my dpi back up to 850. 800 seems low for close combat. Tracking a lucio in your face at 800 dpi can be a little annoying

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Do you have high precision mouse input enabled? It was added to help address this issue.

Also what’s your DPI? The 400 DPI standard is a relic of CSGO and is largely being abandoned in modern games. Higher DPI settings (with lower in-game sens to compensate) increase angular granularity, with 1600 DPI being a popular choice now.

The vid below shows the issue you describe at 2:20:

“Pixel skipping” is a bit of a crude term imo, but all his points have merit. If the angles of your turning increments are too low, you’ll have more difficulty shooting at distant targets.

OW player Daniel Fenner also compares the angular granularity of different DPI settings here:

And here’s the calculator he mentions. It’ll tell you if your settings are adequate or not:
https://pyrolistical.github.io/overwatch-dpi-tool/

Just be aware that changing to a higher DPI setting means your mouse will be capturing your hand movements in a finer resolution than you’re accustomed to. Anecdotally, some find that imperfections in their aim are now translated to the screen in greater detail, so expect an adjustment period to overcome this.

Also be aware that some modern mice still introduce smoothing at certain higher DPI settings, and I believe this smoothing is also generally accompanied by roughly 2ms input latency. You can do a search for “perfect mouse sensor” to find lists of mice that provide no smoothing across their entire DPI range. But for most modern mice, 1600 DPI is a safe setting that’s still low enough to allow fine tuning with in-game sens.

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probably your setup. could be comparability issues /dpi scaling issues
try this: go to the overwatch exe file here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Overwatch\_retail_\Overwatch.exe right click > properties > compatibility tag. make sure compatibility mode is off, make sure ‘disable fullscreen optimizations’ is CHECKED, then click the ‘change high DPI settings’ button and make sure program DPI is off and ‘high DPI scaling override’ is CHECKED and set to application

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Do you have Vsync on? I don’t know if it changed, but years ago, that made the game feel weird

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Thank you. I’ll check that out.

No. I know about that issue in OW. I have frame rate target as high as possible, I believe 400fps now, (used to be 300) and I have Vsync off. (Even if I did have it on, my refresh rate is 144hz)

That I didn’t know. I’ll check that out.

EDIT: A thought occurred to me. I generally don’t go changing the DPI settings of my mice between different games. I usually just stick with the default so that things feel consistent. I just realized that, things should be more consistant between games. I wonder why OW alone feels this odd difference. (Or at least OW is the only game I’ve noticed with this behavior.)

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I’m not sure about that either. Thought about it a lot and the best I could come up with is that maybe mouse and aim issues are simply more noticeable in OW. The game is faster than most other titles and has a diverse array of tracking requirements due to all the different hero movement patterns, so maybe the game simply amplifies even the smallest aim issue? Really don’t know.

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Hmm. I suppose that’s something I can’t rule out, but my gut is telling me that isn’t likely. I’ve played a lot of fast paced games, Overwatch isn’t that much faster than others.

It feels more like Overwatch isnt doing something most games do. I can’t put my finger on what though.

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