I’m gonna weigh in on this topic because I think I have the experience now to form an unbiased opinion since I’ve played with a.) a mouse b.) a controller with no aim assist and c.) a controller with aim assist.
I firmly believe that aim assist on the PC servers when using a controller should be allowed. It will not give a controller player an advantage over a PC player, it will bring the controller player onto an almost equal playing field. The precision a mouse allows is just not possible with a controller. This means that, even with aim assist on the controller, PC players are always going to be at an advantage. Always. Full stop.
For crossplay to be fair, aim assist is needed to balance out the inherent advantage PC players have. There’s a reason they didn’t make crossplay fully crossplay, because dropping PC players onto console servers would be insanely unfair. Anybody who has been paying attention would understand that. If aim assist is so unfair versus mouse, then why don’t they allow PC players into the console pool? Makes sense, doesn’t it? Aim assist is akin to aim bot in many of your eyes, so controller players would not be at a disadvantage with it on. Yet here we are, with no PC players allowed in the console pool.
So either Blizzard is protecting console players from having their heads constantly clicked to death by OP M&Kb Widows and Hanzos OR they’re protecting PC players from being auto aimed to oblivion by the OP console players’ aim “bots”. Now I don’t know about you, but seeing as they didn’t give PC players the ability to opt out of crossplay, that tells me that the PC players are the ones who are OP here and not the controllers and their clunky, slowed aim assist.
Going back and forth between my PC account and my console account, I’ve learned one thing: playing this game with a controller absolutely sucks. The aim assist slowing you down sucks. The tug of war between you and the aim assist sucks, but it does make the game playable.
Personally, and I know this is controversial and many console players are against it, (I was one of them up until a week ago), I would honestly prefer that M&Kb be allowed on console, but with the very important caveat that it only work while playing crossplay with PC. If they can figure this out, figure out how to implement it without it being exploited, then I’d be all for it.
Mouse is just miles and above better than controller, with or without aim assist. It’s no contest, you guys. If a PC player is afraid of a console player using aim assist or still believe the controller would have the upper hand vs M&Kb, then let me tell you, friends, you have no idea how good you have it with mouse and how much of a non-issue this aim assist thing really is.