"Aiming is easy"

General Discussion
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How can people genuinely believe this?

In a game like CSGO, or Overwatch, there are 2 types of skills: accumulated knowledge, and raw aim.

Raw aim is tied to your brain telling your muscles how to behave, something known as “muscle memory”. It is partially genetic, but mostly it’s about training, and starting in your youth helps greatly in developing good muscular habits.

As for accumulated knowledge, it’s the same type of knowledge one learns in university or at a daily job. This knowledge can be incredibly important in FPS games but is also something that everyone can learn, who more slowly, who faster.

Very often people argue that “gamesense” and “positioning” are harder to learn than aim. If we consider this as some form of “book knowledge” that everyone has, then this can’t be harder than something that requires a) training b) genetics.

So to those who argue that "MerCy IS HaRd WhIlE WidOW iS EaSy :clown_face: ", how do you deal with the idea that “gamesense” and “positioning” can literally be learned? While aim is something you train, and just like it can take years to learn how to play Tennis well, it can take years to develop good muscle memory.

For example, if you think that Sigma is an insanely hard hero, I argue that I can teach you how to play him in 20 hours, you just need to basically know what to do vs every enemy comp, and with every friendly comp. This is accumulated knowledge, thus not hard. As for aiming, aiming as Sigma, it’s 1 of the most mechanically intensive tanks, but trivial compared to most DPS.

How can people argue that a hero like Sigma is harder than Widow?

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Feel better after getting that out of your system?

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People with 3k hours+ that still move like they are bots lol.

Tbh though some people just don’t have the capacity for it. Same for the people who move and position really well but have bad aim even if they aim train.

Would also just say mechanical because there are some non-aim execution skills like Lucio wall riding.

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No one argues that aiming is hard. Doesn’t excuse heroes from being unbalanced.

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Aiming isn’t for everybody, why do you think I play Tracer?

I had played a bunch of Widow and aim trainers, but I’m not going to be great at it. I get some nice flicks, but after watching good Widow players, yeah…

Gamesense is different, you have to play enough to read situations and it’s rank dependent. As far as how they use them and how effective they are at setting up plays, or if they are even setting anything up at all.

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“Aim” in CS:GO (for the most part) isn’t just “point cross-hair at head” and click, though. You need to learn spread/recoil patterns for each weapon in order to secure kills quickly and consistently. There’s not really an equivalent to this in Overwatch.

Maybe that’s what people mean when they say that aiming [in Overwatch] is easy. Relative to other games, it is.

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devil’s advocate, for the record because sigma only has a moderate floor, but it’s relatively close to his ceiling, whereas widow has an extremely low floor, but her ceiling is miles away from it

but at first glance, sigma appears to have a bunch of stuff going on with the amount of tools he’s got
he has a barrier that can be deleted pretty easily if it’s misused, a stun that’s pretty generous but it’s also easy to use it at the wrong times, and a defense matrix-esque type of defensive on his shift that is just as easy to misuse, and probably the worst thing in his kit to use poorly
his primary fire is also slow and a projectile, which is a bit of a curve to learn how to use if you’re not used to projectile weapons, but overall I’d say it’s the easiest part of his kit to get down
widow, adversely has an intuitive tool for positioning in the form of grapple, and a mine that alerts widow if it’s been destroyed or triggered, even granting walls to widow for the duration of the dot effect
and using her gun is pretty simple; align cross hair on target, click, wait for charge and repeat

if you just look at the types of tools available, widow looks significantly easier to use just because there’s not much ambiguity in how to use her
click bad man, don’t get clicked by bad man
sigma has a vast array of tools in comparison that are extremely easy to use wrong, and if you don’t know you’re playing sigma correctly, you’ll just build poor habits and compound the issue further

but it’s a bit of a trap argument, tbh
you can vastly improve a sigma player just by describing his preferred comp to play with and into, and how to use his kit correctly (ex don’t view your barrier as a rein barrier)
widow’s room for improvement is significantly less ‘learn widow’s kit better’ and significantly more ‘aim better, and position better’ which only the position better portion is applicable to learning, you have to practice to get better at aiming and clicking heads

tl;dr
sigma can be learned quickly, skill floor and ceiling are close together, and there’s not much mastery required to be effective or excel
widow is intuitive to the point that her skill floor is very low, but her ceiling is higher by an order of several magnitudes, and requires a high degree of mastery to be even competitive, let alone excel

if you don’t know that, you’ll naturally think sigma is harder to play just by virtue of the amount of ways to mismanage his toolkit

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It can also take years to accumulate knowledge.

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aiming in OW is easy because the things that make aiming in different games are non–existent.

Go feel the recoil in CoD or Apex or any other game with it. Then play soldier.

Go fire a rocket launcher in TF2 or quake. Tf2 requires a ton just to get airborn for a sec, pharah presses a button and in quake you have to build speed and hit people going FAST.

Things like that is what they mean.

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I’m well aware :wink:

Also. I’d love to see a replay of OP playing a Competitive match as Sigma. I could use a laugh.

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well i mean When it look at through nothing but physical ability than sure Widow is harder. but ask anyone who has played Main Tank will tell you it’s very difficult and very stressful. if you screw up as a tank you’ll probably die if your team doesn’t bail u out, and if you do die than the rest of the team will follow or have to retreat. if you screw up a shot as widowmaker, nothing happens, bad case the target gets away, worst case it’s genji who deflects it back at you and you die and that’s not as big of a loss.

and while in terms of sheer difficulty widow might be harder but Sigma in particular does require a wider array of skills and mostly Knowledge which just like with anythinf else needs to be learned, practiced and improved

Sigma needs to knkw matchup knowledge,
Predict opponents attacks, be mindful of both friend and foe, and Manage muliple cooldowns in a very fast pace environment

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I’ve always believed aiming is a natural thing, some people are naturally insane at it, others like me simply have to make up for the lack of it.

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I think it’s not that. There are many types of skill and the game determines which skill is needed or favored.

Aim skill is one of the most important skill in FPS, but if you play, for example, turn-based strategy, aim skill is almost nothing.

Also, there are no easy/hard skill in a PvP game. The difficulty is solely determined by the enemy. If you have, for example, silver aim/movement skill, and the opponent bronze, then the bronze man could feel he can’t win the game, and thus hard, while the silver one feels easy even if he’s objectively bad.(Also, this is the whole point of MMR).

game sense and position are not easy/hard per se. They are just very much favored by the game Overwatch. I actually think they should NOT be so much favored, cause, such basic game sense and positions become important, when the game doesn’t provide proper system to diff skill.

There are only 2 abilities, whose effects are also simple and easy, and OW devs cared people so much who don’t have enough mechanical skill, and provide ezkill combos, aimbot ults and etc.

So, the game has few things that are difficult. The rest is just basic game sense and position.

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another Widowmaker who wins the 1v1 and now has free reign to dome the rest of your team for roughly 10~15s depending on the map, forcing tanks to take resources away from the fight to deny the widow, at best, causing a cascading effect that results in losing the team fight in most cases. worst case, widow just deletes one to two more people because tanks either can’t react or don’t have the resources to, effectively ending the teamfight without heavy outplay or ultimate investment
it’s alot worse than widow just has to walk back from spawn, but it’s a significantly pronounced for widow and hanzo because of their pick potential and the threat they have just for being alive, forcing people to respect open sightlines or die

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well that has to do with Balancing not relevant to the argument, and i can replace widow losing the 1v1 with any other character and the same thing would still happen the only reason why it’s widow specific worry is because of pretty bad balancing.

and you talking about widows becoming so dominant kinda proves my point, the fact that widow alone can be as dangerous as a whole team and all they needed to do was have good aim and take out there competition, kinda proves which character has an easier time, tanks aint dominating all on there own they never get an ez win against any opponent unless your hog, and they aren’t making the whole enemy team shake in their boots just from existing

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There’s something called preaim that is skillful

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yeah
the dichotomy of how much I fear a slender blue lady with a really good gun and a rippling 7 and a half ft tall man in a hulking suit of armor with a giant hammer that can cause the earth to break just doesn’t seem quite right
i feel like widow’s max potential is just way too high overall despite her fragility
like if hog whiffs hook i literally don’t care what he does for the next 6s most of the time
if a widow whiffs the first shot? adrenaline is pumping and im looking for natural cover like a crackhead trying to get his next fix

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I hecking love turn based strategy, including things as side quest as suikoden 2’s top down tactical.

Off topic i know but i couldn’t help myself.

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on that we agree, i find it to be a balancing issue as a whole where there are some characters that can flat out do more than other characters and all it takes is some time and effort, like why use High Noon as Cassidy when you get kill just as many people only slightly sloweras widow, all u need is good aim, and then there’s hanzo where if u can consistently land your shots is flat out the most broken DPS in the game

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Ball wall jumping intensifies

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