It honestly sounds like your friends are friends are using aim assist as a crutch.
I played console fps for a long time and always had the aim assist off wherever possible. It is of course more difficult with aim assist off but with practice and especially the right sensitivity your aim gets a lot better.
Turing on aim assist would also allow those with soft aimbots to just say “oh, it’s my aim assist”.
That’s pretty cool that you were able to improve your aim so much, but I suspect that you’re an outlier. I doubt that the average controller player would choose to do that and invest the time and effort that I assume you did to reach a satisfying level of skill.
Have you used M&K before or do you only play on console?
I was by no means crazy good with a controller. I was however comfortable playing fps to the point where I could hit my shots and never felt overwhelmed.
I don’t really feel like I was an outlier. I feel like people have become too reliant on assists to the point that they have never bothered to play without them for any meaningful period of time.
In fps I would always turn aim assist off and in racing games I would always turn brake assist, steer assist, etc off. It just felt like cheats and nothing was earned playing with them on.
I only play on PC now. M&K for most of my games. I only really use a controller for Witcher 3, Elden ring, Trackmania and NFS titles.
It varies from game to game depending on the strength of the aim assist, but in some games (Apex and Fortnite in particular), you can definitely tell when someone’s a crossplay console player on controller. At the lower end of the “skill” spectrum, you often see them run in a straight line at you and then try to cheese out the engagement with an auto-aimed shotgun (often to hilarious effect due to the aforementioned running in a straight line thing). As you get higher up in lobby MMR, the mid-range engagements with semi-autos and short burst weapons are massively in favor of controller+AA players since the weapons won’t recoil enough to pull out of the correction zone aim assist provides.
Now, I know it’s not a slam dunk in all scenarios, but when you do encounter those situations, it feels like you’re playing against an aimbot (because you are, in a lot of respects) and it sucks.
That’s why I’m very much in favor of splitting lobbies on input type. It keeps as many people as possible on even footing as far as their input devices go, rather than having both sides having a number of “feels bad” situations due to input-based aim limitations or assistance.
Gives controllers aim assist but allow pc players to opt out. Then pc players not interested in it don’t have to play with and against, and console players have their aim assist.
Would you say that it’s as easy to aim on a controller without aim assist as it is to aim on M&K? (assuming the same amount of time has been spent practicing on each)
As easy to aim with practice yes.
Target acquisition and precision is far better with a mouse though obviously. A controller will never be as good as M&K.
Interesting point. I have heard this argument against controller aim assist before. One counter argument I have heard from Apex Legends pros (I don’t watch/play a lot of Fortnite 
) is that there are still other advantages to using M&K such as faster/easier flick shots and easier movement techs. To a certain degree, I think that argument would hold in Overwatch as well.
However I think the real solution is a matter of tuning/adjustment by the respective game developers. The smart thing to do would be to collect data about the aim assisted controller vs M&K (e.g. encounter win rates) and adjust the strength of the aim assist until the statistics are balanced.
You had me until this point. Console players will vote to get auto aim. PC players will vote to keep auto aim off.
The side with the bigger playerbase will win regardless of what is better or worse for the game.
Having auto aim has a negative impact on PC players too. There is no happy medium and blizzard had to make a decision.
it just so happens that the decision benefits PC more than console.
That doesn’t mean console players don’t stand a chance. There is plenty of viable heroes in OW that don’t require mechanical skill.
this seems like the most natural solution to me, also. input-based grouping, rather than platform-based.
It’s pretty easy to know since we’ve seen it before in pretty much every major recent AAA game.
Aim assist winds up being so strong that average controller players compete with the literal best of the best m + kb players in terms of accuracy.
OW is one of the few games PC players have left where we don’t have to deal with the BS of going against people who get more value with less effort. Please just let us have this.
Good point. However, I was thinking of a poll within the PC community specifically. I don’t think the results would be as one-sided as you are suggesting.
Even if it was a survey across all platforms, there are ways to balance the results mathematically so that the community size doesn’t matter, but I don’t think surveying all platforms would be useful. It really only seems like there is a lack of consensus among PC players.
An opinion survey is not the best option in any case. I think collecting data about player in-game performance is the best option. I really think that with enough information and tuning a happy medium can be reached, but it’s out of my hands.
If Blizzard would hire me to do it, I would love to do some data analysis lol 
It’s expensive but you can get aim assist working with mouse and keyboard on consoles.
This is because alot of accessibility controllers exist for consoles. Basically they worry about people being able to use a similar work around to get mouse and keyboard with aim assist working on pc.
So they take the simpler option and just turn aim assist completely off for any pc stuff.
That’s an interesting claim. Do have references / evidence that this is actually why Blizzard made this decision? It doesn’t seem like other FPS developers have the same concerns.
I remember their problem with it was because of the expense f the equipment, they felt it should be cheap enough everyone can get it, or shouldn’t exist at all and that it only being available for those with the cash was giving them an unfair advantage. Soz bud, that’s all I remember
the average console player probably hits less shots than the average pc player. aim assist isn’t some massive advantage over m&k, it isn’t even as good as m&k, and it certainly doesn’t let average console players compete with top level pc players
The issue is that when you add crossplay with aim assist that’s what happens to aim assist. It gets cranked up to the max because controller has a much flatter skill curve than m+kb and there’s no way for even the best controller players to compete with high level m+kb players without having super strong aim assist. This happens in every game where crossplay aim assist exists.
what if they just added it as it is now? would that be fine?
IF it was just added to quickplay and IF they didn’t crank it up, yes, it would be fine. If you check Overbuff, controller has a VERY slightly higher average accuracy on most heroes, but M+KB has a higher accuracy in higher percentiles, which is how it should be balanced.
However, I highly doubt it would end at that. Considering most games nowadays have ranked crossplay, people would ask for that, and when they ask for that, aim assist would need to be cranked up so that people on controllers can compete with higher percentile aimers on m+kb.
The problem with input based segregation is that xim users on console still have their aimbot, PC lobbies straight up disable auto aim, and that is the best solution. No auto-aim, ever.