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Originally Posted by JinnKai
I take mousing very seriously.
Lasereth:
Your video card wisdom aside, you're really quite wrong about ball mice. They're incredibly imprecise, in the strictest meaning of the word. Certainly there is more friction, but that doesn't imply accuracy. You could make the same argument for an analog control stick on a video game console versus a digital control pad. The analog stick offers more "friction" in the sense that it has a finite set of states (8) it can be in. This could be a good thing, as minor movements are ignored and it collapses into the nearest state. However, with a digital input, your possibilities for input direction number in the hundreds (depending on the precision of the controller), so you have much more control. The downside to this is that minor movements make dramatic differences, so you must be much more precise in your movement.
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I guess what I'm trying to describe isn't really precision even though I stand by my friction statement (I'm more precise with an optical mouse on a friction(y) surface than an optical mouse on a gliding surface). What I don't like about optical mice is the fact that when you pick them up half a centimeter off of the surface, the laser still reads movement, so moving the mouse slightly above the surface to another location (we're talking millimeters) in order to pull off some mouse moves isn't possible the way I do it. In Battlefield when I'm flying a jet and I run out of room while trying to perform a flip, I have to pick up the mouse VERY quickly to allow more room to flip, and when I pick it up to move it with an optical mouse, it reads the movement while I'm physically relocating the mouse resulting in one spectacular nosedive into a lake. This happens in every situation requiring the moving of the mouse. Furthermore, when I play PC games, I have a lot of "air time," or time when I've actually picked the mouse up off the surface to prevent inprecise or accidental movement. Again, optical mice do not allow this.
I played Battlefield and WoW for a straight year with an optical mouse trying to get used to it due to ball mice being completely and totally obsolete. A year later I found myself feeling completely used to the optical mouse and I really thought I had it down pat in games. For shits and giggles I plugged in my old ball mouse. Instantly, with no configuration changes, my kill to death ratio in Battlefield went up <B>drastically</B> and my WoW performance felt infinitely superior due to the aforementioned respositioning issues that I always have with optical mice.