Pre-text / Intro
This suggestion will be centred around seeking features to improve how the game handles sensitivity and input, unfortunately I am a PC player so whilst I'd love these features to come to all I will be mostly be talking from the perspective of a PC player, I play shooters a fair bit, particularly overwatch, I'm unsure if other PC gamers will feel as strongly about this as I do but its the big thing holding me back from playing this game and I'm sure it is for many others.
Feature Requests
- The ability to input specific sensitivty values allowing for greater and more precise options when it comes to setting our sensitivity
- fix negative accel / mouse smoothing on input devices going over 250hz polling
- 1:1 sensitivity with all weapons and cameras
Reasoning
For PC players of other games these are all standard features, specifically in tac shooters or hero shooters, I personally play a lot of overwatch and have spent awhile figuring out what sensitivity works for me however sea of thieves lack these three features that I think are borderline essential for modern games with pvp elements
The ability to put in specific values as opposed to just having to move along a sensitivity slider will help with having a wider range of options and keeping the same EDPI across multiple games, this is a practice I personally like partaking in, massive changes in sensitivity can be rather jarring, if in one game moving my mouse halfway across my pad is a 180 turn and in sea of thieves thats barely a 90 degrees turn it just feels awful and more exhausting to play the game however after a fair bit of time this can be somewhat resolved for to an extent, the sense will never be perfect but you can get pretty damn close with the current system, this would just be a huge Quality of Life.
The issue of not being able to fine tune your sensitivity is amplified by the issue of negative mouse accel / mouse smoothing on input devices exceeding 250hz polling and it feels terrible, a lot of modern devices can go to 4000hz polling, some even go to 8000hz and whilst this is very much overkill the 2000hz polling spot is what many pc gamers use nowadays, I'm pretty sure even modern controllers operate at 500hz polling, so to have this issue that punishes users for having a higher polling rate for no decernable reason just contributes to how physically exhausting this game is to play, people shouldn't have to go and adjust their mouse specific settings just to play this game and many modern mice, such as my own, do not give us the option to go below 1000hz polling rate so many players are forced to endure this and even more so suffer from it without knowing, it makes aiming feel less consistent and significantly slows down a users ability to aim.
Lastly having our sensitivity change mid action also feels awful and makes things impossibly slow, to comfortably play sea of thieves I need to put my sensitivity at 1.3 & fov down to 102 however the negative ADS sensitivity system sea of thieves uses even when set to max effectly quarters the speed of my sensitivitiy, rendering me unable to effectively pvp in anyway that is comfortable, I either am forced to forgo pvp or sacrifice my general sensitivity to be much higher but unfortunately significantly less comfortable every second I'm not ADSing. Most modern games if not by default let you refine your settings to either have a 1:1 experience or a near 1:1 experience with your general freelook sensitivity and your ADS sensitivity, it is a rarity for a modern game to lack at least the ability to configure something close.
My personal problems
For me personally these are genuinely game ruining, I fell in love with sea of thieves a few years ago, took a break made some hardware upgrades and have since tried to get back into the game on multiple occasions
I've had a miserable experience because of these sensitivity issues, particularly the aim smoothing & inconsistent sense across multiple actions, aim smoothing just feels horrible and makes it harder to dail in the sense you desire, at best as a pc user you can change your mouse settings just for SOT to avoid it, in my case I cannot and have to suffer as a result of this remaining in the game it makes my mouse feel unreasonably slow compared to other games and it feels horribly inconsistent. In addition the matter of inconsistent sensitivity has rendered me in a position where I am either uncomfortable in general play or I have to isolate myself from the PVP side of the game, a part of the game that for me is core to the experience that sea of thieves provides.
I've tried other solutions such as having a seperate mouse for sot, using a controller and ect, but all of these just felt like downgrades to the user experience of the game, I want to play this game and I want to be passionate about it again, I want to be able to recommend it to my friends and sail alongside them, however this is very much holding the game back for me and rending it unenjoyable and I'm sure there are many other PC users who feel the same way I do.
