MMO Gaming Mouse Showdown

Peter Donnell / 2 years ago

Performance

Ergonomics are important for all kinds of PC use. However, MMO gaming can often result in very long gaming sessions, and borderline addicted gaming behaviour… I should know, see here. Those long days of daily tasks, raids and more benefit greatly from a more relaxed gaming style, at least in my opinion. You might want to be a little more on-edge for FPS gaming, but not for MMOs. The SteelSeries is a good size, perhaps a little slimmer and a lot lighter than the other two, it’s certainly the easiest to move around.

It only needs a light grip to lift it, and it fits the shape of my palm very naturally.

The switch mounting system is excellent, I can click just as fast and light at the back of the switch panel as I can at the front.

The click feels super fast and responsive, and while its position is fixed, the side panel 12 button control is easy to reach, but I do have long fingers. It’s a little compact though, so it can take a bit of practice to make practical use of all 12 buttons.

The ASUS mouse is a lot close to an FPS gaming mouse in terms of ergonomics, it’s really long mouse buttons slope off heavily and while it fits a whole hand grip, it’s going to suit a fingertip or hybrid grip too, as this is a bit of an all-genre gaming mouse really.

The thumb control is easy enough to reach, and I can comfortably rest my thumb on it at all times, but there’s a bit enough void next to it to keep your thumb out of the way too.

The natural grip point is well balanced, with my fingertips sitting dead in the middle of the LMB and RMB, and a short flick is all that’s needed for the side navigation buttons.

You can click this far back, but it feels a little heavy, however, from just 1cm away from the back, the click is fast and natural all the way to the nose of the mouse. These are really long buttons too, so that’s quite a large click area for you to work with.

The switches are fast and light, but of course, it has the distinct advantage of hot-swappable switches should you fancy a change.

The DPI button is on the bottom, which suits me, as I don’t make changes too often. However, you could remap this to the other buttons if you so desired.

Corsair has the heaviest mouse here, but it feels no less nimble, as it’s been designed to be a bigger mouse and to deal with that fact. That means it has large pads on the bottom and a generally low friction design. It’s all very well balanced meaning it glides effortlessly while the slightly higher weight makes it easy to make smooth curves and moves, vs the more twitchy nature of an FPS mouse.

The ergonomics are sublime, with a heavily dome-shaped top that hugs the palm of your hand. The long mouse buttons give you lots of range for multiple grip types, and the thumb pad is easy to reach too.

Of course, the fact you can move the numberpad back and forward is awesome, suiting my longer fingers just fine, or slide it back, and it’s within the reach of younger gamers with smaller hands too.

Plus it has a wider ridge side wing, meaning all your fingers have somewhere to rest on the mouse with a fairly natural and open hand design that’s slightly rotated to the outside, leaving your wrist in a more natural resting position.

Sensor Performance

This is my mouse gauntlet. In the top rectangle, I try to draw a straight line smoothly and steadily. You’re looking for imperfections, as if the mouse draws a truly straight line it’s likely due to angle correction, which is bad. I’m not a robot, so mostly straight is true 1:1. The same is true on the angled lines, but this time we’re looking for a smoother line, not one that looks like steps, as that would indicate a low sensor resolution or poor reporting.

The circles I draw as quickly as I can trying to stay close to the inner circle. Again, check for any stepping, angle snapping or glitches in general. These are done at the mouse’s default DPI when the mouse is first plugged in, a higher DPI, then a lower one. The actual DPI isn’t important, but how easily the mouse handles in these tasks is.

The arrows are an acceleration test. The mouse is used to draw from a fixed location, slowly moved to the far side, and then very quickly moved back. Does the sensor land back exactly where it started? If it doesn’t, the mouse isn’t giving you 1:1 tracking and is likely using acceleration.

the zig-zags are much the same, I start slow and move faster, trying to stay within the box, the lines should look smooth, but present with minor flaws from a natural hand movement and not look “assisted” by any angle snapping.

It comes as absolutely no surprise that all three mice performed as perfectly as one could hope. All their sensors are absolutely stunning.

Corsair Scimitar