Ok, so for some reason your mouse started being delayed and floaty, and/or your bullets just decided to not register correctly when you shoot. You did almost everything you could think of to fix this issue, but no matter what you never got fully rid of it; the fixes either don't change anything, only fix partially, or the problem misteriously comes back. This post is for you.
Hi, I'm Giggio, I'm a long time FPS player and have coached hundreds of players over the last years, I'm also a long time lurker on this forum, been dealing with floaty mouse/input lag for 4 years and I finally started considering it being placebo 2 months ago, I'm now confident enough to talk about it!
You could be thinking a lot of stuff to disconsider this just from reading the title: "But some people fixed it!", "I fixed it so many times but it always come back, the difference is day and night, it's 100% real!", or something amongst these lines. The word placebo is probably stored in your mind as an offense by now, every time you read it is like someone is trying to tell you that you're crazy, but I'm not here for that. We are all prone to placebo, no matter how good or experienced you are. Did you ever throw a dice harder to hopefully get a six? That's placebo! Even if you know that it's impossible for you to control how the dice will land, you still do it regardless, so no, I don't think you or me are crazy, we are human and we are prone to being tricked, even by our own mind.
My hopes with this post/video is to to put an end to your problem and get you out of this cycle of Playing a game>Getting frustrated then stop playing>Waste time looking for a fix. It's such a tiring cycle and can get dangerous sometimes with people spending lots of money, looking for a fix for a problem that might not even exist, and even affect your mental health in some cases. Placebo is also the most intuitive explanation and also the first thing people usually think about when hearing about these issues, but even then it's still widely overlooked. I wrote this as if I was talking to my old self from 4 years ago, to hopefully free this dude from the headaches that could have been so simple to solve.
A trap that you might have fell onto (it was what got me the most), is that I trust myself as an above average player making me placeboproof, to the point where I can trust more my mouse "feel" above any kind of logical tests. Be honest, when you tell a friend about this issue, the last thing you want to hear is them saying it's probably just on your mind, right? I get it, I've been through it. I believed my mouse was moving differently from what I'm used to and that was enough of a proof for me. I also believed to be way better before the issue (and it can be true, even with the issue not being real, we'll talk about that).
Ok, you got the idea. Hopefully at this point you're at least open to consider it. To begin it, I'll propose a challenge for you; try to convince that your aim is floaty (or delayed, or your game desynced, whatever is your issue), but not to someone else, you have to convince yourself about it, but you can't just use "feel". Maybe a video showing the amount of accel you have, pixel skipping, or actual lag measurement, it must be something solid. That's the challenge.
Try the classic mouse acceleration test: Place your crosshair somewhere in a game, then place your other hand on the mousepad to mark the starting point. Then move your mouse to point B, and come back to your hand but moving slower. If it lands close to where you started, you don't have mouse accel. Also do the Human Benchmark reaction time test, it's a simple way to start testing for input lag if you don't have a 1000 or 240fps camera. Make sure you don't have DWM (Windows Vsync) enabled, for that, just swipe your camera around and check for screen tearing, if you notice screen tearing, then it's disabled.
If you can't prove yourself with something concrete, there are high chances that this issue you're experimenting is something that your mind created and convinced you of, and hopefully you're starting to defeat this belief. One recurrent example of these mind tricks, is how many "fixes" you, I, and lots of other people here have had throughout time. I have more than 15 "fixes" noted down so I don't forget it in case things went bad again, but guess what? It always "comes back", and the same fixes you did before doesn't work anymore, or they will only "alleviate the problem", that's something I convinced myself of lots of times. I've lost count of how many times people said that their problem came back after a few hours/days/weeks. How come the problem always finds a way to come back? (I know someone will have an answer to that, but we'll also talk about it).
One thing people like to say in response to this is that I don't have the issue or that I experience only 10% of what they do, especially because I still got to Radiant while dealing with the issue, which kinda makes sense when you think about it: An issue that controls your mouse, makes it delayed and destroys your muscle memory, makes sense that you shouldn't be able to get to high ranks, so if you reach it, you don't have it. But this is wrong, I had the problem too. I basically stopped playing competitive games and only played deathmatches and casual games so I wouldn't care too much about my mouse lag. Competing while you have a huge disadvantage is not very fun. You die to low elo players and think: man... If only I didn't have this issue this guy would have never killed me...
Now, you might be thinking "If the issue isn't real, how could it have affected you then?" and the answer is: Placebo! If I convince myself that my mouse is delayed and floaty, I'll believe in it, thus making it real for me. That should be enough to trick your mind, but even worse, I might make corrections to get around it, like trying to flick faster, moving more/less than I should, taking too long to microadjust... On my case I started gripping the mouse harder and doing smoother movements, trying to not flick too quickly since I believed the cursor to always be landing where it was not supposed to (note: aiming with a mouse was never 100% consistent, good mouse control helps a lot but won't change that), I lost the trust on my flicks and preferred to move it slowly. This completely changed the way I aim, on my head by doing this I was dealing with the "floatiness" better.
This will also cause me to pay uneccessary attention to my mouse. When you use a pen to write/paint, do you need to think about how the pen is moving? What about your finger muscles? Do you monitor how they're moving to make sure it's going to draw what you want to? In reality we just imagine the lines we want to draw and our body and mind takes care of the rest, maybe just thinking about moving the tip of the pen as a basis of your drawing point, but that's it. Same thing with walking, kicking/throwing a ball, and, aiming with a mouse!
It's worth pointing out that most people suffering with this problem don't have good mouse control. Yes, lots of us had gotten high ranks and a long FPS journey, but you can have a very decent aim while still having poor mouse control, especially in Tactical Shooters like CS/Valorant/R6 and even more when playing on low sensitivities which is very common on this genre. Most people complaining about this have CS or Valorant as their main games.
So how can one have good aim in these games while still having poor mouse control?
If the way you practiced your aim was by memorizing movements, for example "If I move my mouse this much to the right, my crosshair will move by this much too", that will give you good aim on the situations you trained for, but you didn't improve your mouse control, you simply memorized a set movement that will only work on specific situations, and under perfect conditions. That was the way I did, not counsciously.
And why it works in Tac Shooters and what's the problem with that?
The answer is that in these games, if your crosshair placement and positioning is good, you'll only need to aim within the memorized range of motion, and you'll be very good at it. The problem is that whenever you don't have perfect conditions to do your memorized movement, you'll miss your shot: if you tense your muscles a bit more than used to, the very same movement will be more stiff and your wrists won't move as much. Or, your mouse is not set in the mousepad where you're used to, you'll also miss.
A simple way to tell if you've memorized your aiming movements instead of developing good mouse control is if sensitivity changes or different mouse grips significantly affect your performance. Another good indicator of that is if your biceps/shoulders/trapezius gets very stiff or tired when aiming for a longer period.
To get around this would involve improving your mouse control (same thing as the drawing example from earlier): moving with the sensor of the mouse as the basis of your aim, not your wrist/arm. By practicing that way, regardless of the condition (stiff muscles, grip, sensitivity, mouse position) you'll have good aim, and your body will just adapt to whatever is needed to move the sensor to where it needs to be, just like when you ride a bycicle, you don't memorize how much you'll move the handle to turn the bike; your body will learn with time and then it just happens, it constantly adapts to different conditions. But that's a complicated and completely different topic, we are mainly talking about placebo. The point with this pharagraph is that there is a correlation with floaty mouse>tac shooters>poor mouse control, which can be a cause of the placebo effect.
So to what I said earlier, I'm sure someone will have an answer to the problem always making its way to come back even after lots of fixes you have had. We like to create theories for things we don't comprehend, it's easier to digest instead of having just an endless uncertainty. Ancient people looked at the sun and they couldn't comprehend it, so... This bright thing that warms us and has no explanation must be a god, right? ... Did you get the idea?
If I believe floaty mouse is a real thing, but I can't prove it, I'll find a theory to believe in or figure out a new one. At this point you're basically putting your own judgment and gut feeling over any logical tests you could do to check if the issue is real or not. I'm not saying that you do this on purpose, or to mislead other people. You are just looking for a fix and you believe in what you say.
Let's say you tried everything you could think of. On the first days, you double checked "Enhanced pointer precision" and Vsync, then lowered all your graphics. Then you tried changing your mouse. Didn't work. Change monitor, change GPU, no luck. Changed your entire PC... Still feeling laggy. So you go to the "Well, the problem isn't on the PC or mouse, so it must be an outside factor...", which makes sense. And then you discovered the electricity input lag rabbit hole. This is the place where everyone's problem is the same but the fixes for some reason are always different. Maybe you just need to fix the grounding or your outlet, but maybe for some random reason your only hopes are by moving houses. Some people even moved several times and still didn't find their luck. Cellphone towers, outlets spreading EMI, Internet cables... Everything goes.
Lots of people will come by as experts, telling exactly what you need to do to fix your lag. Like getting a specific high grade EMI filter for your outlet or rolling up your wires on speficic toroids bought from specific places, and if everything fails, there's always a culprit, like a radio tower nearby or being in a city which is way too populated... They know everything about PCs and Electricity, but somehow still haven't sorted out their own problem, or they'll tell you "I fixed it 90%" (but so did almost everyone suffering from that).
If it was so common to get a house with electricity input lag, then why no one knows about it, just us, 0.01% of players? Do you believe we are all so good that we are the only ones to perceive it? Or do you believe that we are the unluckiest human beings in the world that some of you got 6 houses in a row that had lag on it? I never heard of a pro player taking a medical grade transformer to a Lan tournament to guarantee some headshots, just in case the electricity there was dirty.
I believe people are so certain about what they talk regarding this issue (especially electricity) because each time the brain reinforces the belief, they get more sure that this is what was causing their issue. "Temp fixes" are the worst for that; you swear that it changed something, you can feel and see it, no one and nothing can tell you otherwise and your belief is now stronger than ever.
...Don't trust yourself as the only metric to diagnose an issue like that, use actual measurements or you'll just end up reinforcing your belief in something that doesn't exist.
Anyways, let's say you did everything you could to filter out electricity (or something else) from being the reason. Then the issue is either not real, or not coming from electrical sources. But if you still trust yourself to know better and that your mouse isn't moving like it should, then what else could be causing that problem?
Bingo! Anything!
Now it depends from person to person what will make more sense for them next. I've seen these theories:
- Dirty Electricity/Grounding/EMI, this being the most widely accepted one, it can go wild sometimes:
- Solar generators + Batteries to go offgrid;
- Medical grade transformers;
- Clothing Iron on the same outlet as your PC fixing it for 5-10 minutes;
- Dirty Electricity damaging your whole PC, making it so you need a completely new PC and pheripherals before moving house to not infect the rest of the PC with the damaged parts; - Your own body causing interference, having to ground yourself to play;
- Porn/Masturbation causing your brain to lag;
- Karma/Energy;
- Posture;
- Time of the day;
- Steam/Riot accounts causing it, either due to a bug or due to being purposely changed by devs or hackers to cause this lag;
- SBMM/MMR manipulated by game devs making your mouse inputs worse to balance the game out (damn, you're good. you should go pro at this point);
- Pirated windows key infecting your whole PC and even monitor/pheripherals forever, the only fix being to buy a completely new PC, mouse, and monitor, without getting a single used PC part, and never downloading anything pirated again... (this is my favorite one
)
The biggest mistake we do here is jumping straight to the problem solving part before making sure that the problem even exists in the first place.
How to solve that: challenge your beliefs and use actual tests to sort them out instead of relying solely on your feeling/intuition, that way you'll know if your problem is real or not and rule out placebo. Or, you'll find out that your issue isn't real
First you gotta convince yourself that the issue isn't real then you'll stop worrying about it as you play more. Lying to yourself won't work, I believe there is no other way to get rid of a belief caused by placebo, you gotta actually believe that the problem ins't real, you'll need some proofs for that. If your belief is strong, you'll likely need some time too.
That's it, if this post manages to help even just one person I'll be happy already! I've been playing for around a month like that, having fun, improving, and not worrying about any lag or anomaly whatsoever, I'm not just ignoring it; I don't feel it anymore.
(Regarding my case, floaty mouse started in 2020 when I bought a new PC and I did countless things to try to fix it. My last attempt involved trying an old PSU and it gave me a good effect, but I was aware this time that everything could be placebo, from the fix to the problem itself. After 8 or so days, it came back so I accepted that the problem wasn't even real. After a few days, I noticed that the "Activate windows" watermark started showing up about the same time I felt the lag coming back, and this enabled windows DWM (Vsync). I got rid of it the good state of when I first changed the PSU was back. So, there is a possibility that my lag was real and somehow a PSU fixed it, but it doesn't make much sense and I believe that the whole problem was just placebo altogether, especially after all the "fixes" I've had that "came back" misteriosuly, the PSU could just be one of them too. It doesn't matter what was causing it though as long as we can enjoy games again carefree!)
