Mouse sensitivity: what actually affects it and why some weapons are kind of broken.

Mouse sens in EFT varies depending on a few things and there is a fair deal of conflicting information on this topic. I’ve seen people on the internet claim that mouse sensitivity in EFT depends on: weapon weight, ergonomics, turn speed penalty from equipment and so on. I’ve seen people claim that this is meant to simulate realistic weapon handling or artificially lower
the game’s skill ceiling.

It reality, mouse sens in EFT is much simpler than that. There is no in depth realistic simulation at play, it’s both primitive and misleading.


Literally the same thing as what comes below, but as a video with a few short demo clips.

At this moment EFT has two settings for mouse sensitivity: one for free look and one for aiming down sights.

Free look sensitivity is affected by turn speed penalty and is super easy to adjust. ADS sens, on the other hand, is unaffected by turn speed. Whatever problems with turning you may have due to wearing Tactical Dreadnought Armor go away if you put your gun close to your face.

At the same time ADS sensitivity is unaffected by weapon characteristics, such as weight or ergonomics. Slap on one more kg of weight on a gun? Tank ergo? Irrelevant.

In truth, ADS sensitivity depends on the type of scope weapon has installed and nothing else. EFT doesn’t attempt to actually simulate actual weapon handling or whatever, it just has several presets for ADS sens that depend on the active sights.

Ignoring magnified optics there are 3 tiers of “x1” ADS sens:

  • 1: Clean barrel with neither red dot nor rear sights installed (super high sens);
  • 2: Weapons with just iron sights (with rear sights slot being the relevant component) (low sens);
  • 3: Guns with red dots (lower sens).

Difference between tier 1 and other two is astronomical, while difference between 2 and 3 is relatively small (but enough to mess with people who want to do Jaeger's mosin quests all of a sudden). Different weapons have the same ADS sensitivity as long as they have the same type of “active” scope, so pre-WW1 rifle will handle the same as FN 5-7 as long as both have rear sights component installed. Not the same component, just the same type of component. Same thing goes for weapons with red dots, or with clean barrels.

A certain amount of confusion about variable sens comes from the fact that some weapons (like most shotguns) either don’t have, or can’t install rear sights at all so they default to tier 1-super high sens (until you slap a red dot on them, then it’s business as usual).

SKS, also known as “always remove rear sights”, is a popular victim of that
as well.

As a result, game has 3 tiers of x1 sens that are fairly arbitrary as they depend on a presence of 10-100 gram iron sight or a collimator, and nothing else matters. This is neither realistic nor intuitive nor comfortable. That said, it’s not too noticeable due to the fact that most players would quickly gravitate towards slapping red dots on their weapons in most cases and would never think about this charade ever again.

But, of course, it gets worse.

There are several weapons in the game which have “fake” iron sights. “Fake” means that these guns have iron sights from visual standpoint and you can use them to aim, but they don’t exist as a mechanical, removable component. As a result, EFT treats them as if they had a clean barrel and pushes ADS sens in to tier 1, which
is super high. It practically renders these guns unusable dogshit in stock configurations as your highly trained terminator PMC loses ability to manipulate objects with precision while holding them.

These weapons include: VPO-215 (oh boy, like this gun could not have gotten worse), half of pistols (SR-1MP, PB, PM, TT and Grach), Klin and Kedr SMG’s, and 3 shortened AK’s: AKS-74U, AKS-74UB, AKS-74-UN.

As you can see, that list includes starting weapons that are given to new players. And these are, likely, guns that they take in to offline mode to set up game setting for the first time, which basically bamboozles people in to thinking that there
is something deep going on below the hood when they transition to normal, non-bugged guns and dabble in weapon mods for the first time.

There is nothing there, of course, some guns are just broken and misleading. In truth, ADS sens is exactly the same between all guns as long as they have same type of sights installed.

So that is pretty much it. The way it works is not comfortable (variable mouse sens in FPS never is), it’s easy to circumvent and it’s not realistic (I’m not a gun expert, but I’m fairly certain that removing 10 gram rear sights IRL doesn’t turn
a weapon in to a light saber, nor does it up human hand coordination sensitivity
in brain setting). Red dot may be more comfortable than iron sight, but this effect is achieved by red dot just being more comfortable and doesn’t require fucking with mouse sens.

All that this system does is it confuses new players and mosin men.

Nikita, please fix after you’ve fixed sights with variable magnification.

TLDR: Armor turn speed penalty doesn't affect ADS sens;

ADS sens depends on the type of active sights, with types being: 1) nothing at all; 2) rear sights/iron sights; 3) red dots.

All weapons will have the same ADS sens as long as they have the same kind of sight installed (e.g. mosin with rear sights is the same as FN 5-7 with rear sights).

Some weapons have "fake" rear sights, as in, they have them visually, but not as an actual removable component, and will function as if they had a clean barrel unless you install a red dot.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/fxowag/mouse_sensitivity_what_actually_affects_it_and/

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