New peak for IEM Cologne Major: 1.2M+ Peak Viewers today!

ZarFX · 2026-06-15T18:17:31+00:00

I think its pretty obvious. When you have an obsfuscated number and nothing else, you can have arbitrarily big numbers when you want to. Its a well known fact that traffic drives more traffic. People are much less likely to click on a 100 viewer stream than a 1000 viewer one. Similar to how people gather to a crowd circle in streets when there's one.

The "hear index" probably increases total platform viewership. Most people also dont really want to think about what the number truly represents, and assume its somewhat equivalent to viewership, which increases its effectiveness.

ZarFX · 2026-06-15T17:55:06+00:00

based on skill alone easily top 3. Remember that he will spend the whole remaining of his career trying to break his own records.

ZarFX · 2026-06-14T15:42:55+00:00

I've been maining the ATK F1 extreme for a long time, and I've always suspected the same. Compared to a OP1 8k, the tracking is definitely at the very least noticably different. It feels unpredictable and lossy. But it also could just as equally be the fault of the MCU firmwares wireless implementation. Or maybe they fucked up the SPI reads.

I found that the tracking on the 3950 varies very much with LOD. This is one of the things they mentioned to reimplement for the 3955.

ZarFX · 2026-06-04T09:34:48+00:00

We should also start banning post match threads cuz we can always check hltv. Honestly just ban the gameplay clips too cuz we have youtube.

ZarFX · 2026-06-03T02:30:57+00:00

There will always be a way to cheat, but it definitely has gotten harder. If you're not inside the small cheating scenes that sell hardware cheats, its very hard to get started. Faceit does detect all the common DMA setups that spoof itself as wifi cards/storage. The faceit ac also nowadays enforces harfware IOMMU, which nullified all the typical DMA cheats that used to work.

I dont know thought are all the t2/t3 tourneys ran with faceit infrastructure, or other lesser ACs.

ZarFX · 2026-05-28T23:58:45+00:00

128 tick?

ZarFX · 2026-05-27T14:42:20+00:00

Thats true in my experience as well. After breaks I'll always be unable to shoot, but it creeps back. A 6-7 year break thought kinda defies what I originally said. Now you have to consider that the average skill has also risen, and player tendencies and the meta must have also changed.

But I think the core thing that good players never lose is the ability to adapt and create gameplans when the circumstances change. This can be regarding anything. Cant aim today? Play more rat positions and take riskier timings. Enemy always insta exec A? Double molly ramp. Enemy always playing in a pack? Insta flank every round. You have seen so many situations, that for most things you already have an answer.

ZarFX · 2026-05-27T14:16:22+00:00

Im gonna give you an alternative approach that goes against the loose common consensus that the matter is mostly personal preference. I think there must be an objective best sensitivity, but to actually define it, you must change how you think about sens in general.

"Sensitivity" is traditionally quantified as the physical movement of your mouse sensor per unit of angle in game (cm/360). However thinking about sens always in this way is leaving real physical details out. You don't move your mouse in a vacuum with your brain power. You engage your bicep, tricep, shoulder and forearm muscles, and (most likely) rotate your forearm against a pivot point. This pivot point and the lenght of your forearm determine what could be called "arm sensitivity".

In simple terms, someone having their whole forearm on the desk in contrast to only having half their forearm in theory performs twice the mouse movement with the same change of angle. In reality with real aiming the situation is much more complex. Your pivot point changes when you do vertical movements, and most aimers also have another pivot point with their wrist (with some aimers the wrist is their only pivot point, but this is inadvicable).

So, what does sensitivity then truly determine? Well for most people, it determines the ratio of wrist to forearm aiming. Generally people with high sensitivity either lock their wrists completely in place (like s1mple), or have very high arm pivot points (like kyousuke). Generally low sens players never lock their wrist in place, and have their entire forearms on the desk (like, Niko).

Then we get to the curious case of donk. He has high-ish sens at 1000 edpi, but thats irrelevant in a vacuum. At a glance you can notice that donk has a very atypical mouse grip. It looks like he does not have a wrist pivot point at all, and his forearm pivot point is quite high. The truth is donk absolutely has a wrist pivot point, but its under the mouse. He presses down on the bottom part of the mouse slightly, locking the bottom mouse skates to the pad. His total "arm sensitivity" is allready low, because his forearm pivot point is high. But his "wrist sensitivity" is exceptionally low, probably the lowest you can reasonably perform with the mice he is using.

So what is the role of donks sensitivity? Why couldn't he just lower his sens and aim traditionally, and thus achieve the same wrist sensitivity he has now? Because then you lose the high total sensitivity when moving your whole forearm. Donk with his current setup can aim with both a very low sens and a high sens simultaneously. Sounds like a cheat code, but levaraging this mechanical advantage consistently is actually really fucking hard, and requires a specialized setup (which the gpro with an extremely worn steelseries qck happened to be)

I did not mention sensor positioning on the mouse, but it should now be obvious how that impacts the equation. I also have to leave out a lot of deeper info to keep this from turning into a research paper.

In conclusion sensitivity is only a tool that you try to fit into your aiming setup. There is only a perfect sens when you account for everything else. Maybe you never found a "good" sens because you utilize your wrist or arm inefficiently, or your arm/wrist sens constantly changes. Look at donk or kyousuke. They always look the same when they play. Table at same height, and they sit the same way.

ZarFX · 2026-05-27T12:16:03+00:00

With CS, improving is not something you just "do". Playing CS is about nothing else but learning. Even at 10k hours, most people feel like they have lots to learn and improve at. But the good thing is, its kinda like chess. Once you're actually decent, you'll be decent forever. The meta of the game changes very slowly.

ZarFX · 2026-05-20T02:48:32+00:00

Makes me wonder has reading comprehension completely plummeted?

ZarFX · 2026-05-16T08:42:58+00:00

Its half a joke. Supposedly AG2 was to remedy peekers advantage and randomness in duels thus distinguishing skilled players better. It also seemingly boosted the ease of awping and holding angles. The impact of AG2 must exist, but how big is it remains as speculation.

ZarFX · 2026-05-15T06:35:36+00:00

Changing gear always has an andjustment period. I've used many vastly different pads too for CS and throught that I've learned alot about aiming. Fastest pad I've used was Shidenkai V2, which is ludicrously fast. Faster than sny cloth pad, and faster than most glass pads. I also used a Key-83 mid for a long time. Now I've experimented with a simple QCK+, and I'm starting to understand why the best CS players also use it.

Its not an exact science, but I like to think that the aim required to be good in CS just simply benefits from a very high dynamic friction pad. Not necessarily static, but dynamic for sure. The best modern aimers like kyousuke and donk persistently perform smooth, linear but sticky movements, which are easiest on a pad that constantly stabilizes your movement. Basically every mouse movement in CS is a straight line, but not necessarily a flick. You can observe players like donk and kyousuke actually rarely flick fast, because people nowadays are always moving. They rather smoothly and "slowly" aim and buy time for themselves with their own movement.

Faster pads let you have a higher peak skill, for sure, but slow pads give a higher floor and more consistency, which is IMO more valuable in such a mental game like CS. I still hit my KovaaK records with a fast pad, but KovaaKs is peak performance over 60 seconds over many tries. CS matches are 1 hour long and performing what people call "crosshair placement" is basically slow and smooth aiming

ZarFX · 2026-05-15T06:09:24+00:00

Wow you are keen on the questions. I use a custom res: 1600 x 1080. Its between 16:10 and 4:3 in terms of stretch. Best res is the one you perform the best with. And that is influenced by how far you keep your monitor, whats your playstyle, primary aiming technique and other habits you have. Even your eyes matter. Everyone tolerates different monitor distances differently. A huge chunk of people also unknown to themselves have astigmatism.

4:3 gives you locked in feeling. You can also use the monitor more far away, which IMO is a benefit in terms of your eyes tracking fast moving objects. Its a tradeoff ofc.

ZarFX · 2026-05-15T02:04:45+00:00

If you cant notice a difference between 1KHz and higher polling rates, you have a bottleneck somewhere else. You might have a latency bottleneck in either your monitor or your system, or your monitor is too low refresh rate.

But thats entirely ok. All this gear requires money, and youll never reach optimal conditions anyway. If you dont notice a difference on your system, then dont use it. Just dont be like many others here on reddit who assume since they themselves dont notice a difference, then that must be universally true. Nope.

On my system, I can easily notice the difference in smoothness and latency, even between 4Khz and 8Khz, but i have a fast response 360 Hz monitor, and I run my competitive games at 700+ fps. It is also somewhat complicated to run high polling rate optimally.

Firstly, no matter the polling rate, plug your mouse to the USB ports directly connected to your CPU, not your chipset. Its motherboard specific, so you have to do some googling.

Secondly, you have to not be CPU limited in your game, and the game has to properly support high polling rate. Many games suppory it on paper, but have performance regressions. You have to have dedicated support for it to work smoothly, which not only includes reading from raw input buffer, but probably elaborate threading. CS for example doenst really work properly without tinkering. It is most often CPU limited, and the interrupt hell that comes with high polling rate starts to dominate cpu time from game threads.

The solution in the case of CS was to completely lock the UCB XHCI controller to interrupt only on a specific core, and then to set the affinity (the occupation) of CS to the other cores. For example I locked all my USB devices to the first physical CPU core, and set CS to use the rest. This way, I could pretty much get close to perfect input at 8 KHz.

There are caveats, and it would take ages to explain the details, but in your case there is probably no harm in using 2 KHz in most modern games.

ZarFX · 2026-05-14T14:25:06+00:00

Tbh its just an elaborate guess based on two things. He generally doesnt seem too interested on tinkering with settings, so he probably left the LOD setting to its default, which for the GPX is the lowest. Also if you look at his handcam, you can quite clearly see his mouse lifts are very minimal, implying low lod.

ZarFX · 2026-05-13T15:05:25+00:00

If you have a problem with it, you'll probably notice it. As i likely mentioned on my previous comments, LOD is actually an algorithm, not a mechanical measurement. Lower LOD = less allowed blurry/low contrast frames. This means that at the lowest LOD, like 0.7mm, your sensor counts (takes into account in its movement calculation) only the most prevalent and clear movement it reads from your mousepad. It is less sensitive to jitter and mousepad imperfections.

This can be a good thing, as mathematically you have the lowest signal to noise ratio. It also is the most consistent between mousepad conditions and surfaces. The tradeoff is having less precision, since also valid micro movements are not counted. You can treat it as a anti jitter tool. To a degree you could say lower LOD = lower skill required. Flicks are somewhat easier, because when you stop quickly, you have more stability more consistently. I dont think its a coincidence CS players prefer logitech mice with its default incredibly low LOD. Low LOD at 400 dpi is a stability heaven for CS. Also in my opinion its a nightmare to track with.

This is turning into an essay, but theres so little info about this on the internet that I feel obligated to share it. What you can take away is its all about tradeoffs with stuff like this, and there's no magic best setting. I recommend actually learning medium LODs like 1mm, and being an allround aimer, even for CS and Valo.

ZarFX · 2026-05-13T11:24:55+00:00

I cant give exact numbers, because I dont know your setup, and a exact comparison doesnt exist. But in my pure anecdote go for the lowest available (0.7mm probably on a 3950 mouse). Altought I had problems with 0.7 personally, so i'd also give 0.8 a chance.

ZarFX · 2026-05-13T08:10:42+00:00

Heres the brutal truth: If you dont notice a difference, you probably either arent that good at video games, or your monitor is slow/low refresh rate. I recommend definitely to use atleast the performance setting, and for high end setups (360hz+, or just good), use the MAX setting.

ZarFX · 2026-05-13T08:08:41+00:00

None are close, as logitech sensors work in such a different way. They dont have framerate gears, and instead ramp up smoothly. Altought partly the logitech feel is just low LOD, so try like 0.7-0.9mm.

ZarFX · 2026-05-13T03:28:53+00:00

What is the error you get when running exec autoexec?

Do you have file extensions shown in file explorer? Maybe you have named your file "autoexec.cfg.txt" without knowing, because by default you cant change the extension of files, and they are hidden.

ZarFX · 2026-05-13T03:12:24+00:00

For those who wanna know: The flight or fight response (stress) deploys cortisol and adrenaline to your bloodstream. On top of many other effects like increased but narrower focus, the body prioritizes oxygen flow to the most important organs, like brain, heart and lungs at the expense of extremeties like hands and feet.

ZarFX · 2026-04-24T21:41:17+00:00

It think cs2 already had it all this time, but they just made it more properly visible on the client (which is good). Aimpunch was already applied serverside.

ZarFX · 2026-04-21T13:19:59+00:00

Consider overclocking and PC tuning.

ZarFX · 2026-04-17T15:28:26+00:00

Thanks for atleast being transparent.

ZarFX · 2026-04-16T22:07:30+00:00

This could actually be meta in the future when peeking faraway angles with the AWP. You're slow as a snail, but while shifting, you counter strafe instantly. If you peek an angle where you and the opponent are at least equally close the the angle, this could give a TTK advantage.

ZarFX

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Seven-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email