Like teaching a novice how to play tennis or how to hit a baseball, the question of where a player should focus their attention is one that typically is only brought up by a coach. In past years, the epigram “keep your eye on the ball” has been accepted as common wisdom. Aiming is no different.
Aim Before You Shoot
There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to aiming: Those who say to focus on the crosshair, and those who say to focus on the target. In reality, the optimal point of focus depends on the situation at hand. It’s important to distinguish between the types of targets we might want to aim at. Targets can be large or small, in motion or stationary. We may be moving as well. These factors will impact the process by which we acquire and, if necessary, track our targets.
Esports, unfortunately, is not a terribly well-researched field. However, traditional sports have been extensively studied for years. There are parallels to be found between all the variables we find in video games and more traditional sports.
Large Stationary Targets
Let’s first think about a large, stationary target like those we find in KovaaK’s Tile Frenzy scenario. Huddled, the former world record holder, performed a run with his eye tracker enabled. We can see he rarely, if at all, looks directly at his crosshair. Instead, his eyes are continually acquiring targets. Hitting these targets is more akin to hitting a golf ball than a tennis ball. Studies on golfers and their eye placement indicate that golfers performed best when their eyes were focused primarily on the ball (or, rather, the point of contact between the ball and club) prior to striking the ball. Additionally, these golfers found success more often when they continuously visualized the path of the ball. Huddled shows us that he is behaving no differently: His eyes spend much more time on the target and on the path his crosshair will take than on the crosshair itself.
Small Stationary Targets
Next, let’s consider small, stationary targets. 1wall6targets small is the archetypical KovaaK’s scenario. Huddled provides us with another run. This video contains no eye tracking, though it’s obvious where his eyes are focused. Huddled spends the majority of his aiming time in two stages. In the first stage, he acquires his next target by shifting his eyes to the next target. In the second, he locks his eyes on his crosshair and takes care to place it directly over the target. This process, though much slower, results in far greater accuracy.
Moving Targets
For moving targets, we experience an interesting phenomenon. Huddled has a run of Tile Frenzy 180 Strafing 400 Percent with his eye tracker enabled. This scenario has large targets in motion. In the timestamp right, his eyes tell us an interesting story: Huddled focuses first on the target to determine its path. The target is about to hit a wall, and he knows it will change direction to a random vector.
Predict Your Enemy’s Movements
He follows it primarily with his eyes, not his crosshair, and corrects his aim after he is able to predict its motion. This is not unlike how a baseball player hits a baseball: They focus first on the ball’s initial path, then focus on the predicted final location for their swing.
So, what’s “the best way” to aim? The answer depends on what targets we face. A great example is AWPing in CS:GO, where there are two situations.
Adjust Your Angle
When holding an angle or clearing into an angle, pro players treat it much like how Huddled treats 1wall6targets small: They focus on their crosshair and react accordingly. When forced to react to a player peeking from an angle their crosshair is not covering, they treat it like how Huddled treated Tile Frenzy and focus their eyes on their target. For situations where we are forced to react and time is of the essence, we focus our eyes on the target exclusively. When we can choose our own timing and precision is more important, we focus on the crosshair. For those grey areas where we need to be quick enough to capitalize on predictable movement but also precise enough to land our shot consistently, we perform both styles in tandem. The short answer is: We need to be strong at all styles.
When to Use Your Crosshair
For maximum precision, we look at our crosshair.
When to Focus on Your Target
For maximum reactivity, we look at our target. For acquiring a target and firing with precision, we combine the two methods.
Adjust Default Crosshair Placement
Your crosshair placement will play an important role in the consistency of your shots, and whether you look at your crosshair or the target. Lazy placement where your crosshair is looking at the ground or a wall may occur naturally as it can open up your field of vision but it puts you in an awkward position once an enemy comes on screen. With lazy placement you have to perform long distance aiming movements at weird angles just to get to your target.
When holding an angle and waiting for an enemy to come around the corner, it is typically advised to look at your crosshair and use your peripheral vision to fire at the correct time once an enemy moves into your sights. If you hold an angle and try to look for the target, it can be easy to reactively flick and throw off an otherwise easy shot that you never needed to move for.
Do Sensitivity Settings Matter?
Your mouse sensitivity is the most accessible and impactful variable you can adjust to instantly change how well you can aim. Generally speaking, both high and low sensitivities respond the same way to either looking at the crosshair or looking at the target. Low sensitivity does suffer more from not looking at a target, especially when tracking. Looking at the crosshair or simply just not focusing with low sensitivity will result in sloppy and laggy aim.
Keep Practicing
Below are three training playlists to help cover all the bases necessary to succeed.
Target-focused scenarios
Tile Frenzy Mini, 1wall6targets TE, Tile Frenzy, Tile Frenzy 180
Crosshair-focused scenarios
1wall6targets small, Popcorn Sparky, voxtargetswitch
Combined scenarios
Bounce 180 Tracking, kintargetswitch, 1wall5targets_pasu, Target Acquisition Flick
For those who want to track their progress, crack open FAT-DASH.
Grow Your Game with The Meta
Improving your aim and practicing specific skills like where you should be looking, can be very difficult through general gameplay alone. There are so many other variables and distractions that causes these instances of learning to be few and far between. Aim training in KovaaKs allows you to practice in a stress-free environment with an enormous choice of unique scenarios play. Check KovaaKs out on Steam today and see just how quickly aim training can accelerate your improvements.