Un-Learning Invert Mouse

• Gaming

I decided to learn to play without the Invert Mouse option.

I’ve considered doing this for a long time, but the final straw was wanting to continue checking out ArcheAge without getting a headache. But you know if you’ve ever tried to change this setting that you need to turn it off for every game at the same time. It’s not something you can turn off in one game but leave on in another game. Once you begin the re-conditioning process, you can’t go back, or you will perpetually remain confused.

If you’re considering doing this, you should know that when you first start playing with the Y-axis reversed (by which I mean not reversed), you spend most of your time either looking at the ground or looking at the sky, pushing or pulling uselessly at the mouse trying to correct it. This is normal. Keep working at it and after about 5 or 10 minutes, you should get it through your skull that no matter how much you push the mouse forward, you’ll continue to look directly upward, and then you can begin the real re-training process.

It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible. As of this writing I’ve completed three nights of non-inverted play. I can keep my view more-or-less looking the right way while I’m walking around. My reaction time is terrible though. I end up moving the mouse one way from muscle memory, recognizing it’s the wrong way, and then moving the other way. It’s a lot more problematic in combat, and I still end up looking too far up or down, and it’s hard to do “fancy” moves like running around behind a mob while keeping my view looking down slightly from overhead. Trying to aim in games with a reticule is downright comical.

But eventually I’ll get there. I remember having a similar learning curve when I changed from arrow keys to +mouselook and ESDF back in the days of Quake. It took over a week to be comfortable with it back then. (This time, though, I’ve got nearly 20 years of muscle memory to overcome, not just a couple of months.)