I'm glad I was right. All I gotta say. I think it's even less going further back, but getting mapped by SMGs now a days in almost every gunfight was literally unheard of in MW2/MW3 days.
Very interesting results. Its also important to point out that in the games with weaker ranges, aim assist will still activate in 90% of your gunfights, because it's pretty rare for engagements to stretch that far in multiplayer
As a long term PC player, I find these results interesting. Since crossplay was introduced, I always seem to have a "better game" when crossplay is either turned off, or the lobby is mostly k/b & mouse players.
Well that makes sense. Because it is the same as playing against aimbotting kb&m players. If you don't need to play against people with inhumane abilities you will do better haha. Main reason i quit FPS games is the aim assist becoming insane.
Maybe console players are more used to going against console players, and kbm are more used to kbm. Something about the way people play based on their input device! Maybe kbm players like to keep their distance while console players get in your face.
A better test of rotational aim assist would have been to be running into a wall while adsing and having an enemy run through your line of sight and see how much it changes. You could measure it in the same way with degree changes of the arrow on the mini map.
Well there was no cross play before MW2019 so that's probably why people felt it got stronger. As an m&k player I do see the advantage of AA, especially in close to mid range gun fights in WZ.
Yup. It's always been busted, it's just thay cross play made it shine. And Activision can't do anything till Microsoft adds a gyro on their controllers 💀
I refuse to play these AAA garbage cross input games. Not going to put in the effort to use raw input to get beamed by some no skill 12yo with an Xbox controller.
You know i remember noticing in MW 2019, how my sensitivity would slow down and I couldn't see an enemy at all. I guess they were just so far away to see, but it was still picking up. I guess I hope they tone down the range. Maybe even per weapon type. Like SMGs are much shorter then Assault rifles or something.
I swear this is so damned infuriating when the aim assist tries to "assist" through a wall and throws of your aim by shifting it to the left or right because it is trying to assist with a moving target coming around a corner or popping up in that window you were just aimed at so you could kill them when they popped up. Or worse when it tries to assist with your aim but not on the guy your aiming at but the person behind them.
He actually lived on a ranch and looked after livestock with his parents. I remember from an old q&a he did. Maybe he gets it from calculating cattle numbers lol
Ace IS a data analyst on RUclips. He has very impressive testing techniques. He is also critical and thorough in his analyses. That he then uses to come to logical conclusions. That’s not just an analyst in my opinion but a very impressive one.
A thing I've noticed is how soon does the aim assist kicks in. I've seen videos of the aim assist activating the instant it sees a pixel of the character model. In addition to that, some enemy strafing testing would probably be warranted.
The most broken thing about aim assist is that it doesn't track a character model though. It's reacting to the hit box. When Warzone and MW19 was experiencing massive desync issues, kbm players would be shooting through character models while controller players would shoot thin air and get hitmarkers. The servers do a mostly good job keeping the hit box near the character model though. In the instances you're talking about, someone trying to slide/jump around a corner will most likely die because although they have the element of surprise, aim assists reaction time is instant and will begin the tracking process before the player even realizes there's a person there. This is also very frustrating for KBM players because it decreases the distance the controller player has to move their crosshair once they finally react after AA activates. So if someone is holding their crosshair on a corner and a player performs a 10 meter strafe jump, the controller player will only have to move their crosshair 2-5 meters once they react instead of tracking all 10 meters of the jump like a kbm player would.
I’m going to assume the reason the ranges for aim assist grew exponentially starting with MW was to account for crossplay with PC/m&k to help close the gap between the two peripherals
I disagree. When mw was released the developers said themselves the game was made with noobs in mind, they designed the maps around making the game easier new players. Everything they down in mw was to make the game easier for newer players and I think the increased aim assist was also to make the game easier for noobs.
@@MetalZeroFour what about them? Aim assist isn’t effective at as far as a range as MW2019. Cold War was less noob friendly and followed more of a traditional CoD route, Cold War played more like traditional CoD with good balanced 3 lane maps (it was less noob friendly). Vanguard went back to MW2019s approach and promoted camping play styles due to map design, the ttk is also incredibly fast which makes the game easier for noobs.
Great video! I was waiting for you to make a video about AA. I wish you would have tested a few more things though- rotational AA in vertical situations (i.e. you are in a window and you don't see any enemy, an enemy suddenly falls from top to bottom of the window AA tracks them as they fall down), rotational AA at variable distances (I don't think measurements at only 10meters is a good enough metric, especially considering WZ engagement ranges), as well as rotational AA with various movement situations (only self moving, only enemy moving, both moving), as well as the impact of strafe speed vs. rotational magnitude (feels like faster strafe = stronger pull towards enemy center; very tangible with CW Mac10). It is definitely a whole shopping list but I would like to know these things to draw a fully accurate grasp of AA strengths, though your video does give us the baseline. To answer your questions - yes, I was surprised by the data; I thought the "stickiness" had definitely gotten stronger. I think the current state of Aim Assist is too strong - AA extends too far and rotational is too powerful. I play on controller, Xbox Series X. I also wish you would've commented on fragrant language people use like "aimlock" and "legal aimbot" etc., but I also see it is not your intent to "get political" with the video and just present the data. Great video!
100% there needs to be a more in depth test of the rotational aim assist. I played my first controller game a couple of days ago, someone ran past me and it tracked him and pulled my crosshair almost 90 degrees. The issue with it is the accuracy and time it takes to activate, which are both inhumanly
ACE, these parameters you set yourself on these tests, im not sure how you get to this ideas, but im sure of something, i cant feel that a like and a comment or even being subscribed with the bell thingy on is a good enough sort of compensation for the effort the duality the approach the study of many cod sources... you never cease to impress... what a expectacular channel... GREAT JOB!
I would of been curious to see you go into the aim resist of cold war in this video and see if any other nuances of aim assist had shifted over the years.
Great video! In other FPS communities, most of the controversy seems to come from using controller on pc. Could the FOV slider be increasing the effect of rotational aim assist when using a controller on pc? Also, could the scale aim assist with FOV setting have an effect as well?
no it doesnt FOV makes guns have less visual recoil. For example, if you put a sight on vanguard that has two levels of zoom, if you set it to the lower zoom your gun will feel like it has less recoil bc it essentially does the same thing as increaseing FOV
Yea fov has an affect on it because the aim assist bubble isnt forced to scale with fov. Thats why you rarely see anyone use fov aim assist scale on because the aa bubble gets so huge and makes it stupid easy to aim. Scaling should be forced in my opinion, especially if they want to balance out the playing field between every platform
@@Gunnr_ I thought it was more common to use scale? You get a bigger bubble without it, but that just means your aim assist is imprecise, it's slowed outside the character's hitbox and might make it slower to keep up with moving targets, or otherwise disrupt your aim. Maybe for newer players who often overcorrect and don't have much fine precision, but I can't imagine this would be a good thing for better players.
@@Adam-pk7go that's why I turned it off, made aiming to hard, tracking was impossible, if pretty much blocked you from getting your shots on the target because the bubble is so big, so in theory it should be stronger which is what these mnk players think but in reality its super inconvenient
Lots of comment complaining about aim assist getting stronger on a video quantitatively proving that aim assist HASN’T gotten stronger is peak COD community.
the simple fact of the matter is that the massive aim assist range combined with the recoil patterns that have become more and more predictable and improvable with attachments have both led to fully automatic guns beaming someone with ease, from a distance where in older cods it would’ve beeb hard to hit them with a sniper.
I die by headshot 70 percent of the time by controller players in Modern Warfare 2019 and I am not not exaggerating. It's almost as if the headshot hitbox for controller players expands to mid torso or something. Against a controller player if you're in tactical crouch, you're gonna get headshotted EVERY SINGLE TIME. I've been playing first person shooters since the early 90s, in a few cases competitively, so I'm no spring chicken. I've seen shit done by aim assist casuals in this game that I've never seen in all my time playing among the best players in the planet in some games as a keyboard and mouse player.
I do think the extended aim assist range was a nice change. Especially with the longer lines of sight you can find on maps such as Arklov Peak, Miami, and Sub Pens. Also it was probably a needed change if crossplay were to exist.
I mean the maps in MW2019 were huge and not to mention Warzone itself is a one massive Map. They had to extend it to even the odds vs mouse and keyboard players.
Bigger maps, battle royale, and you don't wanna give one platform an advantage at a certain range, that muddies up the already inconsistent system even more.
It's probably worth checking how AA scales with fps. I imagine AA has to use some form of motion vector which updates with every frame meaning higher fps gives an effect of stronger AA.
You should devise a test to see how rotation behaves in a "counter strafing" situation (enemy also moving, anti-parallel to you) and in a "quick change of direction" situation (enemy and you first moving in the same direction, with your sights centered on the enemy, then enemy abruptly strafes in the other direction).
@@TheXclusiveAce Camera lag might vary from game-to-game, and so might netcode lag. If you can ensure the enemy player's inputs are repeatable (for instance, by fitting a controller with a solenoid actuator to change the stick direction a certain amount at a certain speed), and if you just analyze from the shooter's perspective to subtract netcode or camera lag, should be much nore practically useful data than "changes my 360 degree turn time by 0.5% and the way I've chosen to measure it makes even large relative changes over a small portion of the screen completely irresolvable".
This is a really good video and clears up a lot of things but we all have to take into consideration that the reason why it feels/seems stonger is because everyone is now using dynamic rotation instead of standard. I have noticed on standard rotational aa seems to have the same feeling as older cods but when you switch to dynamic it feels 10x stronger... i wish there was a way to test this out but it would be very hard to control
There's no such thing as "Dynamic Aim Assist". Dynamic is a response curve setting that doesn't change aim assist at all. Standard and Black Ops are the only aim assist settings that have rotational aim assist and I was unable to detect any difference between the two.
Ah ok, that only applies to how fast your aim accelerates initially and it interacts with aim assist in the exact same manner so the results would be literally identical because I didn't start my timers until the acceleration had completed because that would skew the results and I'd no longer be tested aim assist, I'd be testing response curves.
As a KaM player I feel I lose a lot of gunfights to aim assist rather than the player. Random movements get easily tracking by the aim assist, where I may miss shots aim assist WILL land those shots.
I play on controller and I think with the addition of crossplay. The range of aim assist has been increased to help controllers compete with mouse and keyboard. It just makes sense.
Having played extensively with both input methods, I think AA on controller is simply better most of the time with these new ranges. I'm sure there could be a long discussion on how to change that, but I'd probably start at just slowing the game down as Ace mentioned in another recent vid about the games getting faster.
One of my biggest gripes with this era of cod is the range and scope of the maps. I feel gun fights are taking place over much longer distances now and spotting people at range is a requirement.
I think 100% FOV and FPS plays a factor with this. Ace is right in his testing and his testing is sound and great, but, as he said, there are so many factors to consider. Controller on PC with high frame rates and FOV changes are a huge piece of the puzzle too in my opinion. I'm also interested to see how aim assist works in different stances of combat, movement like crouch sliding, and if different weapons/attachments experience it in a different way (not just different weapon categories). I'm a firm believer in that aim assist is needed especially in a world where there is crossplay and I also believe that aim assist isn't overpowered in Call of Duty. I think that some games have done it wrong in many ways, but overall it's an important piece of the puzzle for console players and ultimately PC players are used to getting all the information and having more access to things that alter their gameplay then console players do. Enter console players with their aim assist and crossplay with aim assist on controllers and PC players are stuck in the shadow of what is actually happening.
I dont think its too strong or too weak, but it feels off sometimes, especially in Cold War. In that game, it feels like aim assist is reversed in certain situations, almost like aim resist
I completely agree with this I finished vanguard camo grind recently and went back to Cold War to do finish the camo grind and the aim assist is pretty off like it works and doesn’t work so I’m adjusting to that
Glad I’m not the only one who felt this. Cold War’s felt so strong to me that I had to bump my sensitivity way up to keep up with strafing targets. It was actually the primary reason I stopped playing the game
The issue is that it is inconsistant. Clear objects like some fences etc can block aim assist without blocking any visuals. Also if several enemies are close to each other but move different directions, the aim becomes very unpredictable. M&K users with no aim assist do not have these issues.
@@Timoastra This is very true. Especially the part with several enemies. You compensate recoil patterns and aim assist for enemy 1, which makes your aim and recoil management impossible and very often the opposite of your intention when enemy 2 comes into your line of sight. This happens so often, and I end up loosing to both because my aim bubble gets "locked" and bounce off target. This is also a big issue if the targets move in different directions, or if enemy 2 moves to the left while enemy 1 moves to the right.
In bo4 i had to turn it off in blackout, or else i could not change target mid-engagement if i was ¨glued¨ to the wrong enemy. Thats how strong it is in my opinion. Now i play m&k (since vanguard)
I think people feel that is changed because there is less consistency in warzone. Due to small bugs and updates it wasn't unusual to loose aim assist in some situations,areas of the maps, or even with certain weapons only. And also probably could be true the opposite, that maybe in some situations you could get an unintentionally stronger aim assist due to broken things in the game.
It’s not that it’s increased, it’s that it’s too strong to begin with. Even IW director has stated the average controller player has better stats than the average KBAM player. This is bedside Aim Assist Rotation is too strong.
As a mouse and keyboard player there are three glaring issues that need to be addressed if cross play is going to succeed. 1. Rotational aim assist needs to have a 200ms delay before it kicks in to simulate a human response time. It currently can instantly track changes in player movement which MKB can't compete with. 2. Aim punch needs to turn rotational aim assist off completely. What I see in killcams is that hitting a controller player makes their aim lock upper chest and not let go. At which point they hit you and you have to struggle immensely to keep your aim on target. This is incredibly frustrating when you hit then first and the game puts on the training wheels for them. 3. Stuns need to be either removed or reworked to actually hinder controller players to a similar level.
Let's just value the time, analytics and effort ace puts in to thinking of these testing methods and performing them. Also listening to opinions and testing based off viewers
I max prestiged in every cod on console from CoD4-BO3 then stopped playing. Built a PC and then eventually got back into CoD with MW 2019. Playing it on MnK and then occasionally tried going back to controller and that was when I noticed just how strong it was. I never noticed how much it did for you back when I played the old games when only using the controller.
Awesome work. My only issue with aim assist is when two enemies cross in front of me and it switches to the player I am not aiming at and throws me off altogether
that happened to me earlier in Cold War on KGB, super annoying imo, if you start shooting while aim assisted to someone, it shouldn't change the person it's assisting your aim with, until they are dead or you aim a good bit away from them/crouch/go prone.
@@enasnI99 that's not because of aim assist strength lol, it's because the devs can't be asked to make a good system so if there are multiple players nearby each other than the aim assist will constantly be changing between people. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
@@enasnI99 oh boy, looks like we have a PC Player here, the funniest thing to me about this is that i play on both PC and Console and i know you PC Players now are just talking shit because you're mad because i literally play both now lol. Cod and Battlefield on Console and Apex, Warzone, CSGO on PC and Aim Assist is not as strong as you guys wanna believe, since i go up against Aim Assist when playing Apex and Warzone. It does seem stronger in Warzone than it does in Apex, but Aim Assist in general is a thing that's here to stay and it doesn't make a bad player into a good player, that's just dumb and something that bad PC players wanna say because i outplay people on PC on Console a lot and i outplay people on Console when i'm on PC a lot too. If you're a good player, you generally outplay your opposition whether you're on PC/Console and whether you're going up against PC/Console players or not.
I'd like to believe the increase in range of the aim assist since MW19 had to do with balancing controller players with keyboard and mouse players. It can be debated whether it wasn't enough or too much balancing but some balancing was needed when you mix players from all platforms together.
I play on PC with keyboard and mouse and aim assist is hardly noticeable in MW19/CW/VG, but I still died plenty so I'd say it was at a good place. I didn't feel like I was really at a disadvantage. Sometimes I just had potato aim and that was all me. Aim assist wasn't a big deal tbh.
Stellar work Ace! Very interesting to see actual factual (at least more or less) data on this and not just feelings. I feel this would also explain why AR's is so much more prevalent for long range use in recent games, compared to earlier titles where snipers was the go-to.
In Vanguard on PS5 (at least for me) aim assist almost never works at any range. I may get one instance of it happening in a single match, then a bunch of matches with none at all. In Cold War it seemed mostly fine (usually), it helped sometimes - sometimes though it gets you killed.
My favorite aim assist was in zombies when it would just snap to the zombies instead of having to aim, I love mouse and keyboard but man was it fun to spam aim on zombies back in the day
I don't wanna sound like someone who says "I told you so" but while i did no testing, from how the games felt to me, other than Aim Assist ranges, it always felt like the aim assist strength was pretty similar in every game, i also thought that IW was the black sheep in that, because i remember it feeling weaker in that game, specifically, at least in my experiences.
I know it’s been a year, but an easier way to test this it to be inside a semi closed space, like a garage. You hug the wall and keep moving the left stick to the wall. Then a running target, or a walking target passes by, you can easily measure and see if aim assists sticks to target or not based on speed. You can use different weapons with different speeds now that we have values. At least to find the difference between default and black ops. I know it doesn’t apply to what you were trying to achieve here
I just did some impromptu testing in mw2 ps3 dont have any fancy stuff to dig deep. But I found the rough distance estimates which is different for each weapon type. Snipers of course have the most distance, what I would say is roughly 60 meters ads slowdown and ads auto rotate, both engage at this distance, however no auto rotate occurs during hipfire until you're closer to 15 meters. ARs have the next longest distance at around 40 meters. Hipfire auto rotate still occurs out to around 25 or 30 meters though. but I could also mention it would apear some weapon classes auto rotate is also stronger than others, ARs apear to be a weaker rotation group. Lmgs have the same distance for ads as ARs, but movement is much slower. Smgs pick up around 30 meters, but once again hipfire auto rotate only engages closer to 15 or 20m, but they have a stronger rotation, whether its because of the movement speed idk. Pistols have by far the worst aim assist having absolutely no aim assist until your withing the 15m that hipfire auto rotate engages, and it definitely appears to be weaker than an smgs rotation. Noting snipers rotation is also in the stronger group. The aim assist on certain weapons in mw2 had more range than anything tested up to cod mw19. And from what I can tell, the slowdown was also more, as well has being a smaller bubble just around the enemy player. But I'm just referencing what I can tell visually from what you just showed, what I remember from last time playing cold war, and what I see in mw2. All my distances are rough estimates, and went to wasteland unneccesarily.. honestly would have thought the range was longer, at least for slowdown because I regularly hit shots with accuracy at those longer distances, with snipers, ARs and smgs, I guess I just dont need it to nail those shots.
Just because I forgot. I had no way of knowing exactly what distance those were at, just my visual estimate of what the distance is, and the ratio between the numbers I gave is the most accurate part.
I think it's important to remember that aim assist doesn't exist in a vacuum. If, for instance, some games tend to have guns with more recoil compared to others, it's possible that people could think aim assist feels weaker in those games even if it is the same because it doesn't compensate as much for the gun kick or vice versa. I think it could be easy to conflate the two in practical experience. I think another interesting question would be how much has recoil changed over the course of CoD history. Because if we have the same aim assist with less recoil, then aim assist could feel relatively stronger because it has less to overcome. Movement and strafe movement speeds also potentially play a role in how strong aim assist feels.
You need to do a video on win based connection. They don’t keep you at a 1.0 win/loss with player balance. That’s why kids you smack one match will turn into cod pros the next match. Win based connection/throttling.
These past few COD games I feel like my aim assist has turned to aim resist. Not sure if I’m getting slow at my age or what but I have noticed I constantly shoot literally right next to players instead of hitting them.
You should redo these tests, plus throw in some sort of "controller effectiveness test". I know it'll change an extra couple variables, but with the massive amount of options to increase controller gameplay (deadzones, response curves etc). These new qol changes made using a controller much easier plus with the already strong AA (especially at range) it makes using a controller much deadlier vs pre 2019. Imo AA is slightly too strong and puts many players at a disadvantage unless you're within like the top 10% of mnk players.
People forget how op the aim assist was in games like cod 4 where in the campaign they told you that you pretty much just have to spam the zoom in button or scope button and like no matter where the other player where on your screen you pretty much just auto aim on it, I just recently went back to my ps3 and plugged in cod 4
Does PC have less aim assist or more assist than console? Console players have the internal aim assist set to “0.6” in the game files, a value that defines the strength of the sticky reticle effect. If you're playing on a controller on PC, you'll get a watered-down version of aim assist, set to “0.4,” which is far less than it would be on console.
A big problem with the test is not accounting for frames. Go cap your frames at 60 or whatever the old games were and you'll see why AA feels stronger.
“Aim assist used to be a lot weaker back in the day” “We’ll I’m going to test it once and for all by only testing the newest cods” IW was the oldest cod tested and did have weaker AA. I think it got strong when jet packs came in to keep up with the movement
Is there anyway you could test if the average range of engagement has changed? I feel like there are way more long ranged fights because of the maps. I know there are outliers in the old games but in general they had to be closer engagements. Think about MW3 and BO2 specifically. It’s hard to think of common instances where enemies are super far away. Even when accounting for the last 2 cods letting you change FOV, it still feels like enemies are smaller/farther away on average (I played with the lowest fov just to make sure it wasn’t that, and mw19 doesn’t even let you change fov)
I don't think you can honestly do these tests without accurate data from the devs and the game engine itself. You are really testing one specific scenario, and the initial point of reference is based on an assumption. It's not a bad video, you did the best you could with the tools at your disposal, and found some creative solutions to test in, but the margin of error for something like this is enormous. There is also latency, render latency and frame times, actual ping to take into account. Like you said in your intro AA is a fairly complex system.
The reason the majority feel it has not gotten stronger because it would force them to do some introspection and realize their "cracked" aim is actually mostly the code doing it for them.
i’m a KBM player and i have no problem with controllers having aim assist cuz they need it literally to keep track of a target flying across their screen. the problem i have is when timmy’s sit in a corner with a fire shotty and when i fly across their screen up close, their aim is stuck on me and boom im dead in one shot to my feet😂. i’d say only keep rotational aim assist because players with movement will prosper rather than players who sit in corners and abuse the perfect tracking of a close, moving target.
KBM player here and I've noticed this as well. Playing against an aim assist controller is fine at short, medium and long ranges, but close quarter shotgun range is when the controller advantage is very noticeable. Small maps were borderline unplayable for me before the shotty nerf. Those guys would just bounce around one-shot hip firing with near perfect accuracy. Another instance of aim assist advantage over KBM is when you essentially run past or bump into a player at very close quarters. Unless your flick and reaction is incredibly fast, in the time it will take you to even pick up the other player their aim assist will have locked on you. My E/D is currently 2.3, but I feel like an actual bot in those types of encounters. My win rate in those fights is much lower than other ranges.
The "problem" with aim assist is that sometimes you don't have to see the enemy for the assist to activate and that means you just have to "feel" to react and shoot. It often happens that players don't see the target for X reason but they felt the assist and react to it. "Putrid Parasite has left your party". =(
@@aziznh5229 lmao maybe to you personally but I see it all the time on my teammates who even say they didn't see him but felt it. Plus it happens way more than you think-when people are pre aiming, holding a corner and the aim assist reacts JUST before the person peeks-makes all the difference in who wins and who loses the gunfight. I also find it funny that you so confidently said "that's simply not true" and followed that up with something subjective that I could easily say "that's simply not true"
So I started playing MW19 recently again after a year or so of not playing at all and AA isn't working at all for me now. It's an absolute nightmare to stay on target and also to not overrun your target without turning sense down so much that I'm completely ineffective at getting the first shot and everything else outside of aiming. It's just such a small range of motion on the sticks to make tiny adjustments with a decent sensitivity. I've tweaked settings a lot in game plus the elite 2 controller settings I've gotten marginally better with it, idk maybe on the new game I'll be better for it if it has AA again if I don't give up before then. But as an average casual player the thing is virtually unplayable without it for me lol
imo the initial snap feels insane, like I never played consoles or with a controller but I can pick it up and frag out, yet cant even look the direction I want to walk half the time :/ not sure if its always been that way, I've played since cod2 but always PC
Did you test it in WZ vs multi-player? I'd be curious to know if it's the same. Learning to play on M&K has been pretty frustrating getting gunned by dudes I'd have otherwise destroyed on controller, but with that said, feel like good controller players would be able to adapt and be just as good with less rotational aim assist.
I don't see why the ratings would be different from warzone to multiplayer. As I'm sure it's a core coded setting per game. Meaning I highly doubt the devs would go through the time to set a different percentage for one game mode to another.
Please do a new test on this in Modern Warfare 2. As of now, it feels as strong that it's boardering to auto aim.... Does console players think this is fair? If the goal is to alienate pc/keyboard/mouse players, they are certainly succeeding, and if it's not changed there will only be console players on MW2 pretty soon
I wasn’t surprised by the results. I knew that the aim assist range was changed and it makes sense considering that MW2019 had Ground War and Warzone. I really hate how PC players are saying the strength of aim assist (not the ranges) has gotten stronger because almost none of them are actually testing it correctly or has a very small sample size.
Wish you dusted off the 360. would love to see some of these comparisons you’ve been doing to BO2 and MW2. Don’t need to do testing on all the old cods but the two highest regarded ones would be nice
A while later, i've felt like mw2 and mw3 has a lot more aim slowdown. In addition I could be wrong about this, but didn't the aim assist bubble used to be around a character and not based on camera position?(with this i mean that the bubble feels bigger on further distances because the enemy characcters will be smaller in a bigger radius)
I feel you need 2 players to judge AA, When the other player is moving/ jumping/whatever past you it is crazy strong. I play without AA on controller typically, but when I do play it it feels nutty strong in some instances.
@@Sanctifi3dYT in some instances I can flick to multiple people more quickly, but flinch mid combat is a huge draw back. Plus I just hate the idea of the game playing for me. Never used AA as a console gamer, never will.
@@TheXclusiveAce ahh right. is there a way to visually show how they are different in game versus just a graph? Also I’ve wondered how black ops a.i is different as well
the answer is probably just that it would've taken too long, but why did you omit the black ops games (3,4, and cw) from the slowdown and rotational tests?
You could have done testing on the old Cods, on PC the clients like Plutonium and Iw4x have controller support with aim assist ported directly from the old consoles.
What happens when the enemy moves in different ways? Is flinch aim assisted? When you melee, it jerks to the target like aimbot. Does the same happen when bullets are fired or any other situation that damage would follow? Is recoil lessened by any irregular movement, such as “jitter aim” that wasn’t in past CoD’s? Have past CoD titles seen updates between the time we loved them and now that may affect the modern results of these tests claiming things were present that may not have been? Is aim assist cheating, yet? When will it be?
This is why a lot of mk players use xim etc. Native mouse keyboard on console actually puts you at a disadvantage over controller players. Aim assist is just too powerful, it gives you hints that enemies are there even when you can't see them.. it's like having an extra perk even forgetting about getting the actual aim assist as it gives you that awareness of players being there...
In MW19 currently my character would suddenly change directions whilst running or standing still, I thought it was a controller/game glitch, then I realized that the aim assist was literally working through walls. Sometimes I'd throw a semtex aiming at 12:00 but as it leaves my hand it is automatically changes the aim to 10:00 This started happening to me in the update before the last one or the one before that.
Yup. Would turn off Aim Assist when I could. Passing enemy players would pull aim towards them. I think this was CoD 4 or MW2 on the 360. It was enough to pull my aim about an inch from my PoV.
I’d assume their adjustment to the range on it was mainly a change they made for warzone (because of the size of the map) that just stuck in the engine, if they could separate the 2 and have one range for warzone and another more old school range for multiplayer that would be good, the range that you can beam on mp now is crazy, especially with smgs, I remember in bo3 on breach not even having it from one side of mid map to the other with smgs (window to heady glitch) which wasn’t even that long of a range, and that makes sense, every other part may be the same as it’s always been, but as a controller player I do think that range adjustment doesn’t suit mp at all and I can understand everyone on Botha sides frustrations with aim assist :/ , makes noobs camping back map more of an issue for one thing lol, and makes it a lot easier for good players to gunny at crazy range too and so on
Interesting but I would also like to see a test involving CW and BO4 because for me if feels like aim assist is stronger in Treyarch CoDs compared to IW’s CoDs.
Wish you would’ve done it fr bo2, I’ve played so many vids and bo2 almost feels like I can’t hit my shots either because 1. The stick acceleration jolts over the target Or 2. Because the aim assist bubble is so strong I can’t even get to my target
I understand why you chose your rotational aim assist testing technique when it comes purely to data collection. But with rotational aim assist also tracking the target's 3D movements (jumps and falls), there is another whole element that may not be the same across titles. Strafing into a wall and having a player run across your screen will quite literally make aim assist aim for you. Witnessing rotational aim assist perfectly tracking the arch of a jump all because the player was touching their left stick is pretty demotivating for a KBM player who needs to rely 100% on their human movements to track a target.
The question was "is aim assist stronger than it was" not "is it fair", so I think the testing method is pretty good and does answer the question, yes it got better since it's about the same but applies at longer ranges. As for "is it fair?" it's a more opinionated debate, I would argue that it is not fair (strictly the rotational part), but there isn't hard data to back it up.
@@underman77 Its objectively not fair. Having the computer automate your aiming actions is by definition an aim bot. If both players don't have their actions automated in the same way, then its not fair. I understand rotational is meant to help the fact that a controller player must move their thumb an incredibly long distance to begin turning the other direction when someone strafes, and maybe it is the only answer for this problem. It however makes strafing almost completely useless vs them and makes close range gun fights extremely easy in comparison to using a MKB, especially in the hands of a very skilled player. If fairness is desired, the only solution is to not match controller users with MKB users.
@@Mcegan69 you dont even fully understand the reason for aim assist to begin with it seems. Its not just about the time it takes for a thumbstick to go from left to right but that its extremely hard to make precise movement on a thumbstick because the full range of a thumbstick is so small. Controller players have to balance out turn speed at the cost of precision or precision at the cost of turn speed. Something mnk doesnt have to do. And with cod being a extremely reactive shooter, high sens is mandatory.
@@itswalid lmao are you only talking about WZ? Cause in MP let me tell you-having an advantage in tracking someone 100+ meters away doesn't matter if the line of sight is 50 meters max and they can just aim assist 3-4 shot you with an Mp5 or 2-3 with an UZI off the slide cancel... it might offset it, but that is in no means fair. Edit: max
You definitely should have tested having the enemy move and seeing how well it tracked them. This is the major reason aim assist has gotten significantly better
I'm glad I was right. All I gotta say. I think it's even less going further back, but getting mapped by SMGs now a days in almost every gunfight was literally unheard of in MW2/MW3 days.
CoD4's looks like MWR from what I looked at from my old copy.
This was majorly due to recoil etc as well, even though for a while the damage was super high
thats because guns had more recoil back in the day and some alot of SMGs did not have grip.
Aim assist rotation doesnt seem to have been increased though.
@@ShengYu1995 Go look at a MW3 MP7 lol, there was no literally no recoil at all.
Very interesting results. Its also important to point out that in the games with weaker ranges, aim assist will still activate in 90% of your gunfights, because it's pretty rare for engagements to stretch that far in multiplayer
I’d assume that’s mainly for warzone as aiming at 100+ meters is far easier on pc.
They ain't going to like this one
are u really in faze tho
Nah, I'm cool with it. Just happy to get to play with you guys!
@@justno8019 yes, that's the REAL Jev
As a long term PC player, I find these results interesting. Since crossplay was introduced, I always seem to have a "better game" when crossplay is either turned off, or the lobby is mostly k/b & mouse players.
Well that makes sense. Because it is the same as playing against aimbotting kb&m players. If you don't need to play against people with inhumane abilities you will do better haha. Main reason i quit FPS games is the aim assist becoming insane.
Maybe console players are more used to going against console players, and kbm are more used to kbm. Something about the way people play based on their input device! Maybe kbm players like to keep their distance while console players get in your face.
@@awepossum1059 Maybe console players have 0ms reaction times due to aim assist.
A better test of rotational aim assist would have been to be running into a wall while adsing and having an enemy run through your line of sight and see how much it changes. You could measure it in the same way with degree changes of the arrow on the mini map.
Well there was no cross play before MW2019 so that's probably why people felt it got stronger. As an m&k player I do see the advantage of AA, especially in close to mid range gun fights in WZ.
Yup. It's always been busted, it's just thay cross play made it shine. And Activision can't do anything till Microsoft adds a gyro on their controllers 💀
I refuse to play these AAA garbage cross input games. Not going to put in the effort to use raw input to get beamed by some no skill 12yo with an Xbox controller.
Mnk have a lot of advantages over a console player though
You know i remember noticing in MW 2019, how my sensitivity would slow down and I couldn't see an enemy at all. I guess they were just so far away to see, but it was still picking up. I guess I hope they tone down the range. Maybe even per weapon type. Like SMGs are much shorter then Assault rifles or something.
I swear this is so damned infuriating when the aim assist tries to "assist" through a wall and throws of your aim by shifting it to the left or right because it is trying to assist with a moving target coming around a corner or popping up in that window you were just aimed at so you could kill them when they popped up. Or worse when it tries to assist with your aim but not on the guy your aiming at but the person behind them.
@@aurolineblack3692 I remember this happening on blackops 1, you could literally aim against a wall and find where someone was corner camping.
ace never fails to impress me with all his testing. he was definitely a data analyst or something before youtube
He actually lived on a ranch and looked after livestock with his parents. I remember from an old q&a he did. Maybe he gets it from calculating cattle numbers lol
Ace IS a data analyst on RUclips. He has very impressive testing techniques. He is also critical and thorough in his analyses. That he then uses to come to logical conclusions. That’s not just an analyst in my opinion but a very impressive one.
Ikr, I would have never thought of these methods.
A thing I've noticed is how soon does the aim assist kicks in. I've seen videos of the aim assist activating the instant it sees a pixel of the character model. In addition to that, some enemy strafing testing would probably be warranted.
The most broken thing about aim assist is that it doesn't track a character model though. It's reacting to the hit box. When Warzone and MW19 was experiencing massive desync issues, kbm players would be shooting through character models while controller players would shoot thin air and get hitmarkers. The servers do a mostly good job keeping the hit box near the character model though. In the instances you're talking about, someone trying to slide/jump around a corner will most likely die because although they have the element of surprise, aim assists reaction time is instant and will begin the tracking process before the player even realizes there's a person there. This is also very frustrating for KBM players because it decreases the distance the controller player has to move their crosshair once they finally react after AA activates. So if someone is holding their crosshair on a corner and a player performs a 10 meter strafe jump, the controller player will only have to move their crosshair 2-5 meters once they react instead of tracking all 10 meters of the jump like a kbm player would.
I imagine the range from 2019 and on is because of the drastically larger maps compared to previous years
Yeh idk why people are shocked at that. We literally have ground war and a giant BR map used for spec ops.
It got increased because COD became cross platform with PC. Nothing to do with map size
@@n0ddy6 a fraction of pc players have this type of aim, that’s the problem
They overestimated the aiming ability of the average mnk player.
I’m going to assume the reason the ranges for aim assist grew exponentially starting with MW was to account for crossplay with PC/m&k to help close the gap between the two peripherals
and due to groundwar/dirtybomb/map size.
@@orionl7406 Could be as well
I disagree. When mw was released the developers said themselves the game was made with noobs in mind, they designed the maps around making the game easier new players. Everything they down in mw was to make the game easier for newer players and I think the increased aim assist was also to make the game easier for noobs.
@@astute1655 Okay so then what about Cold War & Vanguard?
@@MetalZeroFour what about them? Aim assist isn’t effective at as far as a range as MW2019. Cold War was less noob friendly and followed more of a traditional CoD route, Cold War played more like traditional CoD with good balanced 3 lane maps (it was less noob friendly). Vanguard went back to MW2019s approach and promoted camping play styles due to map design, the ttk is also incredibly fast which makes the game easier for noobs.
Great video! I was waiting for you to make a video about AA. I wish you would have tested a few more things though- rotational AA in vertical situations (i.e. you are in a window and you don't see any enemy, an enemy suddenly falls from top to bottom of the window AA tracks them as they fall down), rotational AA at variable distances (I don't think measurements at only 10meters is a good enough metric, especially considering WZ engagement ranges), as well as rotational AA with various movement situations (only self moving, only enemy moving, both moving), as well as the impact of strafe speed vs. rotational magnitude (feels like faster strafe = stronger pull towards enemy center; very tangible with CW Mac10). It is definitely a whole shopping list but I would like to know these things to draw a fully accurate grasp of AA strengths, though your video does give us the baseline.
To answer your questions - yes, I was surprised by the data; I thought the "stickiness" had definitely gotten stronger. I think the current state of Aim Assist is too strong - AA extends too far and rotational is too powerful. I play on controller, Xbox Series X. I also wish you would've commented on fragrant language people use like "aimlock" and "legal aimbot" etc., but I also see it is not your intent to "get political" with the video and just present the data.
Great video!
Rotational against targets falling down is really bad, it will generally not actually help you and just throw you off
100% there needs to be a more in depth test of the rotational aim assist. I played my first controller game a couple of days ago, someone ran past me and it tracked him and pulled my crosshair almost 90 degrees. The issue with it is the accuracy and time it takes to activate, which are both inhumanly
ACE, these parameters you set yourself on these tests, im not sure how you get to this ideas, but im sure of something, i cant feel that a like and a comment or even being subscribed with the bell thingy on is a good enough sort of compensation for the effort the duality the approach the study of many cod sources... you never cease to impress... what a expectacular channel... GREAT JOB!
I would of been curious to see you go into the aim resist of cold war in this video and see if any other nuances of aim assist had shifted over the years.
Great video! In other FPS communities, most of the controversy seems to come from using controller on pc. Could the FOV slider be increasing the effect of rotational aim assist when using a controller on pc? Also, could the scale aim assist with FOV setting have an effect as well?
no it doesnt FOV makes guns have less visual recoil. For example, if you put a sight on vanguard that has two levels of zoom, if you set it to the lower zoom your gun will feel like it has less recoil bc it essentially does the same thing as increaseing FOV
Fov + aim assit = OP
Yea fov has an affect on it because the aim assist bubble isnt forced to scale with fov. Thats why you rarely see anyone use fov aim assist scale on because the aa bubble gets so huge and makes it stupid easy to aim. Scaling should be forced in my opinion, especially if they want to balance out the playing field between every platform
@@Gunnr_ I thought it was more common to use scale? You get a bigger bubble without it, but that just means your aim assist is imprecise, it's slowed outside the character's hitbox and might make it slower to keep up with moving targets, or otherwise disrupt your aim. Maybe for newer players who often overcorrect and don't have much fine precision, but I can't imagine this would be a good thing for better players.
@@Adam-pk7go that's why I turned it off, made aiming to hard, tracking was impossible, if pretty much blocked you from getting your shots on the target because the bubble is so big, so in theory it should be stronger which is what these mnk players think but in reality its super inconvenient
Lots of comment complaining about aim assist getting stronger on a video quantitatively proving that aim assist HASN’T gotten stronger is peak COD community.
No
It’s peak “I haven’t watched the video yet”
It has got stronger though.
the simple fact of the matter is that the massive aim assist range combined with the recoil patterns that have become more and more predictable and improvable with attachments have both led to fully automatic guns beaming someone with ease, from a distance where in older cods it would’ve beeb hard to hit them with a sniper.
I die by headshot 70 percent of the time by controller players in Modern Warfare 2019 and I am not not exaggerating. It's almost as if the headshot hitbox for controller players expands to mid torso or something. Against a controller player if you're in tactical crouch, you're gonna get headshotted EVERY SINGLE TIME.
I've been playing first person shooters since the early 90s, in a few cases competitively, so I'm no spring chicken. I've seen shit done by aim assist casuals in this game that I've never seen in all my time playing among the best players in the planet in some games as a keyboard and mouse player.
I love the science experiment videos like these.
Ace proves to be really smart and creative with his methods.
I do think the extended aim assist range was a nice change. Especially with the longer lines of sight you can find on maps such as Arklov Peak, Miami, and Sub Pens. Also it was probably a needed change if crossplay were to exist.
I mean the maps in MW2019 were huge and not to mention Warzone itself is a one massive Map. They had to extend it to even the odds vs mouse and keyboard players.
@@CCPvirus141 it must suck to suck
@@mcbonkytron8411 MW2019
Bigger maps, battle royale, and you don't wanna give one platform an advantage at a certain range, that muddies up the already inconsistent system even more.
spits aim asist for ppl who cant aim get guud
It's probably worth checking how AA scales with fps. I imagine AA has to use some form of motion vector which updates with every frame meaning higher fps gives an effect of stronger AA.
You should devise a test to see how rotation behaves in a "counter strafing" situation (enemy also moving, anti-parallel to you) and in a "quick change of direction" situation (enemy and you first moving in the same direction, with your sights centered on the enemy, then enemy abruptly strafes in the other direction).
Nearly impossible to properly control all of the variables for that to collect valid data
@@TheXclusiveAce Camera lag might vary from game-to-game, and so might netcode lag. If you can ensure the enemy player's inputs are repeatable (for instance, by fitting a controller with a solenoid actuator to change the stick direction a certain amount at a certain speed), and if you just analyze from the shooter's perspective to subtract netcode or camera lag, should be much nore practically useful data than "changes my 360 degree turn time by 0.5% and the way I've chosen to measure it makes even large relative changes over a small portion of the screen completely irresolvable".
@@Machine1136 well then you do it
@@YodaSmash And will I get fat RUclips money in reward?
This is a really good video and clears up a lot of things but we all have to take into consideration that the reason why it feels/seems stonger is because everyone is now using dynamic rotation instead of standard. I have noticed on standard rotational aa seems to have the same feeling as older cods but when you switch to dynamic it feels 10x stronger... i wish there was a way to test this out but it would be very hard to control
There's no such thing as "Dynamic Aim Assist". Dynamic is a response curve setting that doesn't change aim assist at all. Standard and Black Ops are the only aim assist settings that have rotational aim assist and I was unable to detect any difference between the two.
@@TheXclusiveAce when i was talking about the rotation I ment the response curve sorry I should have worded it better
Ah ok, that only applies to how fast your aim accelerates initially and it interacts with aim assist in the exact same manner so the results would be literally identical because I didn't start my timers until the acceleration had completed because that would skew the results and I'd no longer be tested aim assist, I'd be testing response curves.
@@TheXclusiveAce ohhhhhh makes since thanks for clearing that up and the work you put into this!
As a KaM player I feel I lose a lot of gunfights to aim assist rather than the player. Random movements get easily tracking by the aim assist, where I may miss shots aim assist WILL land those shots.
I play on controller and I think with the addition of crossplay. The range of aim assist has been increased to help controllers compete with mouse and keyboard. It just makes sense.
For new players to have an easier time.
Having played extensively with both input methods, I think AA on controller is simply better most of the time with these new ranges. I'm sure there could be a long discussion on how to change that, but I'd probably start at just slowing the game down as Ace mentioned in another recent vid about the games getting faster.
One of my biggest gripes with this era of cod is the range and scope of the maps. I feel gun fights are taking place over much longer distances now and spotting people at range is a requirement.
I think 100% FOV and FPS plays a factor with this. Ace is right in his testing and his testing is sound and great, but, as he said, there are so many factors to consider. Controller on PC with high frame rates and FOV changes are a huge piece of the puzzle too in my opinion. I'm also interested to see how aim assist works in different stances of combat, movement like crouch sliding, and if different weapons/attachments experience it in a different way (not just different weapon categories). I'm a firm believer in that aim assist is needed especially in a world where there is crossplay and I also believe that aim assist isn't overpowered in Call of Duty. I think that some games have done it wrong in many ways, but overall it's an important piece of the puzzle for console players and ultimately PC players are used to getting all the information and having more access to things that alter their gameplay then console players do. Enter console players with their aim assist and crossplay with aim assist on controllers and PC players are stuck in the shadow of what is actually happening.
I dont think its too strong or too weak, but it feels off sometimes, especially in Cold War.
In that game, it feels like aim assist is reversed in certain situations, almost like aim resist
I completely agree with this I finished vanguard camo grind recently and went back to Cold War to do finish the camo grind and the aim assist is pretty off like it works and doesn’t work so I’m adjusting to that
Glad I’m not the only one who felt this. Cold War’s felt so strong to me that I had to bump my sensitivity way up to keep up with strafing targets. It was actually the primary reason I stopped playing the game
Literally it’s so weird because I’m almost every other cod aim assist works fine I don’t know what they did with Cold War to wreck it
The issue is that it is inconsistant. Clear objects like some fences etc can block aim assist without blocking any visuals. Also if several enemies are close to each other but move different directions, the aim becomes very unpredictable. M&K users with no aim assist do not have these issues.
@@Timoastra This is very true. Especially the part with several enemies. You compensate recoil patterns and aim assist for enemy 1, which makes your aim and recoil management impossible and very often the opposite of your intention when enemy 2 comes into your line of sight. This happens so often, and I end up loosing to both because my aim bubble gets "locked" and bounce off target. This is also a big issue if the targets move in different directions, or if enemy 2 moves to the left while enemy 1 moves to the right.
In bo4 i had to turn it off in blackout, or else i could not change target mid-engagement if i was ¨glued¨ to the wrong enemy. Thats how strong it is in my opinion. Now i play m&k (since vanguard)
I think people feel that is changed because there is less consistency in warzone. Due to small bugs and updates it wasn't unusual to loose aim assist in some situations,areas of the maps, or even with certain weapons only. And also probably could be true the opposite, that maybe in some situations you could get an unintentionally stronger aim assist due to broken things in the game.
damn your good, i was trying to guess how you'd measure rotational and i didn't even think of the minimap lol. great vid thx for sharing the results
It’s not that it’s increased, it’s that it’s too strong to begin with.
Even IW director has stated the average controller player has better stats than the average KBAM player. This is bedside Aim Assist Rotation is too strong.
As a mouse and keyboard player there are three glaring issues that need to be addressed if cross play is going to succeed.
1. Rotational aim assist needs to have a 200ms delay before it kicks in to simulate a human response time. It currently can instantly track changes in player movement which MKB can't compete with.
2. Aim punch needs to turn rotational aim assist off completely. What I see in killcams is that hitting a controller player makes their aim lock upper chest and not let go. At which point they hit you and you have to struggle immensely to keep your aim on target. This is incredibly frustrating when you hit then first and the game puts on the training wheels for them.
3. Stuns need to be either removed or reworked to actually hinder controller players to a similar level.
Greatly appreciate your analysis .. I’ll also like watching you play gaining insights to how to play multiplayer maps
Let's just value the time, analytics and effort ace puts in to thinking of these testing methods and performing them. Also listening to opinions and testing based off viewers
I max prestiged in every cod on console from CoD4-BO3 then stopped playing. Built a PC and then eventually got back into CoD with MW 2019. Playing it on MnK and then occasionally tried going back to controller and that was when I noticed just how strong it was. I never noticed how much it did for you back when I played the old games when only using the controller.
Awesome work. My only issue with aim assist is when two enemies cross in front of me and it switches to the player I am not aiming at and throws me off altogether
that happened to me earlier in Cold War on KGB, super annoying imo, if you start shooting while aim assisted to someone, it shouldn't change the person it's assisting your aim with, until they are dead or you aim a good bit away from them/crouch/go prone.
lol that's your only issue with it? Must be cause it benefits you 90% of the time
@@DeadSpacedOut that's how strong the assist is...
@@enasnI99 that's not because of aim assist strength lol, it's because the devs can't be asked to make a good system so if there are multiple players nearby each other than the aim assist will constantly be changing between people. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
@@enasnI99 oh boy, looks like we have a PC Player here, the funniest thing to me about this is that i play on both PC and Console and i know you PC Players now are just talking shit because you're mad because i literally play both now lol. Cod and Battlefield on Console and Apex, Warzone, CSGO on PC and Aim Assist is not as strong as you guys wanna believe, since i go up against Aim Assist when playing Apex and Warzone. It does seem stronger in Warzone than it does in Apex, but Aim Assist in general is a thing that's here to stay and it doesn't make a bad player into a good player, that's just dumb and something that bad PC players wanna say because i outplay people on PC on Console a lot and i outplay people on Console when i'm on PC a lot too. If you're a good player, you generally outplay your opposition whether you're on PC/Console and whether you're going up against PC/Console players or not.
I'd like to believe the increase in range of the aim assist since MW19 had to do with balancing controller players with keyboard and mouse players. It can be debated whether it wasn't enough or too much balancing but some balancing was needed when you mix players from all platforms together.
I play on PC with keyboard and mouse and aim assist is hardly noticeable in MW19/CW/VG, but I still died plenty so I'd say it was at a good place. I didn't feel like I was really at a disadvantage. Sometimes I just had potato aim and that was all me. Aim assist wasn't a big deal tbh.
@@Beowulf891 aim assist will track through a wall it needs a nerf
Stellar work Ace! Very interesting to see actual factual (at least more or less) data on this and not just feelings. I feel this would also explain why AR's is so much more prevalent for long range use in recent games, compared to earlier titles where snipers was the go-to.
In Vanguard on PS5 (at least for me) aim assist almost never works at any range. I may get one instance of it happening in a single match, then a bunch of matches with none at all.
In Cold War it seemed mostly fine (usually), it helped sometimes - sometimes though it gets you killed.
I knew xAce was gonna put this one out. Keep up the work my guy!!
My favorite aim assist was in zombies when it would just snap to the zombies instead of having to aim, I love mouse and keyboard but man was it fun to spam aim on zombies back in the day
I don't wanna sound like someone who says "I told you so" but while i did no testing, from how the games felt to me, other than Aim Assist ranges, it always felt like the aim assist strength was pretty similar in every game, i also thought that IW was the black sheep in that, because i remember it feeling weaker in that game, specifically, at least in my experiences.
I know it’s been a year, but an easier way to test this it to be inside a semi closed space, like a garage. You hug the wall and keep moving the left stick to the wall.
Then a running target, or a walking target passes by, you can easily measure and see if aim assists sticks to target or not based on speed.
You can use different weapons with different speeds now that we have values.
At least to find the difference between default and black ops.
I know it doesn’t apply to what you were trying to achieve here
damn, this kinda lines up with ex pros aches take asking for a range nerf.
great video. really wish you had included smg ranges tho
Gotta love how activision thinks every keyboard and mouse player has the aiming ability of baranox.
the minimap thing was super clever, well done
I just did some impromptu testing in mw2 ps3 dont have any fancy stuff to dig deep. But I found the rough distance estimates which is different for each weapon type. Snipers of course have the most distance, what I would say is roughly 60 meters ads slowdown and ads auto rotate, both engage at this distance, however no auto rotate occurs during hipfire until you're closer to 15 meters. ARs have the next longest distance at around 40 meters. Hipfire auto rotate still occurs out to around 25 or 30 meters though. but I could also mention it would apear some weapon classes auto rotate is also stronger than others, ARs apear to be a weaker rotation group. Lmgs have the same distance for ads as ARs, but movement is much slower. Smgs pick up around 30 meters, but once again hipfire auto rotate only engages closer to 15 or 20m, but they have a stronger rotation, whether its because of the movement speed idk. Pistols have by far the worst aim assist having absolutely no aim assist until your withing the 15m that hipfire auto rotate engages, and it definitely appears to be weaker than an smgs rotation. Noting snipers rotation is also in the stronger group. The aim assist on certain weapons in mw2 had more range than anything tested up to cod mw19. And from what I can tell, the slowdown was also more, as well has being a smaller bubble just around the enemy player. But I'm just referencing what I can tell visually from what you just showed, what I remember from last time playing cold war, and what I see in mw2. All my distances are rough estimates, and went to wasteland unneccesarily.. honestly would have thought the range was longer, at least for slowdown because I regularly hit shots with accuracy at those longer distances, with snipers, ARs and smgs, I guess I just dont need it to nail those shots.
Just because I forgot. I had no way of knowing exactly what distance those were at, just my visual estimate of what the distance is, and the ratio between the numbers I gave is the most accurate part.
Só assim pro Tony parar de chorar. Conteúdo de qualidade 🔥
I think it's important to remember that aim assist doesn't exist in a vacuum. If, for instance, some games tend to have guns with more recoil compared to others, it's possible that people could think aim assist feels weaker in those games even if it is the same because it doesn't compensate as much for the gun kick or vice versa. I think it could be easy to conflate the two in practical experience. I think another interesting question would be how much has recoil changed over the course of CoD history. Because if we have the same aim assist with less recoil, then aim assist could feel relatively stronger because it has less to overcome. Movement and strafe movement speeds also potentially play a role in how strong aim assist feels.
Tbf when I think of 'older' CoD games I'm thinking all CoDs up until AW that signed a new era for me with the advanced movement and all
You need to do a video on win based connection. They don’t keep you at a 1.0 win/loss with player balance. That’s why kids you smack one match will turn into cod pros the next match. Win based connection/throttling.
These past few COD games I feel like my aim assist has turned to aim resist. Not sure if I’m getting slow at my age or what but I have noticed I constantly shoot literally right next to players instead of hitting them.
Yep, I completely agree. Especially with Cold War. In MW2019, though, I've had no problems with aim assist.
@@kdog350 same here. I’ve noticed it started with Cold War and now in Vanguard
Yeah definitely the last couple of years aim assist seems to just simply randomly not work
Ace, just wanted to say I appreciate your detailed breakdowns
You should redo these tests, plus throw in some sort of "controller effectiveness test". I know it'll change an extra couple variables, but with the massive amount of options to increase controller gameplay (deadzones, response curves etc).
These new qol changes made using a controller much easier plus with the already strong AA (especially at range) it makes using a controller much deadlier vs pre 2019. Imo AA is slightly too strong and puts many players at a disadvantage unless you're within like the top 10% of mnk players.
People forget how op the aim assist was in games like cod 4 where in the campaign they told you that you pretty much just have to spam the zoom in button or scope button and like no matter where the other player where on your screen you pretty much just auto aim on it, I just recently went back to my ps3 and plugged in cod 4
The campaign has much stronger AA than MP.
@@deathtrooper2048 ye thats why I said in campaign
Does PC have less aim assist or more assist than console?
Console players have the internal aim assist set to “0.6” in the game files, a value that defines the strength of the sticky reticle effect. If you're playing on a controller on PC, you'll get a watered-down version of aim assist, set to “0.4,” which is far less than it would be on console.
A big problem with the test is not accounting for frames. Go cap your frames at 60 or whatever the old games were and you'll see why AA feels stronger.
What a fantastic video. So much high quality effort. Well done
“Aim assist used to be a lot weaker back in the day”
“We’ll I’m going to test it once and for all by only testing the newest cods”
IW was the oldest cod tested and did have weaker AA. I think it got strong when jet packs came in to keep up with the movement
How does this make sense if it was weaker in IW. Also cod4 remastered was tested and the game was copy and pasted so your claim is incorrect
Is there anyway you could test if the average range of engagement has changed? I feel like there are way more long ranged fights because of the maps. I know there are outliers in the old games but in general they had to be closer engagements. Think about MW3 and BO2 specifically. It’s hard to think of common instances where enemies are super far away. Even when accounting for the last 2 cods letting you change FOV, it still feels like enemies are smaller/farther away on average (I played with the lowest fov just to make sure it wasn’t that, and mw19 doesn’t even let you change fov)
I don't think you can honestly do these tests without accurate data from the devs and the game engine itself. You are really testing one specific scenario, and the initial point of reference is based on an assumption. It's not a bad video, you did the best you could with the tools at your disposal, and found some creative solutions to test in, but the margin of error for something like this is enormous. There is also latency, render latency and frame times, actual ping to take into account. Like you said in your intro AA is a fairly complex system.
The reason the majority feel it has not gotten stronger because it would force them to do some introspection and realize their "cracked" aim is actually mostly the code doing it for them.
Up to this point, I think it's justified to call you CoD scientist... Or Doc CoD, lol!
Sick work on all the data.
i’m a KBM player and i have no problem with controllers having aim assist cuz they need it literally to keep track of a target flying across their screen. the problem i have is when timmy’s sit in a corner with a fire shotty and when i fly across their screen up close, their aim is stuck on me and boom im dead in one shot to my feet😂. i’d say only keep rotational aim assist because players with movement will prosper rather than players who sit in corners and abuse the perfect tracking of a close, moving target.
KBM player here and I've noticed this as well. Playing against an aim assist controller is fine at short, medium and long ranges, but close quarter shotgun range is when the controller advantage is very noticeable. Small maps were borderline unplayable for me before the shotty nerf. Those guys would just bounce around one-shot hip firing with near perfect accuracy.
Another instance of aim assist advantage over KBM is when you essentially run past or bump into a player at very close quarters. Unless your flick and reaction is incredibly fast, in the time it will take you to even pick up the other player their aim assist will have locked on you. My E/D is currently 2.3, but I feel like an actual bot in those types of encounters. My win rate in those fights is much lower than other ranges.
Yeah Shroud said it very well: Controller players have a close range advantage and kbm players have a long range advantage.
The "problem" with aim assist is that sometimes you don't have to see the enemy for the assist to activate and that means you just have to "feel" to react and shoot. It often happens that players don't see the target for X reason but they felt the assist and react to it.
"Putrid Parasite has left your party". =(
That’s a map design problem. In vanguard you can get aim assist through destructible objects like broken walls
That’s simply not true, It’s very rare to trigger aim assist without having anyone in the screen and it’s very hard to immediately react to that
@@aziznh5229 no, he means if the enemy is really far away that it’s hard to see them, aim assist will kick in and find them for you
@@aziznh5229 lmao maybe to you personally but I see it all the time on my teammates who even say they didn't see him but felt it. Plus it happens way more than you think-when people are pre aiming, holding a corner and the aim assist reacts JUST before the person peeks-makes all the difference in who wins and who loses the gunfight.
I also find it funny that you so confidently said "that's simply not true" and followed that up with something subjective that I could easily say "that's simply not true"
@@aidan46294 Pretty sure that they meant what they said, that includes both
So I started playing MW19 recently again after a year or so of not playing at all and AA isn't working at all for me now. It's an absolute nightmare to stay on target and also to not overrun your target without turning sense down so much that I'm completely ineffective at getting the first shot and everything else outside of aiming. It's just such a small range of motion on the sticks to make tiny adjustments with a decent sensitivity. I've tweaked settings a lot in game plus the elite 2 controller settings I've gotten marginally better with it, idk maybe on the new game I'll be better for it if it has AA again if I don't give up before then. But as an average casual player the thing is virtually unplayable without it for me lol
imo the initial snap feels insane, like I never played consoles or with a controller but I can pick it up and frag out, yet cant even look the direction I want to walk half the time :/
not sure if its always been that way, I've played since cod2 but always PC
Im excited to see you doing in the future mw2 clips because idgaf about vanguard
Did you test it in WZ vs multi-player? I'd be curious to know if it's the same. Learning to play on M&K has been pretty frustrating getting gunned by dudes I'd have otherwise destroyed on controller, but with that said, feel like good controller players would be able to adapt and be just as good with less rotational aim assist.
I don't see why the ratings would be different from warzone to multiplayer. As I'm sure it's a core coded setting per game. Meaning I highly doubt the devs would go through the time to set a different percentage for one game mode to another.
Please do a new test on this in Modern Warfare 2. As of now, it feels as strong that it's boardering to auto aim.... Does console players think this is fair? If the goal is to alienate pc/keyboard/mouse players, they are certainly succeeding, and if it's not changed there will only be console players on MW2 pretty soon
I wasn’t surprised by the results. I knew that the aim assist range was changed and it makes sense considering that MW2019 had Ground War and Warzone. I really hate how PC players are saying the strength of aim assist (not the ranges) has gotten stronger because almost none of them are actually testing it correctly or has a very small sample size.
Aim assist was always strong.
@@willtheprodigy3819 and the reason is that most of those CoD players are OG console players and got used to controller so stfu
@@willtheprodigy3819 the reason is cod is a CONTROLLER esport since 2007 MLG days. Has nothing to do with aim assist LMAO.
When will you make warzone content full time?
The worst part about aim assist is bots pretending like it isn't too strong
really interesting stuff. seems like you put a lot of effort and thought into it as usual.
Another interesting analysis would be how much STRAFING has been nerfed over the years
Wish you dusted off the 360. would love to see some of these comparisons you’ve been doing to BO2 and MW2. Don’t need to do testing on all the old cods but the two highest regarded ones would be nice
I was going to do this but unfortunately, I only have one working controller so I couldn't do the testing :(
I thing it did get stronger but my main issue is the uncentred reticle. The screen shaked and trembles constantly in the newer games.
A while later, i've felt like mw2 and mw3 has a lot more aim slowdown. In addition I could be wrong about this, but didn't the aim assist bubble used to be around a character and not based on camera position?(with this i mean that the bubble feels bigger on further distances because the enemy characcters will be smaller in a bigger radius)
I feel you need 2 players to judge AA, When the other player is moving/ jumping/whatever past you it is crazy strong. I play without AA on controller typically, but when I do play it it feels nutty strong in some instances.
Why would you play without it? You’re putting yourself in a disadvantage
@@Sanctifi3dYT in some instances I can flick to multiple people more quickly, but flinch mid combat is a huge draw back. Plus I just hate the idea of the game playing for me. Never used AA as a console gamer, never will.
@@RusnakAutoDesign you got my respect man 👌🏼
Lol
Can you do a test of the difference between standard and dynamic aim assist? Be nice to visually see it instead of the just the descriptions
Dynamic is a response curve, not an aim assist value. They both interact with aim assist in the exact same way.
@@TheXclusiveAce ahh right. is there a way to visually show how they are different in game versus just a graph? Also I’ve wondered how black ops a.i is different as well
the answer is probably just that it would've taken too long, but why did you omit the black ops games (3,4, and cw) from the slowdown and rotational tests?
You could have done testing on the old Cods, on PC the clients like Plutonium and Iw4x have controller support with aim assist ported directly from the old consoles.
People running past your ADS will drag your aim towards them. Really got frustrating during the longshot grind.
What happens when the enemy moves in different ways? Is flinch aim assisted? When you melee, it jerks to the target like aimbot. Does the same happen when bullets are fired or any other situation that damage would follow? Is recoil lessened by any irregular movement, such as “jitter aim” that wasn’t in past CoD’s? Have past CoD titles seen updates between the time we loved them and now that may affect the modern results of these tests claiming things were present that may not have been?
Is aim assist cheating, yet? When will it be?
It would be interesting to see a comparison with the hipfire slowdown and rotation as it’s kinda the way people aim hipfire first then ads
This is why a lot of mk players use xim etc. Native mouse keyboard on console actually puts you at a disadvantage over controller players. Aim assist is just too powerful, it gives you hints that enemies are there even when you can't see them.. it's like having an extra perk even forgetting about getting the actual aim assist as it gives you that awareness of players being there...
In MW19 currently my character would suddenly change directions whilst running or standing still, I thought it was a controller/game glitch, then I realized that the aim assist was literally working through walls. Sometimes I'd throw a semtex aiming at 12:00 but as it leaves my hand it is automatically changes the aim to 10:00 This started happening to me in the update before the last one or the one before that.
Yup. Would turn off Aim Assist when I could. Passing enemy players would pull aim towards them. I think this was CoD 4 or MW2 on the 360. It was enough to pull my aim about an inch from my PoV.
I’d assume their adjustment to the range on it was mainly a change they made for warzone (because of the size of the map) that just stuck in the engine, if they could separate the 2 and have one range for warzone and another more old school range for multiplayer that would be good, the range that you can beam on mp now is crazy, especially with smgs, I remember in bo3 on breach not even having it from one side of mid map to the other with smgs (window to heady glitch) which wasn’t even that long of a range, and that makes sense, every other part may be the same as it’s always been, but as a controller player I do think that range adjustment doesn’t suit mp at all and I can understand everyone on Botha sides frustrations with aim assist :/ , makes noobs camping back map more of an issue for one thing lol, and makes it a lot easier for good players to gunny at crazy range too and so on
Interesting but I would also like to see a test involving CW and BO4 because for me if feels like aim assist is stronger in Treyarch CoDs compared to IW’s CoDs.
what a great video Ace. Thank you
There’s a reason every top Warzone player uses controller now. Controller on pc is unbeatable.
Wish you would’ve done it fr bo2, I’ve played so many vids and bo2 almost feels like I can’t hit my shots either because
1. The stick acceleration jolts over the target
Or 2. Because the aim assist bubble is so strong I can’t even get to my target
The real question is.. does it stick to the opponent like some content creators say it does?
I’d be totally okay with cross input not being in the new MW. Controller Vs controller and KBM vs KBM is how it should be.
I understand why you chose your rotational aim assist testing technique when it comes purely to data collection. But with rotational aim assist also tracking the target's 3D movements (jumps and falls), there is another whole element that may not be the same across titles. Strafing into a wall and having a player run across your screen will quite literally make aim assist aim for you. Witnessing rotational aim assist perfectly tracking the arch of a jump all because the player was touching their left stick is pretty demotivating for a KBM player who needs to rely 100% on their human movements to track a target.
The question was "is aim assist stronger than it was" not "is it fair", so I think the testing method is pretty good and does answer the question, yes it got better since it's about the same but applies at longer ranges.
As for "is it fair?" it's a more opinionated debate, I would argue that it is not fair (strictly the rotational part), but there isn't hard data to back it up.
@@underman77 Its objectively not fair. Having the computer automate your aiming actions is by definition an aim bot. If both players don't have their actions automated in the same way, then its not fair. I understand rotational is meant to help the fact that a controller player must move their thumb an incredibly long distance to begin turning the other direction when someone strafes, and maybe it is the only answer for this problem. It however makes strafing almost completely useless vs them and makes close range gun fights extremely easy in comparison to using a MKB, especially in the hands of a very skilled player. If fairness is desired, the only solution is to not match controller users with MKB users.
@@Mcegan69 i agree but for long range fights the advantage is for m&k player so its fair
@@Mcegan69 you dont even fully understand the reason for aim assist to begin with it seems. Its not just about the time it takes for a thumbstick to go from left to right but that its extremely hard to make precise movement on a thumbstick because the full range of a thumbstick is so small. Controller players have to balance out turn speed at the cost of precision or precision at the cost of turn speed. Something mnk doesnt have to do. And with cod being a extremely reactive shooter, high sens is mandatory.
@@itswalid lmao are you only talking about WZ? Cause in MP let me tell you-having an advantage in tracking someone 100+ meters away doesn't matter if the line of sight is 50 meters max and they can just aim assist 3-4 shot you with an Mp5 or 2-3 with an UZI off the slide cancel... it might offset it, but that is in no means fair.
Edit: max
Holy shit! 200meters!!! thats INSANE!!!
You definitely should have tested having the enemy move and seeing how well it tracked them. This is the major reason aim assist has gotten significantly better
It would be nearly impossible to control the variables for a test like that to collect valid data for comparison