Scaling Purely Based On Focal Length

[Skwuruhl]

There's a person I've had discussions with that advocates discarding match distance entirely and instead scaling based on focal length entirely with a multiplier. I can't say I really disagree with him entirely. It's definitely way more sound than "viewspeed" or whatever else. And the concept of "match distance" has a lot of significant flaws, largely that it completely falls apart if you're aiming up or down from the horizontal at all.

The new equation would just be 

tan(zoomFOV/2)/tan(hipFOV/2) * Coefficient

For example CS:GO's default multiplier in AWP zoom 1 is 4/9ths with a zoom of ~2.75x. This means that the coefficient in this case is 1.2211. If you used this to convert to Overwatch your Widow/Ana sensitivity would be 46.27 (zoom scaling * 1.2211).

There are 2 issues I have with this method, the first is that say you have a scope with 1.1x zoom. If you used a 1.2211 coefficient with this zoom level then your ADS sensitivity would be higher than hipfire resulting in a reduced cm/360 distance which just... doesn't make sense to me. However this could be okay, the way our brains perceive sensitivity is complicated. The second is that this doesn't really provide a way to scale between hipfires if the FOV is different other than "scale by focal length with no coefficient" or "scale by 360 distance". This also could be fine as scaling hipfire by just focal length is a decent solution. Both of these could be "solved" completely if you scaled the coefficient by focal length in some form but I don't know that that's necessarily a good idea or that it'd actually be solving anything.

The benefits are that your sensitivity is more grounded in the actual zoom ratio which is good. Also it "solves" people who prefer a sensitivity lower than what 0% match distance would provide. Match distance has no answer for people who use 35 widow/ana sensitivity while this method does (0.9237 coefficient).

Edited January 11, 2019 by Skwuruhl