It's the drifting that triggers aim assist!

Ok, hear me out on this. I’ve tried several times and I’m pretty confident I’ve found something.
Yesterday I was trying different settings with an old controller. It had drifting, so I put the deadzones at the minimum before it became an issue. Finally I found something I liked, sometimes there still were some drifting, but not a big deal. I went into training and clearly noticed the aim assist on BR. Shooting was disabled, so I could clearly see the crossair slightly following the enemy while RS was in neutral position. and the enemy was strafing in front of me.

Ok, fine, let’s get to sleep and tomorrow let’s try with a new controller I’ve never used.

Today I plug it in, put all the deadzones to zero and noticed zero drifting, so I was obviously very happy.
What happened then? The aim assist is dead. Totally, the crossair stand still no matter what.

Unless… Unless I slowly, and i mean SLOWLY, start to move the RS. Something like a slow drift. Surprise surprise, the aim assist is there again! The crossair follows (not a tracking, but suggest the direction) for enemies in the center. And that’s regardless of the direction I’m drifting.

What the hell? Can it be the drifting the issue? I plug the old controller again, and here we go, drifting is there, but aim assist is there too even if I’m not touching the RS.

New controller again… Nothing, Gone. And I mean GONE.

So here we are: the aim assist is present when the RS gives a little, very little input. That’s why deadzones to zero makes the aim “feels better”. It’s not the responsivness, it’s the fact that lower deadzones to most controller allows that minimum input that maybe is not enough for noticeable drifting but is enough to trigger the aim assist.

I wish I could attach a video but I’ve not the time to do so.

I’ll do some more test, but maybe others can do the same. Go in training, playful mode, BR, and see if there’s aim assist with RS in neutral position. If not, try to slowly move your RS and see for yourself.

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What happens to aim assist when the left stick is drifting? I’d imagine that it would activate aim assist.

I was about to make a similar post about some tests with triggering the aim assist so glad to see this here.
I don’t know if it’s actually the drift that triggers it but I can acknowledge that it doesn’t always trigger.

I loaded up a training match against playfighting bots strafing along a wall at about 50m with the needler equipped as primary weapon.
At first I was amazed at how much my aim was just following them around without input, however after double switching weapons it suddenly seemed gone and the crosshair didn’t move at all.

Dit this about 20 times and in about 30% of instances the aim assist didn’t trigger. Now of course it could be that my controller does have a very slight and inconsistent drift causing this but interesting nonetheless to report and investigate.

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This kind of makes sense actually - I’m going to guess it is 343’s attempt to support both control methods on the fly but I don’t think it’s a great solution. Maybe control input is the “trigger” to enable AA.

Honestly they should force you to choose your input type in the menu and if you don’t like it you can change it next game rather than this auto detect business

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