The average PGL Antwerp Major attendee plays with a stretched image, uses a mouse with a DPI of 400 or 800, and zooms the AWP scope by pressing the right mouse button. Quite a standard config, popular among future Major champions and common members of their community alike.
However, there are some contrarians and iconoclasts among pros. The CS.MONEY Blog has looked at Major attendees of all time and selected a couple of players whose settings seem simply weird-ass. Let’s roll!
Woxic & mouse sensitivity
Low mouse sensitivity is extremely common among Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players. Small wonder. What is surprising, on the other hand, is the config of Eternal Fire player Özgür “woxic” Eker. The Turkish AWPer’s DPI value is 2400! To put it into perspective, the median eDPI value among all PGL Antwerp Major players is only 840.
In practice, this means that Özgür only needs to make a couple of relatively small mouse movements to make really sharp curves. Woxic himself notes that these adjustments arose because of how cramped his playing space used to be in the past. Since he simply couldn’t afford to swing his mouse on a huge mat, he adapted by increasing the sensitivity.
Maniac in reverse
If you watch English-language streams, you’re probably familiar with Mathieu “Maniac” Quiquerez. He regularly appears as an analyst on the biggest of events, notably this Major and the previous ones. Besides his activities as an analyst, Mathieu also has a career as a player. In 2014, together with Team LDL, he reached the semi-finals of a Major! Not a bad achievement, considering he was performing with an inverted mouse at the time.
Yes, you got it right, in the Major semifinals, Maniac had the mouse pointer moving upwards when he was actually moving the mouse down — and vice versa. The Swiss played that way for the rest of his career and reached further heights, like victories in DreamHack Invitational II and Gamers Assembly 2015. Interestingly enough, Mathieu changed his settings in 2017, abandoning mouse inversion. It didn’t have much influence on his results, though.
GTR&RDFG
Even if you’ve only started watching professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive recently, you’ve probably heard the nickname GeT_RiGhT. Christopher “GeT_RiGhT” Alesund will forever go down in the game’s history as one of the most talented performers in competitive CS.
In addition to making the HLTV Top 20 six times — which is an incredibly rare accomplishment — the Swede can boast another notable thing about himself. He doesn’t play WASD. Instead, he uses the RDFG combination — that’s two keys to the right. A regular blast from the past!
In case you didn’t know, the WASD combination has been a standard since the first boom of first-person shooters — Doom and Quake. Back then, there were no established combinations yet. In System Shock, a 1994 game, the player was encouraged to move using ASDX! WASD gained momentum after the first national Quake tournament. The champion of that tournament used these four keys.
As a matter of fact, many find the WASD combination debatable even now. Indeed, you have a lot less keys available on the left side with WASD than with RDFG. Maybe it’s time to change your habits and opt for the config of the Swedish champion!
AmaNEk & his signature sound
While mouse inversion is rare, it’s by no means exceptional. Many games offer their players to invert the mouse. Contrariwise, the ability to invert the sound channels isn’t much of a staple. And yet, this little hindrance didn’t stop François “AMANEK” Delaunay.
That’s right, the French player’s sound channels are mixed up. He hears in-game sounds that are coming from the right side on the left in real life, and vice versa. Given that he managed to get to the Major finals, it’s amazing how the human brain can adapt to such strange conditions, while remaining extremely efficient.
Autimatic & mouse acceleration
One of the most popular tips for tuning Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is to disable mouse acceleration. This tip sounds logical, but not everyone follows it. For instance, Timothy “autimatic” Ta not only plays with mouse acceleration enabled, but also has the victory in ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018 under his belt!
Mouse acceleration is a setting that allows the mouse speed to affect the pointer’s motion range. Jerk the mouse rapidly, and you make a 180-degree turn; move the mouse the same distance slowly, and you just rotate a bit around your own axis. Many people say that accelerating interferes with muscle memory formation. We didn’t carry out any research on this account, so we only know that this setting didn’t prevent at least one player from being one of the top five players in a Major.
Keyboard zoom by dupreeh
Some users reassign keyboard bindings to the mouse. For example, in the afore-mentioned Quake, players would often assign jumps to the right mouse button. Sometimes, this practice extends to the configs of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pros. And then, there are the opposite cases (which are truly few and far between) when mouse binds are assigned to the keys.
Pros who have been spotted doing this include Peter “dupreeh” Rasmussen, Team Vitality AWPer and ex-Astralis player. In his config, he had the q key assigned to the +attack2 bind. It’s an alternative way of firing: switching to fire bursts when using the FAMAS or zooming when using sniper rifles. Why would he decide to choose this particular key?..
It’s not surprising that among hundreds of players who have attended Majors, we found some square pegs in round holes with unconventional settings in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. And that’s good, as their examples serve to show that you need to configure your game the way you want it, not according to the good rule of thumb.
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