World of Warcraft Mouse (and multiboxer highlights)
Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 11:22AM 
This is the new World of Warcraft mouse developed by SteelSeries. I like idea of it a lot, and I would buy one instantly if it had Mac OS X support. Yeah I know you can use USB Overdrive to get things like this to work, but native drivers would be much better and they are supposedly coming out in a couple months.
I like mice with a lot of buttons. You, the person reading this who is about to post an annoying comment, do not like mice with a lot of buttons. But you, the other kind of reader who likes to submit my articles to social bookmarking sites--you know what I mean. In fact, when I look for a mouse, the number of buttons is the first thing I look at. If it doesn't have enough, I won't consider the mouse at all. Even Apple's Mighty Mouse--that lozenge-looking thing with apparently only one button--has 4 buttons: left, right, middle, and a 4th side button when you squeeze the sides.
But Seriously, How Many Buttons?
Does this World of Warcraft mouse have enough buttons though? It says it has 15, but let's look more closely. To me, it's only useful to count how many extra buttons it has. Left and right click do not count, you have to have those. Middle click also doesn't count, usually because it's too impractical to use it. Pressing that button interferes with the scroll wheel on many mice. I don't know how it is on this SteelSeries mouse, but middle mouse buttons are guilty until proven innocent.
It has two buttons that are below the scroll wheel, and those do count. The buttons to the left and right of the scroll wheel count also. That's 4 so far. Then the left and right sides of mouse each have 2 more buttons, bringing the total of extra buttons to 8. The left side of the mouse has a d-pad looking thing that adds 4 more, but I'm suspicious about that. I've found it mostly impractical to bind anything to this kind of d-pad. You know, not a real d-pad like on the SuperPad 8, but a tacked on one on the side of a computer mouse. I'm going to give this mouse a tentative score of 8 extra buttons, with the possibility of later counting those 4 d-pad buttons after I try it.
Costs a Lot, Has Cord
This mouse costs a lot. $99. Get over it. It has 8 extra buttons or so. It also has a cord that you have to plug into something, which is kind of strange because this isn't the year 1990. "But the best gaming mice need cords to be accurate enough!" Maybe so, but it's embarrassing that we've put men on the moon using computers that were only as powerful as today's calculators, but we can't figure out this cordless mice thing for gamers. I don't think I've used a corded mouse since Clinton was President of the US.
The SuperPad 8 has 8 buttons and a cord, and it was awesome.
Buttons in World of Warcraft
You still don't know why we need all these buttons, do you? Let's pretend we're going to use this thing with World of Warcraft, as intended. Have you played that game? It has a lot of spells. I'm not talking about fire, alt-fire, change weapons, and grenade like first-person shooter players are used to. (Insert your flame about how some FPS you play needs a lot of buttons, congratulations.) WoW has over 30 spells and abilities you have to keep track of. Sometimes way, way more than that depending on the situation and if you count non-combat abilities. So really 8 extra mouse buttons is hardly even enough.
Yeah you have a keyboard, but there's only so many keys you can reach. Your left hand's dexterity is taken up by moving on the WASD keys so it's awkward to reach away from those keys. Your right hand is on the mouse, so it can't reach keyboard buttons. Also, I like to keep a lot of the default mappings for non-combat stuff like C to see my character sheet, F for getting the target of my target, and so on. That leaves me with even fewer keyboard keys to map things too.
So what do the experts do? When it comes to needing to press a lot of buttons, there are few more expert than Xzin. He is master of all he surveys and a god amongst men. He used to play 5 characters at once, but that became too pedestrian so he switched to 10. He contemplated playing 40 at once, and when I dug very deep into his plans, I became fully convinced that he could, indeed, pull that off. The game got rid of 40 man raids though, so his plans became obsolete. Anyway, my point is that Xzin needs to press more buttons than you or I do. How does he do it?
When You Really Need Buttons
This is how he does it. Buffs and summoning water and other non-combat things on this X-keys strip.
All the real spells and abilities on this X-Keys Desktop Pro.
;)
And here's a shot of his multi-box Shaman setup. He's got mages and warlocks too, I think.
;)
Xzin also has a setup such that one button press can be broadcast to all his characters (to make them Presence of Mind, instant Pyroblast, for example). Yes that is legal under World of Warcraft's terms of service (one of the few things that is! zing!). So no, he is not cheating. If something deep inside you tells you that really, it is cheating, then the thing that's deep inside you is using ancient monkey instincts for its reasoning and you are wrong. By the way, if you and your hot-shot team can't beat a guy playing 5 characters at once in a fair PvP setting, you should retire anyway.
Dual-Boxing.com, A Crucible of Humanity
You might make a stop over at dual-boxing.com to check out the many colorful personalities over there. Xzin, the mastermind entrepreneur. A guy named Prepared who is up to 40-boxing (that's controlling 40 characters at once). Sam Deathwalker, a rumored troglodyte-with-a-heart-of-gold who who everyone knows would 126-box the moment that anyone else 125-boxed. You can even check out this Blizzard forum battle, while the link lasts, between Mr. Prepared and a person named Frostkitten who harassed Prepared endlessly in-game, and on forum, going so far as to follow him around 5 hours a day. Frostkitten tries to get Blizzard to put a stop to Prepared's 40-boxing and gets owned in the end, just after hero Sam Deathwalker chimes in. But I digress.
Pressing Lots of Buttons
Back to all those buttons. So Xzin puts his right hand on the mouse, but where does he put his left hand? On the keyboard, so he can use WASD for movement? If so, it's impractical to reach over to that extra big array of keys. No, that wouldn't make sense. Some forum snooping (stalking?) of Xzin revealed that he rests his left hand directly on the big array of fancy keys. Interesting. That would give him maximum button-pushing ability, but how does he move?
Apparently he uses the mouse to move. I'm not sure exactly how, but I don't think it's with the click-to-move function. I know I'd rather play Bejeweled than use click-to-move in an MMO (a better use of time anyway?) and maybe Xzin feels the same way. I think he somehow actually binds movement keys to his mouse. Maybe that d-pad on the SteelSeries mouse above is good for something after all! Seriously though, that sounds really clunky to me. Xzin's method would allow him to have fewer mouse buttons, because his entire left hand's dexterity gets freed up to press all the keys he needs. But even with no spells at all bound to the mouse, the dexterity requirements for the right hand to control both character AND mouse movement seem too high, and pretty awkward. I think it's just more effective to move using WASD + mouse.
That said, if I had to control 5 or 10 characters, I would probably be willing to give up some amount of movement finesse in order to have better access to a ton of buttons. That could explain Xzin's choice.
Playing World of Warcraft
I recently started playing World of Warcraft again, an experiment of sorts. Join up if you like on Horde side of Kilrogg (US servers) if you're interested. You almost certainly aren't though. I'm talking low level, go through Wailing Caverns and Scarlet Monastery and so forth. PvP if we could, but we kind of can't because WoW offers no real good way to do that until you max out gear after a million hours of play. If you're really "good" at WoW, and you instantly bought the new expansion, that's kind of a minus for joining my experiment. You'll just complain. If you think MMOs are stupid, but you're really smart and good at games in general, this would be more for you. Rather than bombard me with messages, contact someone on this list, in-game: Nephre, Nerfina, ChaosDmentor, Claytus, or Xhad.
Also note that Street Fighter HD Remix is coming out soon, so this whole World of Warcraft experiment is a "casual" one. Casual as in a highly skilled collection of awesome players...with no time commitment required. Remember, "hardcore" mostly means "time-sinker" in an MMO.
Back to That Mouse
Even apart from World of Warcraft, I like using mice with lots of buttons. I also have 59 firefox tabs open right now, 30 safari tabs, Photoshop, MS Word, Apple Pages, textpad with 9 documents, an ftp program, and 11 folders open right now. I'm using 6 desktop "spaces" and two monitors. I wish I had 10 monitors. No, I wish my entire wall was a monitor. I also wish I had a mouse with more buttons. SteelSeries: please make some Mac OS X drivers, thanks.
--Sirlin
Reader Comments (39)
Sending electricity through a naturally conductive material will always be faster than sending a radio or likewise wave through the air to a receiver.
This is why, for gaming, corded > cordless. Response time.
Then there's other problems on top of that like, I dunno, the mouse has to have a power source, making it unnecessarily heavy, and give a chance of the batteries themselves going out and causing problems.
Don't act like cords are some sort of "problem" we have to "overcome". It's an inevitability you learn to deal with.
Also, about buttons. I may only play Quake, but over time I found that I needed less and less buttons on my mouse, until I prefer a simple 3-button over anything else. Gogo Salmosa.
@Amp: Please read the following quote from the article, then consider why your post makes it look like you didn't RTFA.
"It also has a cord that you have to plug into something, which is kind of strange because this isn't the year 1990. 'But the best gaming mice need cords to be accurate enough!' Maybe so, but it's embarrassing that we've put men on the moon using computers that were only as powerful as today's calculators, but we can't figure out this cordless mice thing for gamers."
I'm sure hardcore cavemen thought walking was just some inevitability you learn to deal with, too. Then came the wheel, which pissed off everyone who'd gained a sense of entitlement from all that walking. Thanks for contributing.
Incredible post, DP_E
DP_E and spudly don't seem to have reading comprehension as a strong point. Because of this, I find it incredibly ironic that they deem it necessary to call my OWN reading ability into question.
I gave reasons why Wireless, by its very NATURE, will never be superior to corded.
It's CONCEPTUALLY inferior. As in it CANNOT be done to make a wireless mouse as good as a wired. There are multiple things that HAVE to be done to make a mouse wireless that degrade its usefulness to a gamer.
These things are:
1) Add a power source, therefore increasing weight needlessly.
1a) The power source needs to be recharged/replaced from time to time. Just pray that it doesn't happen while you're in a match.
2) BE WIRELESS LOL (I'll say it again, sending electricity through a conductive wire will always be faster and more responsive than sending radio waves through the air to a transmitter.)
Yes. Wired is an inevitability. The ONE pro that the very concept of a wireless mouse adds, which is mere convenience from not having to tether your mouse to your rig, is vastly overshadowed by the cons of extra weight, replacing battery packs, and the lagtime that radio waves create as opposed to a direct electric signal.
Amp: While you are correct, your reasoning is flawed. The problem is one of bandwidth, and electrical currents are able to operate at a higher frequency than microwaves. However, saying that conduction is faster than light waves ("the like" to radio) is strictly incorrect, and in fact light in and near the visible spectrum is regularly used to transmit data faster than an electric cable can (fiber optic). For the open air analog, I'd recommend looking up Laser Communication.
Obviously, a line of sight solution would not work for a mouse, but I would not be so quick to simply dismiss that a solution exists, especially if you are going to be so hostile.
That said, I prefer wired mice. I use primarily a desktop, so the wire is not at all an issue, while even a mouse that you recharge on a base station is annoying to me. I also know that I don't have the hair reflexes to notice any "mouse lag" on a wireless mouse, except as psychosomatic.
"[B]ut I would not be so quick to simply dismiss that a solution exists, especially if you are going to be so hostile."
I'm just saying that people like Amp are incapable of inventing the wheel or putting people on the moon. Akfeka's quote supports that. So again, Amp, thanks for contributing ideas that would prevent us from making progress. With all those problems the wheel created for us, you're probably right that it was better to stick with walking. Maybe you could offer some advice on how to solve world hunger--or would you prefer to just let them starve because it's too much of a hassle to think up a solution?
Maybe the Dual Shock 3, with plenty of buttons, and the six-axis to look around, would be an answer for WoW?
Dual shock would not be the answer. Even if you managed to map all your abilities to buttons (something I have hard to believe is possible on any "normal" joypad) you're still neglecting targeting and the fact that the fastest way of moving and turning is with the mouse, it is so important in fact that a mouse turner in greens can theoretically beat a keyboard turner in max tiered raid gear/pvp gear. Good positioning and movement can theoretically nullify all damage dealt.
Don't underestimate middle mouse buttons.
I use it in every game - usually for reloading or scrolling.
A good middle mouse button is one of my main concerns when buying a mouse.
Also: Try using Maya (3D Software) without a middle mouse button. It becomes a chore. :)
"It's CONCEPTUALLY inferior. As in it CANNOT be done to make a wireless mouse as good as a wired."
::sigh::
The point was that there's no excuse that this should be the case with the relative accomplishment of putting somebody on the moon with a Super Nintendo.
Chad Miller:
That sounds like about what i was talking about. I am not surprised there are some very robust WoW scripting possibilities out there, but with my experience of Blizzard's hostility to that sort of thing i also would not have been surprised if there was little to no scripting support.
Regarding wired vs. wireless: i prefer wired, mostly because of the power issues. I think the wireless data transfer could be "good enough" that there's no real advantage for a corded mouse, but the first time my batteries died in the middle of a game (and with my general level of mindfulness about things that would happen before long) i would become furious and go back to wired mice.
If someone manages to figure out wireless transmission of power, though, i'm all for it :)
@Cwheezy
I haven't raided or even done dungeons since vanilla WoW, so perhaps you only need a few buttons for that, but in pvp if you're only using 4, 5 or even 10 buttons you're doing it wrong.
Even when I spec arcane on my mage for "skilless two button spam, I need to be able to quickly use:
Scorch
Fireball (rarely)
Fireblast
Arcane Explosion
Cone of Cold
Blink
Frost Nova
Spellsteal
Arcane Missile
Slow
Arcane Barrage
Invisibility
Evocation
Bandage
Mana Gem
Eat/Drink
Iceblock
Ice Lance
PvP trinket
Set Focus
Clear Focus
Arcane Power
Presence of Mind
AP/PoM macro
Polymorph
Focus Polymorph
Counterspell
Focus Counterspell
Mana Shield
Frost Ward
Fire Ward
Use Healstone (If I'm pvping with a warlock)
Mount
Wand
Bandage
Toggle Nameplates (because sometimes you need them on, but I don't like having them most of the time)
Decurse
Escape Artist
Jump
Tab Target
And that's all I can remember at the moment (I think it's a pretty good list). I would certainly suffer if any of these keys were not bound. I also still have Blizzard and rank 1 Frostbolt bound but don't really use them anymore because of the ridiculous mana costs they now have. And again, that's a simple pvp spec. In pvp you need to bind those buttons if you want to do well.
And yes you need to bind things like mount and bandage and eat/drink because even though you need to be out of combat to use those abilities, you often still want to be manipulating the camera while you're accessing those abilities, and you need to have them keybound to be able to do that.
A Sirlin led romp through WoW? thats the first time I've ever seriously considered playing!
I put auto run and jump on the side thumb buttons of my mouse so I can move my character around if I need my left hand free or if I'm just damn lazy... BTW I play a female NE.
As a note about mousemove: a button for move forward and using the mouse to turn IS sufficient for WoW PVP. You don't need perfect precision in WoW PVP, because it doesn't matter exactly where you are - what matters is various 5' and 10' increments.
You DO need rapid turning, which is why keyboard move is absolutely terrible for PVP; you need to be able to spin to face the guy who just ran through you, or your spell's going to get interrupted by facing the wrong way, etc etc.
But you don't need precision. Not in WoW PVP.
Now, when TANKING you very much need precision (and need to be able to move backwards - something almost useless in PVP, because it makes you move slower, and in pvp, when you're not using abilities, facing doesn't matter.) - and don't so much need to be able to turn quickly.
My setup for play has my left hand controlling some 24 abilities, my mouse providing forward and strafe options, plus the usual left/right click, and a place I can stick my right hand for precision movement and a few other tanking-specific things.
But for PVP, no, I do not need precision movement.
Sotek, I think precise movement in battlegrounds is a lot better than sloppy movement. Playing without precise movement would seem like a large handicap. Maybe more importantly, if playing without precise movement is still fine, it's so unbearable that I'd kind of rather read a book than not have full movement controls. :(
Sotek, how are you strafing using only the mouse?
"I don't really see any huge benefits in binding things like your bandages and mounts though."
are you a rogue? do you need to bandage the millisecond you gouge someone? those 3 secconds count buddy. it does become class specific, but it helps.
Set your keybinds as normal with you left hand: WASD for movement, 1-5, z, x, c, v, g, r, q, and f for abilities. Now, make your scroll wheel cycle through action bars instead of controlling camera zoom. So now you have 12 binds on your main bar, and with single mousewheel roll in either direction, you've tripled your binds to 36 without having to move your left hand from the home position or having to pull off multiple key-presses (ie, shift+5, which is quite a stretch with one hand).