Counter-Strike

The purpose of this article is to help the reader optimize his mouse for Counter-Strike.

The two main factors that come into play when deciding which mouse to use for gaming are ergonomics and how many extra buttons the mouse has. The ergonomics part is obvious, gamers want a mouse that feels comfortable and natural to use. Nobody can well with a mouse that contorts the user's fingers in awkward ways. The second part is less obvious. Commonly, a player's right hand is used primarily for aiming/shooting, which in reality is underutilizing since all it takes is one finger and wrist. This article will focus on how to take advantage of the extra buttons on your mouse to optimize your gaming experience. While this guide assumes that you are using a Logitech MX518, any mouse with multiple buttons other than the standard mouse1/mouse2/mousewheel will do.

The first thing to change is the mouse wheel action. As default, scrolling the mouse wheel will rotate through your weapons. This is pretty useless because no one should use his mouse wheel to switch to a new weapon. A much more practical use for the mouse wheel is for jumping. You may wonder what the point of jumping with your mouse wheel is when you can already jump by pressing space bar. The answer is that it is practically impossible to bunny hop while using your space bar. It is much easier to bunny hop while using your mouse wheel. Type the following commands into your console:

bind mwheelup "+jump"
bind mwheeldown "+jump"

Note that you should still leave space bar as your normal jump key. You should only use your mouse wheel to jump when you are attempting to bunny hop.

The next thing to do is to make your nades easily accessible. Scrolling through your nades menu by repeatedly pressing '4' can be an annoying and time consuming process, especially if you have multiple enemies rushing you and you desperately need to pull out that flash right away. Luckily, you can skip that step and select immediately which grenade you by just pressing a button on your mouse. The best way is to assign a separate button on your mouse to each type of nade. Which button is assigned to which nade is purely based on personal preference. I personally use mouse3 for HE grenades, mouse4 for smokes and mouse5 for flashbangs. To set this up, type these commands into your console:

bind "mouse3" "use weapon_hegrenade"
bind "mouse4" "use weapon_smokegrenade"
bind "mouse5" "use weapon_flashbang"

Which button you use for each type of grenade is entirely up to you and doesn't make much of a difference. A different common setup is to not use mouse3 at all and to bind HE nades and flashes to mouse4 and mouse5, respectively, since most of the time when you throw a smoke, you are in a safe area and thus aren't in a rush to throw it. I suggest that you try different setups and stick with the one you like the most.

Even if your mouse isn't a mx518 and it has more buttons, I don't recommend that you bind anything to them. CS/CSS is a game where anyone could be around any corner, and therefore you should always have your index finger on the trigger.