Doomed To Dance

Never thought my new favorite controller would be the thing to call out what friends and family had pointed out for years. Hi, I am Spaceborg, and I, possibly like yourself, do a little unconscious jig when shit hits the wall in my game. As the heat turns up, I also vicegrip my controller for dear life.

Frankly these ticks had already started causing issues. For starters, I do better online with fighting games, because I provide "haptic feedback" as I am about to unleash a special move. As I took my foray into gyro gaming I learned fairly quickly how to actuate my fire button without moving the whole controller. And I enjoyed some nice slow sniping against easy bots.

Then I tried a movement shooter, Ultra Kill. Who really cares if you can move your pointer finger in isolation when you are betrayed with an anticipatory full body spasm every time the shot is lined up? Insult to injury trying to add the grip sense gyro toggle I had been practicing only to find that my hands no longer comply with fine motor movement.

Learning to Be Zen

This is a long, arduous ongoing process, to hopefully one day be still like the mountain so that my tracking lines flow smoothly between targets like the mighty river. Like real guns, its important to not work too hard to overcorrect natural micro jittering and focus on smoothly pulling your fire button.

I am having to slow down, even if it means dying earlier as I retrain my muscle memory. Also increasing body awareness even when you reach a new boss phase. Personally, I am always feeling for the back buttons making sure my fingers remain at a consistent position on those smooth river stones. Maybe someday I will even be speed running Echo Point Nova. For now, back to Kovaak¨s and the UK CyberGrind.

If you also suffer from hand hiccups, know you are not alone. We can get through this together.

Grip to Gripe Hypothesis

Have you noticed that exactly how reviewers hold their controller affects how comfortably they find the controller and whether or not grip sense misfires often or not?

I've seen some reviewers claim their back buttons are super sensitive and prone to firing off easily. I sort of diagnose this as an issue of having an overly finger-centric hold on the controller.

Another grip that the controller seems to dislike is the high grip; when the user holds the controller such that their pinky lands on L/R5 they have issues with both Grip Sense and trackpads. Gamers who like both pointer and middle fingers on shoulder buttons fall into this camp, as do claw grippers. Grip sense seems to favor a lower grip, having more surface area and range lower on the controller body. The high grip also intensifies the feeling of "switching grips" to access sticks OR pads. From my testing, this forces the webbing between pointer and thumb to lose contact with the control to access pads potentially impacting grip actuation further.

Community question: if you find the screw holes uncomfortable would you describe how you hold the controller? Also whether its one or both holes. When trying to recreate this gripe I could not find a grip that didn't require an uncomfortable vicegrip.

Possible Canonical Grip

For the most part, features, especially the grip sense seem to work best if the curvature of your palms cups the controller with a little bit of inward pressure from your hands. Then, your middle finger lands on L/R4 and ring lands on L/R5. This lets your pinky hang such that its available for moving in reference to the controller, but pinky flexion alone doesn't seem to be as consistent as when you lightly tighten or loosen your grip along side moving the pinky finger.

I had thought about using grip sense as a fire button, but making that motion happen reliably moves the controller even more than squeezing triggers. And if your grip changes even slightly mid play session, it does mess with muscle memory. Something that can be tricky if you are a very active gyro gamer or even change your seating situation often. Default settings don't help, because the range is somewhat arbitrary, its hard to get a feel for exactly which frame your grip sense input fires.

My Gripping Alternative

I use grip sense for GYRO PAUSE ON ACTIVATION. Not on RELEASE. The inverse of Valve's suggestion. I have tuned both range and responsiveness to near zero. This means that my natural grip (middle and ring resting lightly on back buttons and hovering pinky) does NOT trigger grip sense. Only an additional tightening triggers them. This is way more responsive, requires less exaggerated movement, and has a natural intuitiveness of tighten grip to activate. Especially with haptics turned up, it FEELS like an invisible button. Oh yeah, and I did set left grip actuation to fire, its hard to remember to rerelease my grip after actuation at times, but does not wobble my aim.

Bonus Fun Fact: Gripping in the Nude

Playing in a state of undress can cause other parts of your skin to interfere with grip sense if you play with the controller braced against various body parts ie belly or thighs or... anything else. Quite a way to have some skin in the game. You can now blame a loss on lack of pants.

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EDIT: Made some adjustments that take into account various great points made in the comments.

Currently tweaking configs on my deck waiting for my controller. So as a fellow Trackpad enthusiast, I have started doing so much with my Right Pad that I sort of am out of reasons to have a Right stick.

This is predominantly for games that allow for mouse aiming

I made a post recently about how much I love trackpad as flick stick. For a while I was trying to do radial menu on stick, but honestly it is buggier and harder to hit the right angle than I would like... so I ended up doing a 9 square touch menu on trackpad activated with a mode shift back-paddle press. Really left me in a situation where I have a spare stick, lol.

I feel that most people would say: use pad as mouse, stick as flick and assist your gyro with your trackpad mouse... but I like having face buttons available more often and good gyro is enough, imo. Plus flick-pad is so fast and sweeping is so ergonomic.

So without a clear RStick mapping, my current implementation which I think is funny: Right stick AS LEFT STICK ALSO. This lets me keep moving freely as I use left trackpad or dpad or select.

What else would you do with a spare stick?

Next hypothesis: Do I even need left stick? Currently practicing with trackpad as stick, but it is not Sticking (heh pun) unfortunately.

I think I might be the only one, but I have been using my right trackpad as Flickstick on both my steam deck and og steam contrOLDER. Anyone else?

It works surprisingly well. There is definitely some myalin to sheath at first, but instantaneous tap powered turning is great. Sweeping feels the same as circular style trackpad scrolling.

Another thing which is especially nice when sweeping: I created a layer where horizontal gyro movement is turned off while holding the right trackpad. Vertical gyro aiming stays on. This means I can actually recenter while still aiming. It also means gyro doesn't influence my flickstick angles.

Finally clicking down on trackpad gets mapped to "A" or another most-often-used button. In ultrakill its Jump, though I'm sure most would just use a paddle for that.

...I am still pretty bad, but improving.

Just locked in the new Steam Controller so excited how I change things up with Gripsense!