"Are you playing a shooting game with a joystick? But what's idea? Don't you know it's a hundred times easier with a mouse? How about a game of FIFA at the Wiimote while you're at it?"
How many bullying incidents players have experienced in recent years in the shooting world? With the arrival of Fortnite and its titanic community, sooner or later the controller and mouse had to confront each other on the biggest stages. But, while the world expected to see the mouse players rule without sharing, some controller players decided to show that with talent, nothing is impossible.
It is October 2018, the Fall Skirmish final has just ended, Tfue and Cloakz are raising the cup in front of a crowd that only has eyes for them and yet, if the audience lost interest in the Faze duo for a moment, they might see that two controller players have moved up to 9th place in the tournament.
Nickmercs and Aydan are 9th in an event that welcomes the best players in the world, all (or almost) playing with the mouse and yet at the end of the day: 41 of these duets finish behind the two controller players.
Did they get lucky? Did they abuse the aim assist? No wonder, they were there during the tournament, winning a regular construction duel against Morgausse and Saint, two experienced players.
Yet it was anything but a foregone conclusion. Not only is the joystick unanimously considered less accurate and natural than a mouse when it comes to aiming, but the construction system is also much easier to understand on a keyboard where each type of construction can be assigned to a different key and built with a single press of the key in question.
Of course, the days when controller players had to scroll through the types of construction until they found the right one are over: with the arrival of the "construction specialty" mode and custom binds, it is now possible to assign each of the 4 structures to a different trigger on the controller to reach them quickly. But you always have to switch to build mode before you can choose a structure, an additional action that keyboard players don't have to perform. An action that takes only a second, but you know what else only takes a second? A head shot.
Yet at this exercise Aydan possesses an insolent ease. Extra action or not, the young player can beat the best keyboard/mouse players in the world, here he is having fun doing construction duels with Tfue and winning several of them.
A few months later, it is the ultimate test for all the pros on the planet: the World Cup is launched and with it come draconian selections.
Reach level 7 in arena mode, be one of the top 3000 players in the semi-final, then be in the Top 8 of the final. This is the price of a ticket to the Grand Final in New York. To make matters worse, Epic immediately specifies that "everyone will find themselves in the same games, regardless of their support or equipment". On the Internet, one quickly wonders if a single controller player will be able to get a ticket to represent his community in the final.
But once is not usual, the Internet was worried for nothing, because only 3 weeks after the beginning of the festivities:
USA - East Coast Region, one of the most competitive in the world. Slowly installed in second place between Tfue and another Faze player, Unknown is a controller player.
And others will be added to the list: Issa the Ghost player qualifies in week 5 and Aydan (also from Ghost) will eventually join him in week 8. And who knows, maybe someone else will do it tonight during the final week of qualifying.
Of course, in the end the controller players will represent less than 5% of the qualified players, but names like Aydan, Issa, Unknown and Nickmercs offer an example for the many Fortnite players who prefer play with a joystick than a mouse, because they have proved that you can have a controller in your hands and still be better than 99.99% of PC players.
