My EC2 eVo black got beer poured in it, and the mouse1 began to malfunction intermittently. I went to looking for a replacement. All the resellers are pretty much tapped for EC2 eVo black, but the less popular EC2 eVo white is still available. Same sensor, I figured, "screw it... I don't care how it looks."

WRONG.

The nice matte finish on the black is not what you will find with the white. The white is a shiny enamel affair that gets greasy and slips around in your hand and sucks really bad.

So being the ingenious guy I am, and recalling back to TechTV/Metku mouse mods days that there was this substance called Plasti Dip, I decided to improve things manually. Plasti Dip is a spray-on grip substance. You simply spray several coats (and make sure to not fill in any mechanical bits), and poof: your plastic, metal, wood, or whatever now has a permanent grippy rubber coat.

I don't have pictures of the process, and I honestly sort of half-assed it because it was for utility, and not looks. But the thing works pretty nicely. I simply used some store-brand blue painter's tape on the mouse's naughty bits and sprayed even coats as prescribed. Three coats to be exact. I also sprayed with respect to the charges that Plasti Dip might peel if you spray over a joint. But I also didn't want to risk taking off the teflon feet and dissassembling the mouse.

The mouse is grippy and nice, almost like the texture of a basketball, there was a sticky mouse1 for a week or so, but i finally located the drip and it flaked out and now there is no such problem. Only took about 4 hours, and made this unwantable mouse wantable and nice.

http://imgur.com/a/LFi0k

e: cleaned the surface with a spray bottle full of rubbing alcohol and lint-free cloth

whos picking up a dk2 for pro gaming

Quake 3/Quake Live is a really good game, maybe perfect -- but that doesn't draw spectators and pool prizes. Many game modes, maps, and even gimmicks still draws some new players to what is widely regarded as the definitive arena FPS.

Arena FPSes are dying though. Improvements in graphics, and several generations of incredibly popular party games - which act a bit like quake - like CoD have sort of pushed them to the side, for at least 6-7 years or so.

There's also a lot of changes in the environment in which these games reside. Wide populations of gamers who will soon be "born with a golden touchscreen in their mouth." Joysticks, having already seen generations of pros come and go. And if many developing companies have their way, eye tracking and body suits will dominate input.

The prospect of cross-platform play has mostly come and gone, stuck in a chasm where big industry can't even support it for real-time games. Networks have gotten more congested with the rise of high-bandwidth media traveling in the same place as exclusively so much simple text and game packets used to, also at the mercy of an even larger industry force.

With these things in mind, where does Quake go from here? From simple things like motion blur, mesh terrain, or weapon recoil -- to the insane, like a gaming-exclusive fiber WAN which is not at the mercy of Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook usage. What are your big ideas?

Just like the title suggests, my mousepads wear out within 2-3 months.

I use a Zowie EC2 eVo, on a cloth pad. QCK+ to be more specific. I typically buy two at a time, because tracking and glide on these pads tend to degrade within a month or so, and become unusable within 2-3 months.

Now it may be because I use exceptionally low sensitivity, that is 6/11, 2300 DPI, and 0.228 in-game (which seems to be roughly the same in quake/source engine games I play). This amounts to roughly across the pad to do a 180 degree turn, and around 270 degrees if i move the mouse sensor all the way across the pad. The sensitivity was something I got from like 0.16 with the DA3.5 I was using a year ago.

I had too many LoD issues with the DA3.5 even with the tape fix, and as well some tracking problems if I moved the mouse too fast, the amount of motion seemed to dip with speed, possibly due to a wagon-wheel effect of sorts. The zowie's larger skates seem to help with friction inconsistencies.

You can see the tracking here: http://i.imgur.com/dT9g518.png

The top four were made on a month-old pad, the bottom four were made on a just-out-of-the box pad. They were made by slowly moving the mouse in a comfortable position to generate a horizontal line (roughly), but to highlight high-and low frequency noise on the pad. These obviously show some differences, but they don't highlight a scarier tracking problem that I recently had encountered, where the cursor would snake down, across, back up to the line. These aren't sensor problems either, the lens is clean.

The real issue though, with old pads, is the friction changes. If you move quickly across an older QcK pad you'll notice that the center of the pad creates a drag of sorts. It's obviously less if you apply less normal force down on the pad, but it's completely non-existant on new pads. This would suggest that the cloth is hardening/flaking away and portions of the mouse skates are actually skating on the back of the traction. I don't know if this is a problem with all pads, because QcK is the only pads I've ever used.

I ordered a Goliathus control, because it's roughly the same size, cloth, and probably high-quality cloth, but I'm wondering if these pads suffer the same problems for other low-sens players. I'm also wondering if there are any other pads anyone can suggest, preferably solid color, because I know that the Zowie EC2 eVo's sensor functions best on white paper (from the data sheet). I should probably just switch to plastic, but I know if I do that I'll have to change my sensitivity, and there's just no way, I will be awful for a year or so. Maybe someone makes double stitched mousepads?

tl;dr: I shoot real good when I've got to move ~20-30 degrees in around 250msec, I don't shoot real good when I'm tracking a target within ~3-5 degrees, given any amount of time, and it feels like it's because my mousepad is wearing down to the rubber.