Accuracy vs. Speed - What is the Optimum Balance for Aiming?

Our three benchmarking games at Aiming.Pro cover multi-target aiming, single target aiming and flick aiming. Each has a leaderboard with some great scores at the top – but what is it that separates these top scoring games with the rest? We wanted to take a look at whether speed or accuracy is more important for elite aiming.

Let’s take a look at some of the statistics for these games.

Free for All (Multi Target)

The blue and orange bars represent the very best scores.

As you can see, the accuracy rating for top 100 games is heavily focused in the 70-85% region and for the top 50 it’s shifted up to 75-85%. Interestingly we don’t see many top games with over 85% accuracy.

The speed distribution is even more telling, almost all top games have a target lifetime of 1.1-1.3s, with the top 50 more skewed towards the lower end of that range. The rest are 1.4-2.0s – much slower.

These two facts suggest that getting a top score in multi-target mode requires a focus on speed and willingness to sacrifice some accuracy.

Single Focus (Single Target)

The peak accuracy for the top 50 games is 90-95% - looks like this is the sweet spot. We can see that the 51-100 ranked games are more spread between 80% and 100% - this suggests you can do quite well by either going fast and loose or slower and tighter. We’re not interested in doing quite well though!

Looking at speed we can see again that there is a clear distinction between all three groups. The top 50 games showing a huge majority at 0.7-0.8s. Then the 51-100 ranked more in the 0.8-1.0s range and all the rest being much slower again.

Coming top in single focus appears to require a high level of accuracy (but not perfect!) combined with a strong bias for speed.

Flick Aim

Flick aim is a bit different – the targets only have a lifetime of 0.8 seconds, so there’s a low upper limit on speed. Looking at speed first we can see the top games have a slight bias for faster aiming, but there’s not much in it.

The accuracy distribution is interesting but could be logically inferred - since it’s not possible to go much faster (that’s the whole point of flick aiming) then the top scoring games must be due to greater accuracy. It is interesting to see the actual accuracy of the top games, scoring 90%+ accuracy on flick aim seems like an amazing feat of aiming skill.

Conclusion

The optimum balance depends on the specific game mode you are playing, but none of the top scores demands over 95% accuracy. Accuracy always needs to be balanced with speed. The higher the tempo of the game you are playing, the more important speed becomes.

Take a look at your stats on the benchmark games and check how your accuracy and speed compare to those of the highest ranking games. If your accuracy is in-line then focus on speeding up. Maybe play some of the flick aiming training games to practice. If your speed is good but accuracy lower then take a look at the precision aiming drill or just slow down a little while you build up the muscle memory.