Anyone who has played Diablo 3 (or any of it's predecessors) will tell you that it's a mouse heavy game, but have you actually wondered what patterns your mouse forms while playing Diablo 3? Or how many times you click the mouse? I decided to try some free applications that are used to plot mouse patterns and record clicks to find out just that.
The first piece of software I used was IOGraph, a cool piece of technology that records where you mouse moves and stops and plots in to an image. I wouldn't recommend doing this for more than 2 hours, as it results in a blob of black lines as you will see in the pictures below. The other software I used is called WinOMeter, which records mouse/keyboard clicks and the distance the mouse traveled.
I started a 3 hour session of Diablo 3 (for the sake of this post, of course) using a level 58 Witch Doctor, and recorded my stats every hour. All 3 hours where spent in online mode with 3 other players.
Here comes the good stuff:
After 1 Hour
After just 1 hour of gameplay you can already see that the graph is pretty full, with my mouse having went all over the screen. The black dots represent spots where my mouse was stationary, like when you are firing at a monster.
And the stats:
Keyboard Presses: 3128
Left Mouse Clicks: 1875
Right Mouse Clicks: 117
Distance Mouse Moved: 0.619 Meters
After 2 Hours
As soon as you hit the 2 hour mark, you can no longer tell what this is. The center of the graph is now a black blob while the edges are full of black spots.
The stats:
Keyboard Presses: 5630
Left Mouse Clicks: 3468
Right Mouse Clicks: 234
Distance Mouse Moved: 1.052 Meters
After 3 Hours
There is not much difference to be seen past the 2 hour mark, for the simple reason that the middle portion is already fully black. You can see some additional black spots on the edges but apart from that it is mostly the same.
And the final stats:
Keyboard Presses: 8759
Left Mouse Clicks: 5439
Right Mouse Clicks: 374
Distance Mouse Moved: 1.795 Meters
I was pretty amazed looking back to see that I actually pressed close to 9 thousand keys in just 3 hours. I am pretty sure the graphs will be significantly different when playing other classes, such as the melee oriented Barbarian, but I do not yet have a high enough alt to test this. If you decide to test this out with other classes, feel free to send us your data from the contact us page.