I don't play this mod (much, at all, anymore, etc), but the fact that you brushed off arguments with carefully manipulated examples bugs the fucking shit out of me.
Compensating for wide crosshairs requires skill; shooting with pinpoint accurate ranged weapons does not. Landing a headshot into a 20 pixel head is harder with a 30 pixel crosshair than with a 1 pixel crosshair, and it doesn't come down to luck. If you center your 30 pixels into the 20 pixels, chances are you'll hit. If you aim at the top left edge of the earlobe with your 1 pixel, you'll still hit although you technically didn't aim at the center of the head.
First off, the bolded part is horseshit. I don't even know how you can have this viewpoint.
In your example, aiming at the center of the head lets you hit 100% with a pinpoint crosshair and ~66% with the wider crosshair. Aiming at the top left edge of the earlobe with a wide crosshair only gives you increased chance to miss because you didn't aim at the center of the head. Additionally, aiming at 1 pixel to the side of the head
misses with a pinpoint crosshair, yet you still have a chance to hit the head with a wider crosshair.
Not quite; imagine a player has a jittery hand, thus consistently misses the pixel he wants to aim at by an average of 10 pixels into any direction. He wants to aim at the center of a 20 pixels sized head with a pinpoint accurate weapon. Instead, he slips as usual and hits a point 10 pixels away from the center of the head. Due to the pinpoint accurate weapon, the shot hits the 20 pixels sized head missing the center by 10 pixels. It is still a headshot.
In the next case, imagine the jittery player uses a weapon with a 20 pixels sized crosshair. He wants to aim at the center of the 20 pixels sized head again, but slips by 10 pixels. 50% of the 20 pixels sized crosshair is now outside the area of the 20 pixels sized head, meaning he will miss with a likelihood of 50%.
Now assume a player with perfect aim and a weapon with a 20 pixels wide crosshair. He aims at the center of the 20 pixels sized head, doesn't slip unlike the jittery one, and the shot hits despite the inaccuracy of the weapon because the crosshair perfectly overlaps the head.
The pinpoint accurate system does the jittery player a favor, because he is able to land shots he otherwise wouldn't. The perfectly aiming player is indifferent about pinpoint accuracy or the 20 pixels sized crosshair, because he hits either way.
Consequently, the pinpoint accurate system promotes careless shooting into the general direction of the head, whereas the system involving randomness requires special care to center the wide crosshair over an equally-sized area. The prior needs less skill, the latter needs more.
Increase the jittery player's inaccuracy by 1 pixel, or slightly reduce the size of the head and he misses with the pinpoint crosshair every time.
Here is a mastercraft picture illustrating my point. (
http://i.imgur.com/Nx407dv.png for people who don't want to log into this horrible forum)
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loginThe white dot represents a pinpoint crosshair, enlarged for viewing purposes. The red circle represents a wider crosshair approximately the size of the head.
In the image, the pinpoint crosshair misses, while the wider crosshair has a decent chance of hitting the head. If the wider crosshair user hits the head, he wasn't more skilled than the pinpoint crosshair user, he just got
lucky. The random inaccuracy caused him to hit, not his skill.
It's true that there are times when you can hit with a pinpoint crosshair and miss with a wider one. However, the only reason you missed is because of the random inaccuracy that is inherent in the wider crosshair; random inaccuracy that can equally cause a hit on a missed pinpoint shot. You're
rewarded for being inaccurate compared to the pinpoint crosshair. This is less skill-based. Just because you're inherently penalized for shooting doesn't mean you're more skilled.