Just putting a quote from this link here:


These two things are our aim assist.

Magnetism = when you strafe, the game will auto-turn if your crosshairs are over an enemy to keep the enemy in your sights.
Adhesion = when enemy moves away from your crosshairs, they follow the enemy.

Magnetism is often used to describe a system where the crosshairs will move towards a nearby enemy, and this usually happens most when either the player or the enemy (or both) are moving. It's basically the same system, but it activates when the enemy is NEAR where you're aiming, not just when you have them lined up precisely.

---

After my first experience with the game's aim assist behaving a LOT like an aimbot for the 5 minutes it took to give up and turn it off, I didn't bother doing proper testing until today. In that first encounter with it, I was lining up a relatively long range (for a Scrambler Rifle) headshot on a Heavy, and an enemy Scout ran out and jumped BEHIND him as I was releasing the trigger. I landed a mid-air headshot on the Scout about 2m to the left and more than 1m above where I had my aim centred. I wouldn't have found this too horrible (still a bit off, but bearable) if the Scout had actually run in front of the Heavy, or if my aim had been a litle off at the time so I might have been dragged onto the new target. But even then, getting a headshot on a target while he was jumping seemed more than a little ridiculous.

After geting sniped, I found another enemy near my next spawn point. I lined up then let go of the right stick while holding the fire button with my AR (I'd forgotten to restock my Scrambler fitting), and it chased an enemy around for a while before he died, with literally no aiming input from me.

I also had several encounters where I was trying to aim for myself and the aim assist was also trying to aim for me, and it threw my aim too far in the direction I was turning, or it decided to aim at one enemy while I was trying to line up on another and I got "stuck" firing between the two.

I got an inordinate number of headshots, and they were frequently on enemies I hadn't been aiming high on, but where the aim assist seemed like it was tracking my shots up towards the target's head for me.

---

In today's proper testing, I haven't had anything remotely as extreme as that, and as far as I can tell, you need to have your sights VERY close to the target before the aim assist will do anything, and even then it doesn't give chase on a fast-moving target.

---

I will empahsise that most people I've seen who have spoken about how OP the aim assist is while speaking as users of it have been Laser Rifle users, and I haven't tested that weapon myself. It's possible the majority of problems are occuring on LRs. It's also possible there's an intermittent issue with the aim assist going into supercharged mode. Given CCP's record with aim assist in the past, I'm inclined to think that inconsistent results are to be expected at this point.