SteelSeries Special Edition World of Warcraft Mouse
Co-designed specifically for World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment and SteelSeries, the World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse is fully scalable to meet the requirements of even the most discerning World of Warcraft gamer and delivers incredible customization with 15 programmable buttons, advanced macro creation, and 10 profiles each with unique illumination scheme, superior performance, comfort and control for in-game dominance, an amazing experience for World of Warcraft gamers of all levels and play styles.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars confused
I have not quite figured out everything on this mouse.
I suppose it is a good one, but going to take me more time.
1 Star Awful mouse
Let me start off by saying that I love most SteelSeries products. But this mouse was terrible. I can’t imagine the shape of the mouse fitting anyone’s hands well. I have large hands and it was still too big for me to use. Second, the buttons are not placed in ways that allow you to press them easily, probably because they are trying to fit too many buttons on the mouse. Third, it didn’t track as well as their other mouses, the skates looked the same as the Ikari mouse but weren’t as slick or something. Fourth, the mouse would only track X or Y, it would not do both at the same time. Meaning that you could move the cursor sideways or up/down, but not at angles or in an arc. Which of course makes it entirely useless for anything. Fifth, after plugging in the mouse, every 2-3 seconds the cursor would jump down 1/2″-3/4″ on the screen until it hit the bottom of the screen. This was constant and if you moved the cursor back up to where you wanted it, it would start the process all over again. This only happened when the mouse was plugged in, so obviously was a problem with either the driver or the mouse hardware/firmware.
I contacted SteelSeries about the last 2 problems which were the only showstoppers for me. Tech support took 5 days to get back to me and told me that the unit was a “rare” defective unit (they actually used “rare” with the quotes in their email). I was given the choice of returning it to the store I bought it from or paying shipping and send it back to them with a 4-6 week turnaround. I sent it back to Amazon the next day with the intention of getting a new one through Amazon. After talking to 15+ people online about this mouse (I was still getting /whispers 2 hours after talking about it in the trade channel of my server), every single person experienced the same problems I did. I have decided I will stick with my Ikari Laser Mouse SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse (Black).
1 Star big on promises, bigger on failure
short version: do not buy this mouse - it’s really really terrible at best.
details:
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pros: it looks great, has illumination, great looking box…. did I mention it looks great?
physical cons:
It may look like metal, but it’s all plastic and feels very lightweight and cheap in your hands.
The buttons on the sides feel “extra” cheap and are kind of “loose” and soft and don’t provide a clean click of any sort - it reminds you more of a flimsy “D pad” controller on the old nintendo systems, but no where near that reliable. You’ll be asking yourself, “am I pushing the button now? how about now? Now???”
It’s big - I have large hands, and it was still uncomfortable to hold my hand in a position where my fingers covered all the buttons. If you have medium or small hands, I would not even bother trying to use this mouse.
software cons:
Does not ship with software, you must download it (13 megs?!? for a mouse driver???) yourself.
Installing the software is easy. Making changes to it is nigh impossible.
Illumination:
Say you want your mouse to glow “blue” instead of the default yellow - you change the color to blue…. and wait, and wait…. and watch the yellow - it never changes to any color ever. Hope you like yellow, because that’s all you’re ever going to get.
Button assignments:
Major failure here….If you want to change a mouse button to be “sit” or “action button 7″ or something in directly out of World of Warcraft, you’re in luck - that’s very easy; but what if you want to assign a mouse button to “page down”, or “home”, or “k”, or any other key…. nope, can’t be done, you’re out of luck! They have to be kidding!! This was the number one deal breaker that made me return the product. If I can’t even assign “page down” or a letter key to the mouse buttons that means you can’t use those extra buttons in Windows or in any other game but WoW. Prefer Lord of the Rings Online? Doom? Some other game - Sorry, this mouse will not work for you.
Profiles: another “advantage” (read useless marketing hype) is the profiles in the software. You can set up 10 different profiles, each with it’s own colors (which -as I mentioned - don’t change the mouse from flashing yellow), and each with it’s own separate WoW control scheme for unique button mapping depending on which WoW character you are playing. Why anyone would want to re-map the mouse keys for each WoW character - so that every character plays differently - is beyond me, but you can do it; apparently this is so you don’t get used to your control scheme?
Conclusion: this is a “marketing driven” mouse that feels cheap, costs a lot, and does not deliver on expectations that are written on the box.
1 Star Avoid.
Bought it today, and will be returning it tomorrow. Here’s why.
1) The buttons (apart from left, right and scroll wheel) have a very “dangling” feel about them. I can wiggle them easily when i lay my fingers on them, which is an indication of poor casting and build quality.
2) The Steelseries company promised Mac OS X drivers for the mouse in November 2008, and said they would be available no later than late in December 2008. I’m writing now in the end of May 2009, and there are no drivers for the Mac (or Linux for that matter). USB overdrive (a common Mac utility used to alleviate the poor driver support of certain input unit manufacturers) is not able to detect the 9 non-standard buttons.
3) A steelseries product that is made of poorly-cast plastic? Come on. They’ve gone to great lengths to make the mouse look like brushed metal, though.
With the above in mind, the price tag of 100$ (give or take, depending on place of purchase), this is a poor joke on the buyer.
Yes, the mouse looks cool, including the pulsing internal LED light, but that’s not the reason you buy it. You buy a mouse to use it, not for show.
And before closing, I’ll add that others have come to much the same conclusion as me - google the product name and read the bloggings and product reviews about this. There are numerous reliability problems with even short-term use of the mouse, and the SteelSeries customer support is abysmal. No way I’ll be a patron of a company that sells second-rate products at premium prices.
Suggested alternatives: Logitech MX 1100 (same price, but has a MUCH better build quality, and it’s Logitech, which says it all, really!) or HP VooDooDNA Gaming mouse (cheaper, yet solidly built and good looking too).
5 Stars Very Pleased
Back in February I was looking for a new mouse as mine was about to die. Since I do play wow, I somehow came across this mouse in my search. In my excitement I just ordered the mouse without doing much research first.. (I usually never do that and was surprised that I was so spontaneous)
Once I started reading all the posted reviews on many different sites, I was very worried about all the problems that have been reported with sticky buttons, not working, DOA, not true macros ect. So, now I thought I made a mistake by ordering this which would be really bad as this was 99$.
Well I got my mouse a few days later and I went ahead and unpacked it and installed the drivers from the website. So far so good. I received it on a Friday so I spent a little bit of time configuring the buttons to my liking.. This took a bit until I was satisfied.
Then I went and cleared Naxx.
Yes During the raid I was having issues on how it did the macros with it using the chat window.. So, I took a few seconds when they were looting, and made the macros inside wow, enabled another action bar (dominos) scaled it way down and made it invisible unless I mouse over. Drug the macros out there, assigned key stroke and then bound that key to the desired mouse button. Problem solved. After approx 6 hours of play the mouse was still working (no sticky buttons) and I was completely sold on it. Thank God!
I have used the mouse daily for the past 3 going on 4 months and have had no major issues. The mouse works great. I can’t imagine playing without it now. It helps being able to watch the fight and just press a button rather than watching the action bar ect.
Just because I am paranoid on a static electricity discharge frying the mouse as some reported, I have a computer case that is metal right at the edge of my desk. So before I touch the mouse, I always touch the side of the case first.. During the colder months this proved critical as there were times I did discharge some static. Now that it has warmed up, no issue but I still touch just in case. I would rather take 2 seconds and touch the case and be ok than touch the mouse and shock it to it’s death.
I consider myself lucky to not have received one of the flawed mice. I love this and will probably order another one for my laptop. So when I am on the laptop, I don’t have to unplug/plug the mouse in addition to moving cables.
I use this mouse in addition to the logitech g13 gaming board and between the two, I have enough buttons to do whatever I want.
Despite all the negative reviews and flawed mice that did ship out, I am very pleased and highly recommend the mouse.
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