Love the game to bits, have done since EA, but this one thing is driving me nuts and I just can't get used to it.
To me the feel of the mouse "zoom" (the way it acts) is such that it feels more like mouse elevation and lowering most of the time, rather than an actual zoom functionality (I think it "swoops in" at the last minute, but most of the time it feels more like an elevation control (not as drastic or straightforwardly vertical as the modal level change, but not that far different to me).
IOW, I want forward scrolling to zoom "up" (or "out", but it feels more like "up" to me), and backwards scrolling to zoom "down" or ("in," but if feels to me more like "down"). Also, when I hold the level modal key, I want to maintain the same feel - that forward scrolling lifts the level up and backwards lowers the level down. Both these functionalities are opposite from what my brain wants to do, and it really is exasperating, I just can't get used to it; with the result that I can't get the super-slick feeling of control I'd like. I just tend to work around it by keeping a medium zoom level as much as possible and not using zoom or level until I have to. But that curtails the feeling of control in general (it's more like playing with fixed isometric or something, which I don't think is how the devs want the game to feel).
It's a very similar psychological pain to the thing of not having the option to reverse mouse x-axis, and I have the same problem with that. (If a game doesn't allow me to reverse x-axis it's an instant return. It comes from when I first started playing videogames - I played Descent for so long that the feeling of a "forward" button (later translated to pushing the mouse forward) feels like "nose down", and "backwards" feels like "nose up" - which is totally different from the way I think the majority of people feel it, which isn't like a flight sim, but more like "painting" the screen, so that up is up and down is down.)
I tried using X-Mouse Button's reverse scrolling functionality, but it doesn't work unfortunately.
I understand that the team have more important things to spend their time on, so in lieu of them implementing this, could I ask, is there perhaps a config file somewhere where I could change the functionality myself?