Gaming hardware manufacturers often walk a fine line between allowing players to apply their real skills and simply giving them an unfair advantage. Sometimes, legitimate accessibility aids are falsely accused of being cheating tools; other times, your monitor simply plays League of Legends for you. This week, the rise of gaming keyboards has sparked a up-to-date debate about what is and isn’t fair play, and mechanical keeb specialists Wooting declaring in an unambiguous manner that “Rappy Snappy is not the same as Snap Tap.” Cool, I’m glad that was cleared up.
If you’re convinced that only half of this sentence consists of real words… you’re right, but be patient. A while ago, Wooting announced 80HEa super-fast Hall-effect keyboard that would introduce a up-to-date Rappy Snappy feature. It tracks two keys you select and lets you activate one of them even when the other is already partially pressed – unlike most keyboards that only track one input at a time. In theory, this allows for faster side-to-side movement in fast-paced FPS games like Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant, since you don’t have to lift your finger completely off one directional key to start moving in the opposite direction. Unlike your unfortunate, technologically inferior opponent, who will probably be full of holes before they can sort out their mutually exclusive feet.
The 80HE is scheduled to launch in September, but Razer – a shadowy green Goliath compared to David Wooting’s presumably normal skin tone – beat it to the punch by releasing a firmware update for its existing Hunter V3 Pro keyboards, which add a similar feature called Snap Tap. Much like Rappy Snappy — which, it turns out, is really difficult not to spell Snappy Tappy — Snap Tap enables the same kind of rapid movement, letting you hold down one directional key and quickly tap the opposite key for an optimal sideways dodge.
However, far from ushering in a up-to-date era of meritocratic shooting, the near-simultaneous emergence of these dueling keyboard technologies has raised concerns that such SnappyTapRapRapBabap systems are tantamount to cheating, with critics citing similarities to similarly-functioning scripts existing in games like Team Fortress 2 and CS2’s forefather, CS:GO. Scripts, as a concept, tend to occupy a grey area between “taking advantage of available assets” and “being a cheating slut”, but I suspect most online shooters would agree that their apply is not considered particularly good form.
Wooting decided to go on the defensive, tXeting tXeets series This explains how the Rappy Snappy is functionally different from Razer’s Snap Tap – and why it’s not as much of a competitive no-no as it might seem. In miniature, Wooting claims that the Rappy Snappy only registers input from the key that’s pressed down the most deeply; this still allows for faster transitions, since one key doesn’t have to be fully released for the next input to occur, but using it effectively still requires the player to put more force into just one key at a time. The Snap Tap, on the other hand, only registers the last input, meaning that a player could (for example) fully hold down the D key with one finger and simply press the A key to perform a lateral motion.
In other words, Razer’s system more comprehensively disregards the PC shooter rule that only one input is allowed at a time, while Wooting’s system… just cheats it a bit, I guess? It still eliminates the need for a full key return before the initial input is considered complete, but it sounds like you’ll still have to press manually and quickly Both keys, like on a standard keyboard. Snap Tap, allowing you to hold down a single key and still register multiple inputs, arguably approaches standalone gaming territory.
Either way, those who want to lay claim to the supposed benefits of these systems will have to wait and see how they fare against anti-cheat systems. Valve apparently isn’t handing out VAC bans to those who apply Snap Tap in CS2, but different games will have different rules about what hardware can be considered assistive. And it’s not just shooters: rhythm game and minor internet sensation Osu! enforces the ban “anything that lowers the level of skill required to play the game,” and these tools that enhance game efficiency could very likely violate that rule.
