Rappy Snappy beats Snap Tap rap, say click-clack manufacts

rockpapershotgun.com:

Gaming hardware makers have often walked the line between enabling a player’s true skills, and simply delivering them an unfair advantage. Sometimes, honest accessibility aids are falsely accused of being cheating tools; other times, a monitor will straight-up play League of Legends for you. This week, developments in gaming keyboards have sparked a new debate on what does and doesn’t fall within the scope of fair play, with mechanical keeb specialists Wooting declaring in no uncertain terms that "Rappy Snappy is not the same as Snap Tap." Cool, glad that’s cleared up.

If you’re convinced that only about half that sentence is comprised of real words... you’re right, but bear with me. A while back, Wooting announced the 80HE, a superfast Hall Effect keyboard that would introduce their new Rappy Snappy feature. This tracks two keys of your choosing and allows one of them to activate even when the other is already being partially pressed – unlike how most keyboards only track one input at a time. In theory, this enables faster side-to-side strafing in pacey FPS games like Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant, as you don't have to fully lift your finger off one directional key before you can start moving in the opposite direction. Unlike your hapless, technologically inferior opponent, who'll likely be full of holes before they can sort their mutually exclusive feet.

The 80HE is due to launch this September, but Razer – the dark green Goliath to Wooting’s presumably normal skin-coloured David – have pipped it to the post, releasing a firmware update to their existing Huntsman V3 Pro keyboards that adds a similar feature called Snap Tap. Like Rappy Snappy – which it turns out is really hard not to type as Snappy Tappy – Snap Tap allows for the same rapid strafing by letting you hold down one directional key and quickly hammer the opposite key for optimal sideways dodging.

Far from ushering in a new era of meritocratic manshooting, however, the near-simultaneous arrival of these