GuitarBizarre Profile Blog Joined November 2011 United Kingdom 331 Posts Last Edited: 2013-02-05 00:56:02 #1



Being so tired of this state of affairs, I have drafted a megapost regarding non-features and bad design.



Unfortunately, its such a huge topic I'm sure I've made some mistakes! (I'm also aware that sometimes my opinions will be disagreed with, IE, I'm sure someone out there finds macro keys useful, but I'm unlikely to want to change much of what I'm saying in that regard - I am however open to specific examples and convincing logic!)



I am also aware that much of this is covered in the respective megathreads for hardware we already have. This is because I wish for this to be posted in many different places across the internet, and I also hope to use the length of the article to consolidate and as efficiently as possible condense the information into one single source!



NOW! Without further ado, here's what I've got so far.



Please be aware the following is neither complete, nor has the final tone been fully realised - I may stick with the irreverent tone of the articles beginning, or I may re-format to match the later, more factual/formal tone.



I would like any questions and comments directed towards the factual content and its correctness, or otherwise towards any suggestions people may have for improving the articles legibility or clarity without affecting the underlying content. Thankyou!



OK, so, specifically - I am disappointed with much of the gaming hardware out there right now. So much of it has such obvious and such silly flaws that its kind of ridiculous. Many of these flaws are being turned right back and marketed to us as features!Being so tired of this state of affairs, I have drafted a megapost regarding non-features and bad design.Unfortunately, its such a huge topic I'm sure I've made some mistakes! (I'm also aware that sometimes my opinions will be disagreed with, IE, I'm sure someone out there finds macro keys useful, but I'm unlikely to want to change much of what I'm saying in that regard - I am however open to specific examples and convincing logic!)I am also aware that much of this is covered in the respective megathreads for hardware we already have. This is because I wish for this to be posted in many different places across the internet, and I also hope to use the length of the article to consolidate and as efficiently as possible condense the information into one single source!NOW! Without further ado, here's what I've got so far.Please be aware the following is neither complete, nor has the final tone been fully realised - I may stick with the irreverent tone of the articles beginning, or I may re-format to match the later, more factual/formal tone. OK, so after spending a ton of time upon the interwebs and yet more time playing a ton of games, and EVEN MORE TIME THAN THAT learning about hardware and buying mice and keyboards and generally nerding out, I've come to a singular conclusion.



That conclusion is that the vast majority of “Gaming” hardware is shit, and that most gaming “Hardware” advice, is also shit.



This (not so) little diatribe intends to be my very best attempt at fixing that.



So, first things first. Keyboards. Old computers didn't even boot up without one of these bad boys present, so its pretty much reasonable to term this badass motherfucking set of switches the king of hardware. Its also often the most expensive and the one with the biggest surge in popularity among makers right now.



**Why your gaming keyboard is shit, and what you can do about it.**



OK. So, right now there are some pretty fucking fancy gaming keyboards out there on the market. This is nothing new, really. Slightly older gaming keyboard models like the Logitech G11 and G15 are poster children for how much useless crap you can throw at a product.



Newer models like the Steelseries Apex are pushing the boundaries of bullshit right now, and even the much vaunted G710 Logitech mechanical board is really struggling to be taken seriously in more serious circles (Which is to say, most people fucking love it).



So lets review a few features that are completely. Fucking. Useless. On keyboards.





*1 – 1000Hz USB polling rate! 1ms response time! Faster reaction to your keypresses! 1337 Fr4gz0r!*



This is bullshit because keys and keyboards have mechanisms in them already to avoid key bounce and accidental double taps. In plain English, the keyboard, monitors the switch status, and if it detects multiple connections being made within the same few milliseconds, will intelligently average out the input to produce one confirmed keypress, since it is assuming (rightly) that the switch contacts are not being pressed once ever 2ms, but rather bouncing together after actuation.



This stops switches from registering keypresses twice if the contacts bounce together multiple times which is of course, a good thing, and EVERY keyboard on the market does this. Even the cheapy rubber domes and even the Topres and Mechanicals.



When you increase the polling rate over USB, you ask the operating system to check the status of the equipment 1000 times a second. Considering your debounce time will be (typically) between 4 and 8 ms, this means that it is checking the status of the keyswitch AT LEAST FOUR TIMES MORE OFTEN THAN IT IS POSSIBLE TO REGISTER A KEYPRESS.



Sound like bullshit? Sound like a waste of your system resources checking something four times too fast? You betcha it does. (Note: This is also common feature on mice, however since mice are continuous input devices, they actually do benefit a little from high USB polling rates. 500Hz is more than enough though even there.)



*2 – Gold plated USB connector reduces latency from your keyboard! Faster response time! Pwnt nubz!*



This is similarly bullshit. Firstly, electricity travels fucking fast as shit through everything except insulators. Whether its gold or nickel or copper or even lead, when conducted, electricity moves at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. Wikipedia, when I checked, put it to me that in a vacuum, electricity travels at 100% the speed of light. In unshielded copper, 97-98%, and in typical coaxial cable, which is very heavily shielded, 66%.



66% sounds like a big speed reduction, right? Well yeah, proportionally.



However this is 66% of the FASTEST THING IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSE.



Light can go round the earth 7.4 times a fucking second. The earth. That giant fucking ball of rock that you couldn't possibly see all of in a lifetime. 7.4 times. One second.



The gold plating on your USB connector is less than 1mm thick. Much less. We're talking microns thick. Human hair thick.



When you're dealing with something even half as fast as electricity, you're talking measurements of speed that deal with whole meters being traveled in nanoseconds. No fucking way in hell is that gold USB cable making your shit respond faster. Unless you happen to have the capability to slow down time to roughly 1/100000th of normal speed, in which case you might, if you were really paying close fucking attention, notice a difference in response between a very heavily and very lightly insulated cable.



*3 – Macro keys.*



Ok, here's the skinny on macros – They're predefined sequences of keypresses and commands that can be run from a single keypress. This means that if a task is sufficiently simple, and its parameters sufficiently rigid, that this predefined sequence of things can automate it entirely, and therefore a macro is capable of doing in one press what would normally have taken many.



Thing is, games don't fucking work that way. I've had boards with macro keys, and I game a LOT. But the fact is - If you're serious enough about gaming to be dropping serious cash on a keyboard, then you're probably at least looking up to, if not playing at the level of, tournament players.



And basically every tournament out there for any type of game, bans macro keys. So your expensive Logitech G710 isn't tournament legal. You can bring it along, but you'll have to disable your macros and probably the tournament organizers will ask you to remove the key caps from your macro keys to make them hard to hit and use.



And even if that weren't the case, you wouldn't use them because your idols and the people you respect, don't use them. In fact, a macro key is the opposite of skill - it automates a task you cannot do yourself. But the fact is, all those tricks you're setting up macro keys to do? They can be done manually. And probably better that way, with more control, its just harder to learn. You can't set up a macro to muta stack, or rocketjump, or really do much of anything, without it being possible to exercise more control manually. Not to mention, if you've got a macro, remember what it is – a predefined sequence of normal keypresses, executed automatically. If you hit (or need to hit) another key mid-macro, well you just screwed up whatever your macro was doing by interrupting it. Failure!



But wait, what about games like Quake, where people will spam chat messages to annoy their opponents? Well, those aren't macros. They're chatbinds. The software actually allows a message to be sent all at once with one key. No macro, just a predefined message. And you don't need a macro key to do it. Just a normal key you're not using for anything else.



*4 – Bazillion colour backlight! Choose your power glow! Red! Green! Blue! Yellow! Heart!*



If I have to seriously explain to you why varying backlight colours will not make you better at games, you are beyond saving. Thankfully, most manufacturers market this the way it should be marketed – as a visual commodity.



Unfortunately, not all of them do. Thermaltake are particular offenders, since they often term the backlighting on their products (in typical engrish), along the lines of “Backlight to unleash your battle feeling!”.



Don't do this. Don't encourage this. Just don't. Its fine to want backlighting, my Ducky Tenkeyless has it and I asked for it. But don't let backlighting sway your opinion too much guys...



*5 – LCD Screen! On your keyboard! Look at it! It displays stuff!*



Ok, look, seriously, I get that the keyboard companies don't exactly have a ton to work with regarding a legitimate hype machine, but come the fuck on. If you have an LCD screen on your keyboard and you're actually looking at it during games, you are playing games for which you do not need a fancy pants fucking keyboard, because apparently the game is so simple you can divert your attention from it entirely with no consequence.



*6 – Minimized ghosting! 10 key rollover! Anti Ghosting! WOOOoOOoOOooOOoOO!!!*



OK, lets be real here. What is ghosting? Well, in simple terms, its a thing that happens when you press too many keys at once on a bad keyboard. Different boards will handle this different ways. Some will refuse to accept the additional key, and so you might find, as I once did, that diagonal down left on your arrow keys is not possible, because the keyboard won't send both keypresses to the machine at once.



Other boards will occasionally run into situations where certain combinations of keys will produce other characters than initially intended.



What happens when a keyboard ghosts, is that the board is receiving signals from two keys on the same circuit matrix layer. Unable to determine which keys are being pressed directly, it confuses the two signals and registers a key elsewhere on the board by accident.



So this is bad, and therefore anti-ghosting sounds useful, right? And it is. But the problem is that what gaming keyboard manufacturers term anti-ghosting is usually a completely different thing. N Key Rollover.



Here's a description from WASDKeyboards, that tells you what N Key Rollover is.



Key Rollover (N-KRO, 6-KRO)

Another benefit that a mechanical keyboard can provide is something called Key Rollover. This terms describes how many keys can be registered when pressed at the same time. WASD mechanical keyboards all feature N-KRO (infinite keys) over a PS/2 connection and 6-KRO (6 keys) over a USB connection. Our mechanical keyboards uses individual diodes for each switch to provide true N-KRO. The reason why the keyboard only provides 6-KRO is due to limitations of the USB protocol.

When N-KRO is available, you could theoretically press and hold down all the keys on your keyboard at the same time and have every single key register. With 6-KRO, you can press up to 6 keys and 4 modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Windows). Effectively giving you up to 10 keys in that situation. Since most situations where multiple keys are being held down require the use of modifiers, you will probably never run into a situation where a key press is blocked. So, under most situations, N-KRO is not needed. Some instances where one might find N-KRO necessary are emulating musical instruments (such as a virtual piano) or while playing some games (such as some flight simulators).



And here's another, that tells you what most gaming keyboards actually do:



Gaming Matrix - This is similar to Key Rollover, but is far inferior. To save costs, some keyboards are designed so that only certain areas of the keyboard can register more keys at once rather than offering the true Key Rollover achieved by adding diodes to the circuit.



Now, as for ghosting itself – these days its a non issue. You may find that your board hits the limits of its key rollover, if you choose a cheap board or if you use odd, 4+ key combinations not involving modifiers in your favourite games, but even if you did manage to hit the limits of your board somehow, (And in 99% of cases you simply won't, even on cheap boards, no matter how hardcore you are.) most keyboards these days will simply refuse to register more keypresses, rather than misidentifying characters or commands. Its simply useless marketing hype to advertise anti ghosting, even if the manufacturer isn't misidentifying it as a synonym for N-Key Rollover.



Want more proof that this stuff is bull? Well then peep this. The year is Starcraft Broodwar, the worlds most popular eSport RTS EVER, where players earned millions and the scene attained governmentally recognised status as a profession in Korea.

The most popular keyboard in the entire sport, for many, many years, was the Qsenn DT-35. You might never have heard of it. (Though if you're into your StarCraft, you probably have) The reason why you might have never heard of it is because its a cheap, throwaway membrane keyboard that was used in internet cafes and bought in bulk for pro team houses so that players could wear them out and go grab another from the back room without breaking the team bank. It doesn't have or advertise N Key rollover because it doesn't need to. Even at 600 actions per minute, no StarCraft player has ever hit the hardware limits of this board.



Now are there situations where a certain amount of N-Key rollover is useful? Sure. But you have to be digging DEEP to find them. Here's a few:



*Braille2000 input (which requires up to 6 keys at once; according to the Keyboard Requirements, SDF + JKL must be accepted, ideally plus spacebar)

emulating a musical instrument's keyboard

some games*



Now when it says “Some games” we are talking a very, pathetically small number. Unless you KNOW that your game REQUIRES huge numbers of simultaneously held and pressed keys, you seriously have better things to worry about.





**So wait, I thought you'd tell me what I can do about it?**





Thats right, I did! And what you can do about it is this. Stop buying fancy, glitzy keyboards with stupid lights and flashy crap in them and gold USB connectors and LCD screens and 80 bajillion macro keys.



Instead, take the time to read up on the things that genuinely do make a keyboard better to use. Note I said “better to use” and not “make you better at games”, skill is skill and fancy features will not give you more of it.



You can win professional tournaments with minimal and basic gear if you're simply better than the competition. Having nicer gear, flashier gear, whatever, is primarily a luxury thing. A mechanical keyboard with a solid build will make it only very slightly easier to play games. The biggest difference will be in how much you WANT to play games now that you have a fancy keyboard to play them with.



So, what features SHOULD you look out for in your new gaming keyboard?



*1 – Mechanical keyswitches. Maybe.*



Now look, this one isn't set in stone. Like I said above, that Qsenn DT-35 membrane board that costs next to nothing and was bought in bulk in order to be used, abused, and replaced frequently, has won multiple StarCraft professional tournaments, and nobody seemed to mind what keyboard they were using when they hoisted that trophy afterwards.



But, regardless of that, a vast majority of people will agree, that while any board will do, mechanical keyswitch boards feel better, and have many advantages that justify their expense when you're using them all day every day.



There are tons of references available already about mechanical keyswitches, so I'll keep this brief. I'm only going to deal with Cherry MX switches here, simply because unless you're looking at specialist boards (and therefore don't need this guide because you should already know your shit), you're not going to come across any Topre or hall-effect switches anytime soon.



Cherry Switches are mechanical switches and come in various types, usually denoted by colour.



In Cherry MX switches, “Clicky” means the key stem is built in two pieces, such that when pressing the key down, the two parts collide and make a clicking sound.

Tactile, on the other hand, means that when pressing the switch down, there is a small “bump” halfway through the travel, which provides touchy-feely feedback as to when the switch has activated.



A switch that is neither of these things is known as linear. Pressing one down is smooth the whole way down, and creates no sound until the switch bottoms out at the end of its travel.



No set rules exist as to what kind of switch you'll like, but as a general rule, tactile switches favour typists, as the feedback allows them to type lightly, without bottoming out the switch, and therefore typing faster and with less stress on the fingertips. Typists are also the main group favouring clicky switches, for the same reason regarding audible feedback.



Linear switches are often characterised as “gamers” switches, however in practice this is really more out of a lack of desire on the part of manufacturers, to market many different boards to appeal to their whole demographic – its simply easier to tell the “gamers” that they want linear switches and put them in everything.



Regards individual switches:



Cherry's Red switches are a linear switch, with a very light feel. They require 40cn of force to activate.



Black switches are essentially “stiffer reds”, requiring 60cn of force to activate, but remaining linear.



Brown switches are tactile, but NOT clicky switches, requiring 45cn of force to depress initially, but activating with a small tactile bump, at 55cn.



Blue switches are tactile and clicky. They require 50cn of force to depress initially, but activate with a small tactile bump, at 60cn.



“Clear” switches are tactile but not clicky. Essentially similar to brown switches, but stiffer. They require 55cn of force to depress initially, activating at 65cn with a small tactile bump.



The last type of switch is fairly rare – the Cherry MX Green. Essentially this is a stiffer Blue. Currently there are very few boards with this switch on the market. They require 80cn of force to depress initially, but activate with a small tactile bump, at 90cn.





*2 – Consider your environment*



Most "Gamer" keyboards are full 104/5 key keyboards. A healthy number of these also have those useless additional macro keys and stuff that make the keyboard even wider. And on top of THAT, keyboards like the Steelseries 7G have stuff like integral, unremovable wrist rests, or large outside bezels that extend significantly beyond the keys themselves because the manufacturers had to have SOMETHING to style like a goddamned UFO.



All of this means that your average "Gamer" keyboard, takes up roughly as much space as a small aircraft carrier. Plenty of nice keyboards however, don't have this, such as Qpad, Ducky, and WASDKeyboards among others. Many of these come in “Tenkeyless” variants, where the numpad is removed, so people who don't use the numpad can save further desk space.



This means more flexible positioning of your gear, which means less chance of badly set up desks, less tension in your shoulders, etc. Trust me, your wrists and shoulders will thank you later.



*3 – Ignore any feature I covered in the first half of this section*



*4 – Really, this is it. However I do have one thing to add on personal preference*



The right keyboard for you is the right keyboard for you, so buy what you want. But, do bear in mind some general preferences I believe will be good approaches for most people



Generally, avoid laptop style chiclet, island, or scissor switch low profile keys. (Apple Aluminium, Razer Lycosa) They're fine if you have a very specific typing style, but low profile and short travel makes them very much easier to typo or mis-hit when using with a typical setup. In text, like this (I am typing this on a laptop), that's less of a problem, but in games, you typically want to avoid pressing keys you're not intending to press, and I, and others like me, find that laptop style keys make it too easy to accidentally hit, say, ctrl+shift rather than just shift.



Secondly, if you're getting mechanical keys, there's little practical reason I can think of to use reds or blacks in gaming terms. They may feel best to you, but they're not "Better" for gaming in any meaningful way beyond that personal preference. They're linear, so there's no tactile bump, and the manufacturers hype I've seen, claims that this is better because you don't need it when gaming, owing to the need to bottom out the key in order to hold it down.



In my view, this doesn't hold water. If you're hammering an MX Brown switch, the tactile bump is pretty difficult to pick up on. It doesn't impede on the travel of the switch and it imparts other benefits when typing, thanks to the tactility offered during less intense activities.



If you want to move to your first mechanical keyboard, in my experience the best switches to go for are going to be browns, or blues if you really, really know you can live with the noise. Blues are too loud for many, reds and blacks don't offer as much feedback, and first time users of a mechanical board will find the browns a good introduction.





Ok, so, moving onto our next piece of hardware: The mouse.



**Why your gaming mouse is shit, and what you can do about it.**



*1 – Its Wireless.*



Ok, look, here's the facts folks – Wireless data transmission is not, and never will be as fast as wired data transmission. It requires too much conversion and decoding throughout the signal chain to be done in the same time, and wireless signals are not 100% reliable so some packets may be lost or otherwise mishandled.



Use a wired mouse if you want to game hardcore. There IS NOT a wireless mouse that can match the instantaneous and reliable transmission of copper wire. Many manufacturers will offer claims like “1ms response time over wireless!” or whathaveyou.



Now, true enough, I can't verify that they're lying. But I can point at all other wireless tech on earth, and point out that almost none of it offers 1ms response on a continuous data stream. On top of that, nobody I'm aware of can prove they're telling the TRUTH either – because how the fuck does the home user measure a 1ms wireless response? Its next to impossible.



So, rather than be burned, just stick to wires. You'll pay less, it'll be more reliable, and it'll respond as quick as it is possible for science to make it respond, a claim which cannot be verified (and which is probably untrue) for wireless tech.



On top of all of that, you'll not have the weight of batteries holding you back, since weight is important in mice, and we cover it below!





*2 – It has a bazillion DPI!*



DPI counts are a major concern for manufacturers. As a marketing tool they're the easiest number to inflate and make higher to prove that your component is more “precise” than the rest.



As an example, take the AVAGO ADNS9500 laser sensor. This is the sensor in the Logitech G9x, and has a maximum CPI (Counts per inch, functionally equivalent to DPI) of 5700. This is also the max advertised DPI of the G9x. However there are many other mice on the market that have higher DPI figures using the same sensor (which at the time was the highest end sensor available to OEMs).



This is achieved by either interpolating the DPI - Artificially increasing the number of counts in software, by attempting to predict the rate of counts and provide "best guess" information for counts occurring between hardware counts. This is obviously not perfect.



Or it is achieved by using a sensor lens which doubles the amount of change the sensor sees for a given amount of movement, which has the same in game effect as moving 2 pixels for every 1 the mouse reports. This is bad and inaccurate.



And the sad fact is, nobody NEEDS this much DPI! its a pointless effort. The highest sense gamers in RTS need only a few inches movement, and they need that to translate into a mouse pointer moving the whole distance across a screen. With windows configured correctly, and providing 1:1 movement for each mouse count received, its possible to achieve unusably high sensitivities with not even 3000 DPI @1920x1080. The amount of pixels in the screen increasing will obviously increase the DPI needed to have the same "feel" to the movement of the cursor in relation to that of the mouse, but even then, the fact is that 90% of StarCraft 2 professional gaming is broadcast at 1920x1080 and tourney PCs are also set to this for seamless streaming. On top of that, Dual Link DVI isn't technically capable of pushing much more than 1920x1080@120Hz, so the highest end gaming monitors from BenQ and Asus, retain a 1920x1080 resolution.



You wouldn't ever need the 12000 DPI of a Sensei MLG edition unless you had a monitor with a resolution upwards of about 8000x4000. And even then, you'd still be using what would translate as a fairly high sensitivity. If you were a low sense user, you'd need half or less!



As a side, BTW, my personal setting is a DPI of 2300 or 1600 depending on the game (1600 for RTS) @1920x1080, with a Logitech G400. This works for me, but thats a fairly HIGH sensitivity. Every friend of mine who uses my machine remarks on how sensitive it is and I immediately turn the DPI down. You do not need that much. You will likely never need that much. SO STOP BUYING BAZILLION DPI MICE.



*3 – The mouse doesn't actually move the cursor the way your hands and arms move the mouse*



It should be said that generally (Or at least, as of Jan 2013) you want to avoid laser mice. All the Avago sensors currently in use on laser mice suffer from a design flaw wherein the sensor itself has unresolvable negative acceleration on the order of 5%. This is slight but its there and it can be noticed.



Acceleration is a feature, hardware or software, whereby your mouses sensitivity is dynamically altered based on how fast the mouse is providing counts to the operating system. In windows, this is the “Enhance pointer precision” option in the mouse settings window.



This is usually on by default. The reason is that most cheap mice have only 400 or 800 DPI at best, and therefore would feel slow and sluggish to many users if windows didn't apply acceleration.



When the mouse is providing counts to the OS slowly, the OS recognises this as the user trying to move the mouse pointer to something precisely. It therefore turns the sensitivity of the mouse down slightly, so 2 hardware counts might result in one pixel of movement, to aid the user.



When the mouse is providing counts quickly, the OS recognises that the mouse is being flicked or moved quickly, and in that instance, it increases the sensitivity because the user is clearly trying to cover a reasonably large distance with the cursor. In this situation, the mouse might move 2 pixels for one hardware count.



Wait, what did I just say? One count? Two pixels moved? Doesn't that mean its SKIPPED a pixel? Yep! You're damn right thats what it means!



Can you imagine how hard it would be to make precise movements if your mouse cursor randomly skipped a pixel every now and again? Pretty annoying when you're trying to do that precision task in Photoshop or whatever, right?



Well thats why mouse accel exists. If the mouse itself doesn't have enough DPI, then you're either stuck with a slow, sluggish mouse feel where you have to practically throw the mouse around to hit the other side of your screen, or you're stuck with a mouse that skips shit all the time. Mouse accel is a clever solution to both problems at once. Unfortunately, it does come with one horrible side effect.



Because the accel is applied based on the speed of the motion, and because humans can't really move a mouse EXACTLY the same way in a repeatable fashion, it makes it so that when you perform, say, a 5cm movement with the mouse, the cursor might move several different distances based on how fast you performed that motion. This means its difficult, especially under pressure, such as in games, to actually perform the same motion exactly the same way reliably over time.

Now, to be clear, any software program can "turn off" mouse acceleration by hooking into the windows setting "enhance pointer precision" and turning it off. You can also code custom mouse accel curves into drivers and have variable accel, again, by modifying the windows accel curve. Some professional quake players actually seek a mouse with no accel, then add in a custom accel curve to which they are accustomed, in quake itself.



This does nothing, and can do nothing, to change the accel characteristics of the mouse itself, which, if it is a laser mouse, or a mouse where the manufacturers have added in accel themselves (For example some Steelseries mice actually adertise accel as a FEATURE) will not be neutral. This is because the Avago ADNS9500 sensor which powers most of the current gen laser mice, and its ADNS9800 successor, which powers the MLG edition Steelseries Sensei, both have an amount of accel which is part of the sensor itself. At present, the only mouse sensors on the market which do not exhibit this, are optical, specifically the Avago ADNS3090 and ADNS3050, used in the G400 and some lower end lines respectively. There are other sensors, such as the Philips twin-eye, however that has its own major flaw, which is that its Z-axis tracking does not register up and down correctly, and this means when replacing the mouse after a wide movement, the cursor jumps in one direction when it shouldn't.



The other part of the puzzle is prediction. This is also called angle snapping and is a result of the mouse or its firmware or software, attempting to "assist" you in drawing straight lines or moving in a straight line, as is sometimes helpful in office applications.



If your mouse has angle snapping, then when you describe a perfect circle with it, the software will force the cursor to the form of a rounded square instead. This is becoming less common with high end mice, however many still have it and its usually a firmware issue that cannot be changed in software. For example, the Logitech G400 comes in two variants – one with prediction, and one without. The change was not publicized and the only way to tell the two apart is the seal on the box – the newer version will have a sticker labelled Logitech. The version with prediction has a blank seal.



*4 – Its too heavy*



Look, there's a very simple way to make a mouse with a bad shape, a bad design, and bad weight distribution feel more “Stable” and less twitchy. That is to make it heavier.



Look at the R.A.T. Mice. Not only do they use a Philips sensor (HELLO Z AXIS TRACKING ISSUES), but they're customizable based on a huge metal frame onto which more and more metal is bolted and more weights are added in to boot.

The thing weighs a ton. If you want to use this mouse you're looking at a hard time making swift changes in direction, flicks, and god help you if you want to follow a curving path, because the mouse is so heavy it obtains genuinely significant momentum.



None of this is good. A good mouse should be controllable even with minimal weight because you should have good contact with it and it should be easy to move however you want it to move.





*5 – Its got a stupid gimmick, like customisable shape, or a cherry MX switch as a thumb key, or a billion macro keys.*





Look, macro keys are dumb, for the same reasons stated when we discussed keyboards. Cherry MX Switches have 4mm of travel and aren't suited for mice. There's a REASON we already use microswitches, and its not because MX switches won't fit!



As for customizable shapes or weight – Look, this is, admittedly, a thing where personal preference plays a part, hand size, etc.



Thing is, by not committing to a full product line of shapes, manufacturers make their own lives easier by shifting the burden of doing research on different hand shapes onto the consumer. This would be reasonable if it didn't result in compromised performance of the mice themselves, but it always does, because a single molded part will always be lighter than an entire configurable mechanism (Which is why the RAT weighs so much – 150g with the default panels and no weights added. WITHOUT CABLE. Compare that to a Zowie Mico at 68g without cable, or 88g for the full size AM).



*CONCLUSION* – Nearly all gaming mice have one or all of the above flaws. As with keyboards, most of these flaws are actually marketed as FEATURES.



If you're looking for a gaming mouse, look for one with the Avago 3050 or 3090 sensor. Try to determine from reviews and sites like ESReality if the manufacturer has added prediction or acceleration.



If in doubt however, The Logitech G400 is one mouse that comes highly recommended.

While initially it was produced with prediction, this was removed in a running change roughly a year ago. (Signified by changing the plastic seal on the box from plain black to one with LOGITECH on it. If there are any in the wild still with all black stickers, they have prediction, don't buy.) The grip is tried and true, and its only real flaws are that while not the heaviest mouse ever, there are lighter options out there, and its quite a long mouse, so you may want to look for a short alternative if your game requires lots of vertical movement. Minor issues on a very good mouse, and not applicable to everyone.



Its also quite cheap and remarkably easy to get hold of.



There are of course others, but do your research, learn to spot the marketers speaking over the engineers (GOLD PLATED USB FOR MINIMUM LATENCY!) and if the review you're reading does not devote at least SOME time to testing for prediction or acceleration, DO NOT buy on the basis of that review alone - find one that does test the accel and prediction!



You use your mouse every day. Don't buy one you'll struggle to make co-operate. In retrospect, I don't know how you can play StarCraft without swearing. - Eifer