SOCD Is Not Just a Fighting Game Issue Anymore

It feels like it was yesterday when everyone in the FGC was making video and articles about how broken and unfair these new leverless controllers are.

In all seriousness, the advantage that leverless controllers have provided in the past, and continue to offer, is nothing to sneeze at. There's a reason why many people still swear by them, and why Capcom had to revise both their ruleset and how their games handle SOCD (Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions).

The way two opposing inputs are interpreted by the firmware or the game itself can open up a whole host of new shortcuts that many consider unnatural. However, once the dust has settled, heated debated turned into mostly mild grudges and dislike for leverless controllers. While they have their own pros and cons, they're not significant or definitive enough to claim that leverless controllers offer an unfair advantage, or that they would make anyone play beyond their skill level.

Things don't seem nearly as mild with the other genres, however, with two specific games igniting a similar discussion after Wooting and Razer started offering keyboards that attempt to push the functionality of the old and tried peripheral.

Wooting was the first one to get flack after a prominent player was caught cheating by utilizing the dynamic stroke feature, which gave said player a massive sudden "skill" boost for a technical aspect of the game that they previously weren't proficient in.

Outside of this, the rapid trigger feature has been commonly utilized by players who otherwise wouldn't be able to reach the same level of APM with other keyboards.

After that, Razer showed off their own tech with the Snap Tap. Another fancy term that mostly just stands for SOCD, and in this case, it caused an outrage in the Counter-Strike community.

Counter strafing is one of the most demanding skills in CS. Clean and precise use of movement keys to negate your momentum and gain peak accuracy is something that takes weeks and months to start using properly, and it takes years upon years of practice, which still doesn't guarantee total consistency.

Snap Tap completely trivialized this feature, to a point where a new player with no experience could perfect in 5 minutes, what would otherwise take them thousands of hours.

Surprisingly enough, Wooting managed to avoid this criticism, but since the introduction of Snap Tap, they have developed and released their own alternative that functions the same and arguably even better.

Since then, there has been nothing but silence from the esports side of things, until FACEIT's community manager commented that bind, which achieved similar effect to what those keyboards offer, is now banned at ESEA.

This sends a weird message that scripting and macros are cheating, but doing the same thing on a hardware level is completely ok.

To say that community and players are divided on this, is to say nothing, but right now it does not seem like anything will happen. The fact that both companies, Razer especially, sponsor esports event, bring the ethical side of this problem into question as well. While there can be completely valid reasons to allow these new keyboards and their new features, the conflict of interest poisons the water for that discussion.

What happens next? It's hard to predict. The impact of the new features on gameplay is far more pronounced than it ever was in fighting games, yet for every person who has an issue with it, it feels like there are two more who rush to buy the new hardware and embrace it as the future of FPS.

With this course of events, perhaps something drastic would need to happen in order for these questionable innovations to raise a serious discussion about fairness and competitive integrity.