this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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The article doesn't explain it, but it sounds like the keyboards are detecting a transition from A to D and making it happen faster, instead of having a momentary dead zone while both are pressed. That's definitely getting an advantage from something out-of-game, which is cheating.
While being able to do this from outside the game is definitely cheating, I'd personally say that being able to decide what happens with conflicting inputs should be an option in any game where that matters.
Whenever I start pressing A while I'm still holding D it should be obvious that I now intend to go left, so the game should interpret it that way.
Yes, but the game doesn't necessarily even see those inputs. What a keyboard transmits, and how the OS handles it, is a complicated process with a bunch of legacy handling code. Often, if you're pressing more than one key, the keyboard might send only one of them.
I remember in one game I used to play, I would hold W to go forward, and shift to boost, but if I wanted to turn left or right, only adding D would be recognized. Pressing A would do nothing at all, no turning left.
Afaik it should see both inputs simultaneously if you have n-key rollover, which is a pretty common feature now. I think the last time I was looking for a keyboard, they all advertised n-key rollover. As such, it'd be on the game, not the OS.
You can actually test this in the Unity editor if you have some programming experience (or I assume any other engine for that matter). It's very easy to write a character controller in which A+D results in the game using the last input instead of adding the inputs together. I actually had to learn how to make a game not do that. It wouldn't function exactly like the keyboards currently under fire, but it would function very similarly.
I'm pretty sure you can also do this very easily with a macro (assuming you have a keyboard with n-key rollover), no special keyboard required as well.
Edit: your specific example is an example of a cheap keyboard losing inputs, which n-key rollover fixes. Ironically, find the right cheap keyboard and you might be able to partially reproduce the effect they're talking about (having one key override another other).