Are gaming peripherals overrated?

nightHawk12

nightHawk12

Contributor
From personal experience, I thought getting a gaming mouse(G102) would help me rank up and improve my aim in FPS like CSGO(Gold) and Valo(GNM). Turns out I am still stuck in the same rank after 2 years. I know I have skill issues but isn't it a marketing gimmick if they sell the mouse and keyboard with a gaming prefix and add multiple DPI options and a 1000hz polling rate when you literally can't improve just because of upgrading the gear?

On the contrary, I believe good headphones are necessary for footsteps and sound but I seriously doubt gaming mouse and keyboard has any impact on gaming other than aesthetics and placebo.
 
A mouse with a good sensor and polling rate is would perform much better than any normal office everyday mouse designed for regular usage. Its not just aesthetics as you can actually feel the difference in performance. However you cant just expect to improve your ELO just cause of your equipment. If you feel it makes no difference whatsoever try playing the games with a regular office mouse and see if its just aesthetics. For my case I hate using the generic logitech, HP mouse even for normal usage. It feels sluggish and not as responsive.

Gaming keyboards are another matter. A good normal keyboard will perform good no matter the application. However there are keyboards which can give an unfair advantage in games. Mostly applies to higher ELO ranked matches but adjustable actuation keyboards can be game changer for fps games. Some features are even banned in tournaments like snap tap in razer and rapid tap in steel series keyboards.

Wooting, Razer Huntsman, Steelseries Apex these gaming keyboards can offer a advantage which normal keyboards cannot provide. But you are talking about keyboards costing over 10k usually.

Again if you have skill issue no gaming mice or keyboard can magically improve your ELO.
 
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To add to that, it seems like non-gaming mice are decreasing in size every year, to the point that even supposedly "large" mice like the Logitech M170 is too small for my hands. On the other hand, a mouse like Lightspeed G304 feels really nice in hand. Even ignoring all the benefits a gaming mice might provide from a technical standpoint, a no nonsense gaming mice like G304 is just an overall really good mice, especially if you don't have small-ish hands. I just daily a G304 for office and normal usage haha
 
no they are not. cheap mouses are garbage wrt to tracking, utter garbage. this does not however mean one needs to spend absurdly high behind them, like those above 5k range. just get one with a good sensor according to your gripping style. and combine it with a good pad, which is equally imortant.
But yes, you must have some basic skills first. no amount of good accessories can improve your lack of basic skills. don't take it personally, i myself sucked at CSG for a long time. even after being a CS player for nearly 20 years now.
 
In my experience, immediately after buying a gaming mouse, I double ranked up to G1 on 2 different accounts (Asia and EU) in Valorant. I know Gold is not that impressive, but I don't really play ranked in games so this was a pretty nice surprise. The increase in consistency of my shots in comparison to my old Dell office mouse was immediately apparent.

Gaming Keyboard def didn't change much though, I feel like I overpaid for RGB lmfao.
 
When I would play Valorant (thank God, I haven't touched that rage-inducing swamp hole in a year, especially the Mumbai servers), I was hard-stuck in Bronze with a shitty Red Dragon mouse. After I upgraded to a Razer Basilisk V3 Ultimate, I peaked at Platinum, with no real skill change. A decent mouse (not something absurdly expensive like a Superlight) does indeed make a difference.
 
With fps especially, several factors exist in cheap peripherals that more expensive ones take great pains to avoid:

Keyboards: n key roll over, consistent actuation.

Mice: grip, shape, size, angle snapping, acceleration, max movement rate (how quickly you can move it across the pad before it errors out), lift off distance, consistency.

These days the only thing that the common brands sell are "omg look at the rgb" and hyped sensor resolutions, because that's what sells, hardly anyone knows what to look for.

There's also no one really reviewing stuff like mice like they used to. YouTube reviews have overtaken detailed text reviews and they're absolute trash. All these reviewers know to do is show the mouse out of the box and list the specs. Go to a site like esreality and look at some old reviews, you'll see the difference. Even on reddit, where you do see some decent reviews, it doesn't approach the level of detail it used to be.
 
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