Keyboards, Had Enough, Popped my Cherry.

If that title doesn't sound like a delicious pun to you, and instead sounds dirty, A: get your mind out of the gutter, freak, and B: you clearly don't keep up with computer stuff in the neurotic way I do.

Here's some simple backstory. About 6-8 months ago, my old cheapo $20 Microsoft rubber dome keyboard died. I decided I wanted something all pretty and backlit, so I bought the Razer Lycosa Mirror. Now theoretically, all their issues (supposedly hardware issues from a bad production run) had been fixed and recalled, so the one I bought should have been fine.

So, within a couple of days, my fancy keyboard is spastically attacking me by loading a new instance of Windows Media Player roughly every 7 seconds, relegating whatever window I happened to be looking at to the background, and generally being a pain in the ass until I hard rebooted or unplugged the keyboard. Funny thing, my media player set up via the Razer software was iTunes.

I contacted Razer support. They told me "Oh, that's a hardware issue, initiate RMA." Well, it didn't seem much like a hardware issue to me, because it was easily fixed by forcing the drivers to reload, and would randomly occur at another time, whether 5 seconds or 2 days. So, I contacted them again, and told them it felt like software. After quite a bit of insanity, I managed to convince them their Lycosa software was broken, as evidenced by the fact that uninstalling it and running off of generic drivers fixed 100% of my hardware problems.

So, as the weeks go on, they keep contacting me, asking me for more information, since I'm clearly more competent than their QA/QC group, and eventually the software is actually reasonably safe to use. Of course, by this time, my audio and USB passthroughs in the keyboard had died, but hey, I'm a real geek, those are gimmicks I don't need or care about much, I get better signal quality when I'm plugged straight in anyway.

So, last night rolls around. My not so cheap keyboard, theoretically good for half a quadrillion keystrokes or some such, decides that it's time to go on strike. Specifically, my spacebar. Since I do occasionally type more than URLs, this seemed rather inconvenient. A look at the key showed me that the rather cheaply designed (read: piece of shit) spring wasn't going to function again. The little retaining clips that made the stupid thing stay attached were made out of the same plastic as those little green army men I used to play with, except less of it.

Well, that was the final straw. Something about owning an $80 "gaming" keyboard for less than a year and having more headaches than the morning after an Alcoholics Anonymous class reunion with an open bar just kind of pissed me off. So, when I drove down to my friendly neighborhood Fry's, I wasn't looking at anything Razer, and avoided all the rubber domes. I'm now fighting to get my hands retrained to work with my SteelSeries 6GV2, which uses nice mechanical Cherry Black switches.

I already love it, the return to an old-school feeling keyboard is like a slice of nostalgia that doesn't come with drawbacks like 8 bit sound and 640x480 max resolution. Granted, I'm having a few more typos than usual, but that will change soon enough.

Of course, you can't expect Razer to make a keyboard this solid. If they did, they'd be putting a perfect blunt object into the hands of the people with the most cause to want them dead: their customers. So, Razer, go soak your heads until you figure out that quality control means more than keeping half your stock in a warehouse to be able to handle the flood of RMA requests.

Peripheral Vision: Gaming Keyboard and Mouse

This is a topic that comes up a lot in discussion, especially in the various competitive PC gaming communities. People will see Razer, TTEsports, or SteelSeries sponsoring players, and they'll look into buying the high end, fancy, and oh yeah, kind of pricey peripherals. Of course, as soon as someone asks, the guy who thinks that his budget should determine every other person's spending habits shows up. (An idiotic asshat on the internet? No!)

So, here come the arguments: Overpriced, gimmicky, doesn't matter at all, don't need extra buttons, better stuff won't make you play like a pro! Well no shit, Sherlock, you figured that out all by yourself, did you? I thought that since Nike shoes let me get up from making a Krispy Kreme shut down early for the day and run a marathon, that a Razer Abyssus would make me the best pro gamer ever!

Obviously, no, you don't need to pay more for flashy LED's, teflon mouse feet, 5600 DPI mice, and a Windows button you can turn off. But you know what else I didn't need to pay for? My whole damn PC. I could buy a netbook for browsing the internet. Hell, these days you can use your phone. So my gaming rig is a luxury purchase. And like every other luxury purchase, there's nothing wrong with spending a little bit more for features that help just a little, or look sexy.

Now, obviously, the question becomes one of value. Well, last time I checked, value is relatively subjective, particularly in the leisure time/luxury purchase department. I can't benchmark how comfortable my mouse is, and if I did, it wouldn't mean a damn thing for someone else. But if it makes my hobby a little easier, or a little more comfortable, then it's cool. If I decide I like the flashy LED's? That's my decision, and you and your notion of what I should do with my money can go to hell.

Then you hear: Higher mouse sensitivity doesn't matter. Well, yeah, it does. If you take one of those old fashioned mice with the ball underneath, and used nothing but software mouse acceleration to change how fast it moves, and give it to the best pro gamer out there, he's going to do worse. It's like handing a chainsaw to a surgeon.

So, all in all, what do I think about fancy gaming peripherals? If you can afford them, and your rig doesn't need the money dropped in more, go for it. If it makes your hobby easier or more enjoyable, that's awesome. This may seem a bit strange after the way I ripped into Water-Cooled RAM kits, but as long as you know what you're getting, who really cares what you get? You should, and nobody else.