SOCD – What Exactly Is It?

In the keyboard space there’s been a lot of talk about SOCD as of late. Whether or not it’s cheating, games banning it from use, and whether or not it’s even useful. If you’re feeling lost in the sauce with all the terms and tech, fear no more. It’s time for a breakdown of what SOCD is, how it might help you, and the foundational knowledge you can use to start to formulate an opinion on whether it’s right for you.

The first obstacle that adds confusion to everything is that SOCD is not a clear initialism. SOCD, in its basic form, stands for “Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions”. Unfortunately, people on the internet will casually use the term as shorthand to refer to every aspect of SOCD, whether they mean SOCD inputs or SOCD handling, or SOCD cleaning. These are not all the same thing, and the lack of clarity only makes the whole topic more complicated than it needs to be.

An SOCD input is when you’re sending information to the game that involves two opposite cardinal directions at the same time. Hence, simultaneous opposing cardinal directions. An example would be if you held the buttons for up and down at the same time, or left and right. This phenomenon first started showing up in console fighting games once controllers with multiple types of directional inputs started appearing. Up until that point, console game devs never had to consider this type of input because older controllers and joysticks on arcade cabinets couldn’t physically have those inputs. You’d probably have to disassemble an SNES controller or a Sega Saturn controller to get it to send up/down or left/right simultaneously, and so console developers probably didn’t prioritize checking for it.

SOCD handling is another aspect that gets lumped into the generic term SOCD. This term refers to how the game, controller, or keyboard handles situations where SOCD inputs are detected. Some console fighting games weren’t coded to deal with the input, and this would cause unintended situations like allowing the player to block attacks from both directions at the same time.

There are four typical ways that hardware and software handle SOCD inputs: neutral, last input, first input, and absolute. Neutral handling will just resolve the SOCD by canceling them both out. Up + Down will result in nothing, as will Left + Right. Last input and first input both take into account the order of the SOCD inputs that are sent. It’s pretty unlikely that you just hit left/right at the exact same moment, right? In most situations, you’d be holding one button down, and then you’d press the other. Last input will always prioritize the most recently pressed button, whereas first input prioritizes the one you pressed first. Absolute will always prioritize one direction over the others. For example, some controllers are set to treat Up + Down to be an Up input every time, some games prioritize forward + backward to be a forward input every time.

Now, it should be apparent that each one of these resolutions is going to be good some of the time, and not great other parts of the time. It’s going to be situational, and very skewed by personal play style. Is something that is both disadvantageous and advantageous depending on the situation a cheat? This is definitely a nuanced topic that has no clear right or wrong answer.

CORSAIR’s system for handling SOCD inputs on supporting K70 keyboards is called FlashTap. By default, it will apply to the A and D keys, and it’ll choose to handle those SOCD inputs by prioritizing last input. So, if you’re trying to jiggle peek, and you haven’t quite let go of D before you hit A, FlashTap will take care of that little oversight for you. FlashTap and the CORSAIR K70 PRO TKL can help you move like you mean it.

If you’re an elite level player going into a tournament, or you’re about to jump into a game that detects SOCD handling as a cheat, we’ve made it super easy to disable FlashTap in those situations. Jump on over to this article if you’re just looking for a quick way to ensure you stay on the right side of the law.

The genre that has been dealing with this the longest is the genre where the most benefits can be seen. Fighting games require incredibly precise inputs and timing. In these situations, an SOCD input that wasn’t handled the way you wanted could result in you dropping a combo or letting go of a block for a split second. And sometimes, that split-second can result in massive punishment.

Relying on constant handling of SOCD inputs can result in charge characters getting a boost in the hands of skilled players. This could grant you the ability to pull off moves more consistently and more quickly.

In first-person shooters, setting up SOCD inputs to be handled in any way other than neutral would ensure that you were never caught flat-footed while trying to jiggle peek. You’re either going to move back into cover, or into the firefight, but you’re never going to jump halfway out and stay there, the way you might if your SOCD inputs are handled sub-optimally.

If you’re not at the pro level, and you’re not worried about the possibility of becoming overly reliant on a technology that might be banned in tournaments, you probably want to consider giving a keyboard with SOCD handling a try.

If you do find a consistent method of SOCD handling that benefits your playstyle, then you’re probably going to want to make sure that you’ve got a keyboard that’s handling it for you. After all, why give your CPU one more thing to handle when it’s already trying to pump out as many frames as possible?