Are Rapid Trigger keyboards banned in CS2?

Ever since PC gaming's inception, gamers have been trying to find ways to gain a competitive edge. Pure practice is of course the most effective way to get better, but outside of that, entire industries have sprung up in order to sell you things than can actually make a difference.

High refresh rate monitors, super light gaming mice, smoother skates for said mice, and yes, keyboards with specific features. Some of which are regarded with suspicion, depending on the game in question. Counter-Strike 2 is one of these games.

It is no surprise that Counter-Strike 2, one of the most widely played and highly competitive games out there, has placed restrictions on certain features in the name of fair play.

To help this, Valve has made the decision to ban the use of what they call “input-automation features”.

This includes the FlashTap SOCD feature found on the K70 PRO TKL.

To be clear, Rapid Trigger is fine at the time of writing. Additionally, this does not mean that playing CS2 with the K70 PRO TKL will net you an instant ban.

You just need to make sure that you disable FlashTap before playing CS2, otherwise you run the risk of incurring a temporary ban. Here’s how to turn off FlashTap.

To help assuage any worries, FlashTap is always disabled by default. This is the case whether you’re in Device Memory Mode or iCUE mode. You have to manually enable it via the keyboard itself. There are two ways that FlashTap can be enabled, and they are both visually obvious.

• The first way to turn on FlashTap is by pressing the Game Mode button. This is the button above the insert key. It looks like a speedometer. When Game Mode is enabled, all the lighting on the keyboard will turn red. This overrides any other lighting, so you will always know when you’re in Game Mode. So, if you’ve pressed this button, and the keyboard lighting is red, FlashTap is enabled. By default, when pressing this button, the keyboard will also do a little animation as it turns red to make it more obvious.

• The other way to enable it is to press FN and Right Shift. This will enable FlashTap, without the other features of Game Mode. You can also readily tell when you’ve done this as the A and D keys will turn yellow. Again, this overrides any other lighting preset, so you will always be able to tell if it’s enabled.

So, to be absolutely sure that you have disabled FlashTap, simply look at your keyboard. As long as it’s not all red, for Game Mode or the A and D keys are not yellow, you are not using FlashTap and will not get in trouble on Counter-Strike 2.

It is worth noting here that you can customize the color the keyboard goes when in Game Mode via iCUE, rendering the visual shortcut about it turning red obsolete. However, if you’ve already customized the keyboard’s functionality to this extent, you’ll already be familiar enough with the keyboard to know if you have FlashTap enabled anyway.