I'm finally looking to buy a mouse and so I started looking for tips on good gaming mice and then quickly came across some old threads discussing wired vs wireless in the osu community.

And I did notice the clear winner with millions of replies with "wired > wireless", with some instances making the well-founded argument of "because latency" in the comments. The point is, if the latency is off by 30ms, can't you just change the offset to correct the song in the game ???

If so, then this argument would lose its value and the balance would go back to just: Less clutter on your desk VS Having to buy batteries, would it not?

What do you guys think?

I'm playing wireless and I feel absolutely no latency (G305 but there are more favored ones out there, mine feels pretty heavy and non-balanced due to battery placement not being in the middle)

If your mouse has latency then your aim will be delayed, changing whether the song plays earlier or later won't change the fact that your aim feels slower and it's harder to hit things.

Same thing with your keyboard. It's fine for your keyboard to have latency when you're playing mania or taiko, but in standard it'll make it so that your keyboard inputs are not in line with your aim and you will need to compensate for that. It's not that big of a deal though and you can definitely get used to it, but from my experience it does make streaming harder because your keyboard taps and hitsounds don't line up as well.

In the end I don't think wireless mice nowadays have any real noticeable latency, especially good gaming mice, so you can remove latency from the wired vs wireless debate. I think the biggest downside of wireless mice is that the battery makes it heavier and clunkier to aim with compared to wired mice, which is why I'm guessing lots of top mouse players still use wired mice.

Maybe wireless mice have some latency but they're generally unnoticeable, and with what we have today, I don't think this is a problem anymore

DM FOR MUTUAL wrote:

Same thing with your keyboard. It's fine for your keyboard to have latency when you're playing mania or taiko, but in standard it'll make it so that your keyboard inputs are not in line with your aim and you will need to compensate for that.

Ahh, I never thought about it that way! So the real problem is the desynchronization of the latencies between the mouse and the keyboard, in which the keyboard will generally be faster I guess, gotcha.

On that note, this just made me think that this would also probably mean that a good trade-off for a slower wireless mouse would be to also have a slower wireless keyboard lol. Because if both had, say, about 30ms of delay, THEN the only thing you'd need to do is adjust the offset, right? I found that kinda interesting.

Thanks for the reply though, you brought up some interesting points there.

Anyways, just as an update, after some research, I'm probably considering getting the Razer DeathadderV2 Mini, since my hand isn't that big.

Enzoys wrote:

DM FOR MUTUAL wrote:

Same thing with your keyboard. It's fine for your keyboard to have latency when you're playing mania or taiko, but in standard it'll make it so that your keyboard inputs are not in line with your aim and you will need to compensate for that.

Ahh, I never thought about it that way! So the real problem is the desynchronization of the latencies between the mouse and the keyboard, in which the keyboard will generally be faster I guess, gotcha.

On that note, this just made me think that this would also probably mean that a good trade-off for a slower wireless mouse would be to also have a slower wireless keyboard lol. Because if both had, say, about 30ms of delay, THEN the only thing you'd need to do is adjust the offset, right? I found that kinda interesting.

I think adjusting offset only is relevant if you play using the sound of your keyboard taps and not the ingame hitsounds. If you play with the ingame hitsounds, the perfect offset is going to be when the hitsounds line up with the music, and the latency off your equipment is going to have 0 effect on this, it's just going to change how long a keypress takes to be registered as a hitsound. On the other hand if you play without hitsounds and instead just use the sound of your keyboard, you will need to change your offset so your keyboard taps match with the music.

That being said I want to add some more nuance to what I said before now that I've thought about it more. I think if you play with hitsounds, then the latency doesn't matter that much, because your brain can do that easily even if there is a bit of latency. All the keyboards I've played with have noticeable latency when you compare playing with hitsounds vs not playing with hitsounds, and some keyboards more than others, but I've never really had trouble with any of them and can play pretty much the same on all of them. The only exception is maybe streaming on high latency keyboards, because with high latency it's really evident that your keyboard taps and hitsounds aren't lining up and it's kinda offputting.

If you don't play with hitsounds and instead play with keyboard taps, that's when the desync becomes an issue, because even if you tap perfectly on the note, you could have aimed off the note before the game registers your tap. Maybe this is something you can adjust to as well, but I don't have much experience playing in this way so idk.

I'm also not sure that compensating for high latency aim with a high latency keyboard will work, I feel like it could just be worse because they'll just be two different things you have to compensate for individually instead of them cancelling each other out, but idk maybe this works lol.

Going to drop this here https://www.rtings.com/mouse/tests/control/latency