Comment Don't human reaction times increase with practice? (Score 1) 160
I've only really got that sort of experience with one old game which I've been playing for about 8 years now - it's an extremely input heavy game played with just the keyboard, about 10 key presses a second (half of them the spacebar) would probably be about average. When I play that game I don't even think about what buttons I press and if I tried I'd fail miserably. Everything gets turned into goals and 'moves' and my hands do the translating. But from my experience, as you start to get experienced enough that you're stringing together long sequences of actions and timing things down to the frame, input lag makes a difference. What I'm saying is that where input lag might be reasonable compared to reaction times for some casual gamer, when it comes to the high end competitive gaming and people have practised so much that everything has a learned response without even thinking about it, input lag needs to be a lot lower.
The other thing I've noticed is that using sound cues seems to be far more effective than visual cues - maybe it's something to do with the brain being able to use audio input for timing based actions better, or maybe the higher sample rate for sound gives more to go off than 30 or 60 fps. Anyway, it'd be interesting to see how people's reactions compare when they're based off visual and sound cues - it could be valuable information for game designers.