That's assuming that the user always starts from a completely uncompressed key. On a medium-weight mechanical keyboard, for latency-sensitive actions you'd likely be hovering the key just above its actuation point (one of the reasons I actually prefer tactile keys for gaming: the idea keyboard holds the weight of my resting fingers just above the actuation point).
> A common response to this is that "real" gamers will preload keys so that they don't have to pay the key travel cost, but if you go around with a high speed camera and look at how people actually use their keyboards, the fraction of keypresses that are significantly preloaded is basically zero even when you look at gamers. It's possible you'd see something different if you look at high-level competitive gamers, but even then, just for example, people who use a standard wasd or esdf layout will typically not preload a key when going from back to forward. Also, the idea that it's fine that keys have a bunch of useless travel because you can pre-depress the key before really pressing the key is just absurd. That's like saying latency on modern computers is fine because some people build gaming boxes that, when run with unusually well optimzed software, get 50ms response time. Normal, non-hardcore-gaming users simply aren't going to do this. Since that's the vast majority of the market, even if all "serious" gamers did this, that would stll be a round error.
That's the best case scenario, not average case scenario. It only regularly happens with gun/mouse in shooters, as in any games that have abilities to cast you don't exactly know which one you might cast next in a given moment.
