Deading

Deading (past tense: deaded) refers to any instance in which a player reacts to an orb correctly in the immediate tick after it spawns, as opposed to the standard reaction time of two ticks after it spawns.

The term deading originated as a graphical oddity in which, if a player made contact with an orb just one tick after it spawned, the orb would appear to stall for a tick and then fly quickly to its next location. However, it has since then expanded to include all instances of reacting to an orb one tick earlier than the usual reaction time, even orbs which are not initially reachable from the player and thus require movement or premovement. However, a requirement for an early reaction to be a dead is that the orb must also be scored one tick earlier than it normally would. Thus reacting quickly to perform a suboptimal maneuver to score an orb does not count as a dead.

Deading is known to be difficult because it requires many things to happen correctly in the 600 ms after the orb spawns. These things are: the processing time of the brain to react to its spawning (i.e. reaction time), the quick and precise movement of the mouse to the correct location, clicking, and ping. The average reaction time is between 200 and 250 ms; and in the best case, a good ping induces a 100 ms latency. Therefore this leaves only a 250 to 300 ms window for the quick and accurate mouse movement.

A subclass of deading is dead squaring, which is any instance of deading where the first action must be an explicit click on a square rather than the orb, for example, if a player is part of a duo and the orb spawns behind the player requiring the player to move to the side to feed it to his partner. Dead squaring is even harder than deading because:
 * Dead squaring requires a fast and accurate click onto a particular square instead of an orb, and a square has a much smaller click radius than an orb.
 * It takes more time for the brain to calculate or remember which square to click for a nontrivial orb, as opposed to just having to move your mouse on the orb and click it.