Fixing a DDR soft pad (Wii) that ghost steps?

Context: Back when Hottest Party 2 and Hottest Party 3 just came out (~8-9 years ago), I got each of them along with their bundled soft pads. The pads worked excellently for at least four years (including sessions with multiple boss songs on ) and I never had a problem with them, but then I moved into an apartment and was unable to play DDR for the past five years. The two soft pads remained folded up in a box that whole time. I'm no longer living in an apartment now, and just the other day I took out the pads, unfolded them, and tried playing on them.

Now I'm consistently getting a handful of ghost steps (around ~5) per song on either pad, and FCing anything is impossible for this reason. Given the above context, is this a fixable problem? I'm surprised that the pads went directly from "no problems at all" to "persistent and reproducible problems" during a time period when they were never used. One thing I've attempted is to tape squares of cardboard under the four arrows so my feet can find them easier when the pad is shifting around, but this actually made the ghost steps worse (could this help diagnose anything?).

If the problem is unfixable, what recourse do I have now? I wouldn't be surprised if all the Konami soft pads are now long out of production, and (from experience with a friend over several years) almost all third-party pads (both soft and hard) deteriorate even faster (compared to the two Konami soft pads which had no problems for years).

I own the same pad, and I've been using it for about 8 months now. I suggest to tape it (duct tape recommended) on a big piece of plywood. It really makes a huge difference! and make sure to flatten the pad first before applying the tape

From my experience of dealing with soft pads for about 2 years or so, you should actually expect this when you fold them up. A suggestion for storage would simply to be to keep them unfolded and flat when you store them away. As for the ghost stepping problem... that's also something just kind of comes with softpads. As Senketsu said, duct taping it to plywood or in my own experience, four of those foam puzzle mats with weights put on the corners to prevent it from moving works well. For current ghost stepping though that's just something that'll go away with time and gameplay eventually. What I do recommend doing though is to just test where the pads will start triggering as the sensors inside might've moved around. You can't really do anything about this as it's part of the deal you get when you use a soft pad, but you'll at least know where you can step to get a response. If it's triggering while you're standing in the center of the pad though, then that's again just something that'll go away with gameplay from my own personal experience.

Of course the best fix for this would be to get a metal pad. Which I'd recommend picking up a Cobalt Flux from someone who knows that the pad is in perfect working condition. You can even hack up one of your softpads to make a control box for one if it doesn't come with one.

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Glad to hear that this is a fixable problem that can fix itself with time; I was afraid I would have to rip the pad open to do stuff and risk permanently damaging it.

How does taping it to wood or another surface affect ghost steps? If it's just to prevent the pad from moving during gameplay, then I don't have to bother with that (it doesn't affect gameplay for me).

I did a little testing and the sensors don't seem to have moved around; the edges of the sensors appear to be centered on the arrow on the pad. Mobile sensors aren't the problem I'm experiencing though; it's the ghost steps that have the effect of holding down random arrows for random amounts of time (so that I get misses because the game thinks the arrow has already been pressed down earlier).

I'm highly iffy on getting a Cobalt Flux or any other third-party pad - from secondhand experience with a group of friends (who went through about seven different hard pads over about as many years), they tend to break significantly more easily for all their cost. (The hard pads don't ghost step, but one or more arrows per pad will inexplicably and irreversibly break after a period of some months, even after opening up the pad and attempting to fix things.)

By placing it on a hard surface, the inner "sensor sheet" will flatten out as you step on the pad, and it will also improve your stepping/timing accuracy.

I actually owned 2 Wii pads before, then I ripped one of them to build a custom metal pad using its sensor (which was a horrible idea). I've seen what was inside. The sensors are permanently attached to the edges of the pad, so their mobility shouldn't be a problem.

Another method would be to manually "fold back" rippled parts of the rubber layer from under the pad.