UI Suggestion: Macro Bar Persistence

I don't know if this is a feature, if it is, it must be buried in the menus somewhere.

I once played the X360 version of FFXI. It lagged horribly, and the controller felt incredibly clunky, clunky enough I plugged in a USB keyboard and used that instead (though it didn't work quite properly, as the 360 only partially supports keyboards and there were glitches).

There is ONE thing, though, that the 360 did that I wish I could get my PC version to do:

It used to be that when you pressed one of the shoulder buttons, you would get the CTRL+ or ALT+ version of the macro buttons. This Macro bar would persist on-screen until you chose one of the abilities, or I think it would disappear after something like 5 seconds if no buttons were chosen or if the shoulder buttons were pressed again.

I find myself sorely wishing we had this on PC, because of the input lag/unreliability in which macros on PC actually work. Half of the time, I hold down Ctrl or Alt and hit a number and...... nothing. It doesn't function at all. There's this weird delay between me hitting Ctrl or Alt and the bar actually appearing, and during this delay, the macro system is unresponsive. And then sometimes, you hit a button and... nothing happens. I suspect this is because you let off ctrl or alt a millisecond before you pressed the number key.

Either way, I have had too many occurrences of macros not working.

So my proposal is this: add an option that lets us have the console-like behavior -- touching Ctrl or Alt should display the relevant bar and this bar should stay there for ~5 seconds until a number key is then pressed at which point the macro activates immediately. If the ctrl or alt key is pressed again, either display the correct bar, or if the correct bar was already displayed, then hide it. (If I hit ctrl and then hit alt, it'd switch to alt instead of hiding the bar).

And please do something about the input lag/unreliability of the buttons..........

This feature does exist I use a PS4 controller and it works exactly like the old xbox 360 version of the game.

I used the final fantasy xi config menu to set it up, can't remember anything special to get it working

I want it to work with the keyboard, though. I have zero interest in trying to play with a controller. Also another problem I have, and I think this is why macros don't work half of the time, is it takes 2 full seconds for the macro bar to display after you hit ctrl or alt... if it would pop up immediately, that would help too.

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Originally Posted by Aysha

I want it to work with the keyboard, though. I have zero interest in trying to play with a controller. Also another problem I have, and I think this is why macros don't work half of the time, is it takes 2 full seconds for the macro bar to display after you hit ctrl or alt... if it would pop up immediately, that would help too.

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You don't have to wait for the macro bar to appear. If your macros aren't firing reliably with the macro bar not on-screen, they won't fire with it on screen.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Folken

You don't have to wait for the macro bar to appear. If your macros aren't firing reliably with the macro bar not on-screen, they won't fire with it on screen.

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So if that's not the cause, then what is? Something is causing them not to fire reliably, and I've had this issue with multiple computers.