Unreliability of Gamepad Connection

I recently picked up a PC/XBox360 wireless controller to use with XIV, but they seem to get along very strangely. If I start the game with the gamepad on, the game has no problem accepting commands from it. However, if the gamepad goes to sleep, and I pick it back up, the game no longer responds to it.

At first, I thought this was, while obnoxious, normal - but upon fiddling around with the config menu, I've found that maybe 1/20 times, swapping the keyboard into Chat Only and back made the game start accepting the gamepad again.

This fix is extremely unreliable and doesn't work 19/20 times.

Is there anything else I can do?

What gives?

Heres a solution, if you are planning to go afk for longer than the controller stays awake, plug in a play and charge cable to prevent it from sleeping.
Ive been using this method since release and it never fails.

If the a cotnrolelr is disconnected, the game doesn't auto resynch it. Goto do the get aroudn trick. I played with a wired for that reason.

Link to previous discussion on this type of problem with a download link to one solution towards the end.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-one-Instance.

*Edit*

Mediafire took the download down, I'll see if I can re-upload it.

*Edit #2*

Re-uploaded the custom driver for Xbox 360 controller at Speedyshare.com

http://speedy.sh/szk6C/x360wc.wlh.x64.en.rar

Lately I've been using one of these: http://www.powera.com/products/details/774

I can afk, and reconnect it as much as I like without reloading the game.
Real xbox360 controllers are horrible.

I prefer the "Real" controller over third party ones which typically have more issues, break faster, thinner plastic, unresposive buttons, or are shaped odd with stick layout.

THat perticular ones is too small for my hands.

I picked up the Razer Onza Tournament Edition controller couple of days ago and can recommend it, I find it better than the official 360 controller.

Bigben USB PS3 controller - Wireless Controller with PS3/PC switch.
Around 15-20 euro, plug and play , works perfectly and doesn't use much battery.( i play about 2 -3 long days without changing batteries)
auto-shutdown when idle saving battery life
changing batteries in-game (usely) gives no problems.
Been using it since beta without problems.

I use to use a ps3 controller and periodically get disconnection issues even while I'm actually playing. I eventually bought a couple Snakebyte XIV controllers from Amazon.com and have not had a problem since. It's not wireless but the cord is 9 feet long. At the time, I paid about $30 for both controllers.

I use a PS3 controller wirelessly via bluetooth thx to MotionJoy Gamepad Tool and it works fine.

However if I want to charge my gamepad I need to relog because the emulated Xbox360 controller gets "unplugged" and even when it's "replugged" the game won't realize it.

I am using a GameStop controller and had some initial problems getting FFXIV to recognize it, finally had to reload FFXIV from scratch to get the game to recognize it. However, I just bought a new notebook ASUS N53S which runs the game beautifully, except I can't get the game to recognize the controller! Tried reloading and reinstalling and changing drivers and nothing works. The controller works fine in the controller test screen so I know it is not a hardware or computer problem... it is something odd about the FFXIV setup. Square-Enix needs to figure out what it is doing wrong and fix it.