The unbalanced advantage of game controllers and how to make keyboard play better.

[Firesped]

I'm a keyboard player. To be more specific, I am a FFXI keyboard player. I have built my gameplay experience completely around using the keyboard for everything. numpad is used for movement, arrow keys control the camera. I used A, S, D, and X to control the menu movements. and I have two rows of action bars for doing stuff. I've been using macros to switch my primary action bar between 3 different bars on my lower row. I even have g-keys on my Logitech G-510s keyboard mapped out.

Even with all that it is not enough to compare to a game controller player.

Pros for game controller players.
1: each cross bar provides 24 actions that can be accessed. 8 active at a time, "on the fly" swappable.
2: game controllers are ergonomically comfortable to access controls.
3: able to still used the normal hot bars to build a UI.

Cons for keyboard players
1: action bars only have 12 actions, half the amount of the game controller player
2: action bars are not ergonomically as cross bars. realistically I only have comfortable access to half of the action bar.
3: have to use action bars to build UI elements I want quick access too.

The solution that I can think of is this.
add swappable action bars.
holding ctrl or alt will swap the action bars to an alternate version of that action bar. each key providing access to a different set.
This would triple the accessible action bar space.
settings in the action bar configuration could be added for if the player wants each action bar to swap when ctrl or alt is pressed.


The second upgrade that would be good, is allowing for direct key bind mapping of game keys on gaming keyboards. so they don't need to be set in the software to emulate other key presses, which can cause problems by triggering other keys. (alt-1 may trigger 1 sometimes.) Logitech keyboard g-keys or Razer Keyboard M-keys/T-keys for example.