Guild Wars 2

So I play with a rather strange control setup where I use the Numpad keys (right side of the keyboard as opposed to the ones above the letters) for my skills. Which works great for me, except for one thing.

For some reason I can’t imagine, the 8 key sometimes doesn’t respond when I push it. I’ll press 8, and nothing happens. It doesn’t happen every time, sometimes it responds just fine, other times I have to push it 2-3 times before the skill I have in my 8 slot goes off.

Now, you’re probably thinking “well that’s just a keyboard problem”. That’s what I thought too. So I went out and bought a brand new gaming keyboard. Needed one anyway, my old one was a crappy thing that came with the machine and I’d been meaning to get a gaming one for a while. Exact same issue. So unless I have the worst luck ever, I don’t think 2 completely different keyboards (one of them being brand new and high-quality) would have the exact same issue.

And I don’t think its a PC issue either, because it responds just fine when I’m using it for typing numbers or anything like that.

And its not an issue with a specific skill either, because it happens across all 6 of my characters and any skill I put into slot 8.

Far as I can tell, GW2 is the only place the problem pops up, so I figure it must be something to do with the program. What or how something like that could affect a single key, I don’t know. But there it is.

Oooh, keyboard quirks, a kind of problem I’ve seen time and again over the years… Key above all else is finding patterns to when the problem occurs… Patterns allow you to recreate and research the issue.

First up: what operating system is this, and is it a laptop?
Most likely you may be inadvertently hitting a key combination that is caught at the OS level (or lower) and never reaching the game. Do you hold down any other keys when this happens, like Control and/or Alt?

Is this a laptop? These sometimes have options triggered by specific keystroke combinations.

Is there anything special about this key?

Equally important, does this key see the same exact use outside the game? (It may be a subtle keystroke pattern that hardware or firmware fails to recognize)

If one hand is at the number pad, where is the other hand? Does it use the arrow keys or is it using any modifier keys (alt, Ctrl, shift, windows key, etc…)?

Could this be an issue with the number of keys pressed simultaneously? There can be a limit to the number of simultaneously pressed keys a program will track or keyboard monitor.

Is there a specific pattern of keystrokes that evoke this? If you can find a pattern of keystrokes to reliably recreate the issue, you can research for ittest it specifically in other programs, and forward it on to support here for reproducing it inside their testing and development environments.

Does tapping the key by itself, with nothing else held down anywhere on the keyboard always work?

Does double-tapping the key always work when a single press fails?, or does it sometimes require a third press? (Usually a software issue if 2 presses always works)

I know you don’t think its the skill and you’ve used it with different characters, but just for the sake of testing, swap skills 8 and 9 and confirm the problem follows the key and not the skill – mind, its not just testing the key and skill that I am after here, but getting you to change pattern of usage to see if the symptoms change any.
//Portable Corpse

Sun of a gun. I just figured it out. I can’t believe after months of getting this I just figured it out in like 5 minutes. And it turns out it affects more than just the 8 key, though I never noticed just because its much more rare for me to use the other key combinations.

OK, so here’s how to reproduce the issue 100% of the time.

1.) Num Lock OFF. This is key, it doesn’t happen if NumLock is on.

2.) Press and hold the UP arrow key. The UP arrow key doesn’t even need to be mapped to anything in the game controls.

3.) Press Numpad 8. The button press will not register. If you press it a second time, though, it will.

Also works for LEFT + 4, DOWN + 2, and RIGHT + 6. All those combinations will also produce a non-response.

It also works in reverse. Pressing and holding 8, then trying with the UP key also prevents the UP keypress from responding (in my control scheme, that means if I hold 8 and try to move forward, I won’t move). Ditto for the other combinations.

I imagine it has something to do with the fact that the 8, 4, 2, and 6 keys have built-in arrow key functionality on most (all?) keyboards. 8 is Up, 4 is Left, 6 is Right, and 2 is Down. So the Numpad “arrow” directions and the actual arrow keys conflict with each other in some way.

It also explains why the issue would come and go. Because the NumLock key is used to toggle auto-run (can’t remember if that’s the default or something I custom-set), I’m frequently turning NumLock on and off when I toggle auto-run. When its ON, the issue disappears. When its OFF, it shows up again.

It does still seem to be a GW2 issue, though. I’ve tried the combination in other games and it doesn’t have any negative effect, no lost key presses or anything. So hopefully its still something that can be fixed.

And in the meantime, I guess I just have to stop using NumLock to toggle my auto run and leave it on.

I’m glad you found it. I was wondering if you were hitting a shortcut combo I used to use for changing screen orientation (Ctrl-alt-arrow), which would probably never reach the game if the appropriate software was listening for it.

The numberpad is a wierd beast, and why I’ve never written any code that touches it. That I can gather, there’s more than one way to listen to number pad presses, but I’ve never researched it properly from the code writing angle – any rate, this makes it a numlock bug issue. You might update the subject and first post to reflect that.