Hi. I’ve been an avid GW2 player since launch, and ever since then I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the little Wine client that lets me mash 1 and collect loot on my Mac; however, the latest MacBook has raised some concerns and some questions. As I’m sure many are aware, we no longer have a standard row of function keys in order to access our profession skills. It’s not that we will be unable to use them, these “keys” still exist, but in a rather cumbersome way.
As I understand it, by default, we will be required to hold the “fn” key in order for these buttons to appear in the new touch bar. This is rather…uncomfortable. Now, I also understand that there is a preference that essentially toggles “fn key down” to be the default state of the button (I have this setting on currently).
I am concerned, however that either 1) This new MacBook will not have this preference (in all likelihood it will) and we’ll be forced to perform finger acrobatics in order to enjoy the game, or 2) This behavior will spoil the touch bar’s behavior outside of GW2, essentially removing all of the special tools it gives us and forcing us to constantly toggle this setting on and off as we play the game. Similarly, it should be possible to program the touch bar to include the function keys by default, but again this will force us to swap layouts whenever we launch/close the game.
Now, it would be trivial to write a little script that toggles the setting or swaps the layout when I launch the client, but that seems completely unnecessary to me. In the last AMA I was extremely pleased to hear about the progress of the native Mac client, and it shows that they do care about the experience of the game for all users, even if we are in the minority. Knowing this, I’m curious if actual support for this new technology would be possible? The track-pad controls for Mac are sublime and I often prefer them over mouse (A+ job), so maybe something similar should be in order.
I know it’s still very early (I mean the thing was announced today), but getting this idea out there seems very important to me. In my mind, I see Mac users pressing little icons for their skills on their touch bar (the icons for the profession skills) or being able to access menus from it. Giving too much control to the bar would obviously provide an unfair advantage to anyone with one of these machines, but having no support for it sounds bad too.
If anyone has gotten one of these things early and would like to comment on their experience with the new bar in GW2, that would be great. Maybe I’m overblowing the whole thing; but, it seems to me that with the mindset of “best possible experience for all users” should include support for this technology. Anyone else agree?
