Any chance to see command card customization coming?

StarCraft II General
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The thing that drives me away from SC2 constantly is the inability to customize my command card, nothing else really. I feel like this with other games and I simply enjoy them and like them a lot, but can’t play because there’s a big adaptation gap where I have to get my muscle memory to react, I have to fight the controls every new game I play, and that just bores me.

I’ve never played Dark Souls with Keyboard and mouse for the same reason, if I wasn’t comfortable with gamepad either I would have quitted that game as well, even though it’s one of my favorite games of all time, other games with such problems, I just quit for the same reason. Several games I’ve played in the past, you change the controls but still have the old inputs hardcoded, so you change E to F for “Use/Interact” and still get “Press E to use”, it totally puts me away, and it’s just a very small feature that can throw me away from so many pieces of art.

This game in particular, I have a problem with the command card that I can’t solve. I’ve played the game a lot in the past, and never really got comfortable with the keys, after so long playing ARPGs and MOBAs with QWER as spells, A for attack, S to stop, etc. I simply fail to do everything I want to, I press Q to build and my probe moves, etc. So I try to look at the command card before pressing Q, I realize it’s Z, but the next time I press Q again, or press Q to convert tank to siege mode, or press A to attack and get whatever trash command.

Using custom controls doesn’t work either, it’s like replacing my keyboard key caps QWERT with ABCDE and pretend like I’m doing the same stuff, it just doesn’t work.

Grid keys, I tried this in the beginning most comfortable method, does almost what I need, but I never liked having a 5th row of keys, TGB keys, I almost never used them. I tried custom controls, I was amazed at how much faster I could do stuff, even after using grid for months, then the muscle memory kicks in, I see build button is on the bottom right cornet so my brain says “press Z, that’s the key” but I don’t get the build menu when I do so, because keys no longer relate to positions. I have to look at the small key on the button which makes me literally look at the command card, something you can’t afford in a fast-paced game like this.

So, what I mean with this, is I tend to go back to Warcraft 3 after all, play games by myself because I actually can modify the keys as I want them, I don’t have to fight the controls in that game, the game gives me the correct keys so I can play the game. I wish something like that might happen one day, even if it’s a paid feature to have different control settings I’m willing to spend about 10€ just for it, to be able to place the buttons where I need so I can pretty much remove all keys from the TGB row, put all skills on the correct places according to current generation standards for gaming (i.e. QWER are abilities, ASDF actions, etc.) and I can play the game beyond AI because I can’t handle having to spend more time trying to find out what key does what I want to do than actually playing the game.

I don’t think anyone will read or care about this, but as a long time fan of SC2 since I preordered WOL collector’s edition, I would really like to revisit this game at some point, and this is literally the only reason why I haven’t done so.

Cheers.

3 Likes
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So, in addition to customizing hotkeys, you’re asking to move buttons in the UI to places you like?
You’re quite unspecific in that huge post tbh…

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Yes I mean moving the buttons around so I can put the action on the correct place of the grid, so the visual control matches the keyboard input, and it’s all in the correct place.

I’ll make a TL;DR version:

I play several games at once, and have played over a thousand different games in my life, I don’t want to learn completely different, hardcoded, time-consuming control schemes, however easy they might seem for other people. There are several minor reasons for me to want this, most of them quality of life improvements, and a major one: The fact that I can’t make myself learn this game without it negatively affecting my skills in other games. I played a few SC2 games and after that I went back to Warcraft 3, I kept pressing Z to build when the build button on my acolyte is Q. Mistakes were made.

Also I don’t see a reason why a player has to fight the controls in 2019, I think we should have grown past that already. This is only notable in strategy and similar games, because you actually have a command card, other games you don’t have the cheatsheet and controls are much simpler: point with mouse, click to shoot, WASD to move, and a couple more things, you’re ready. Rebinding keys to your liking doesn’t have any impact anywhere. Just check the example about Dark Souls as it perfectly explains the situation: Yes you can dominate the standard control scheme, but you’ll suffer, it will take you a very long time, and by the time you’ve managed to handle it everyone else will have been ready for a much longer period of time (i.e. not having to fight the controls).

I could give you dozens of examples in my life to explain why I think it’s a bad idea to force hardcoded controls, but I think this is long enough to express my point.

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I don’t get it. I agree that the grid layout is incredibly dumb - who would turn your abilities into ZXCV? But you can rebind every single unit’s abilities to QWER (and QWER-ASDF-ZXCV for buildings).

What does “card customization” even mean? I thought about the ability to drag unit groups in the control group - for instance, if you have both Sentries and High Templars in a group, you might want to have Sentries first, or the HTs first. Thatwould be insane customization, something a guy on the Reforged forums suggested.

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It seems like you guys don’t even know what the command card is, I’ll just take some screenshots from Warcraft 3 which, as I said earlier, has allowed me to do this since day 1 (honestly I haven’t used it since day 1, but way more than 15 years ago anyway) and hopefully we can finally clear this out:

This is the default peasant command card: prntscr. com/ohznx0
This is my custom peasant command card: prntscr. com/ohznmo
(Remove spaces in URLs, it doesn’t allow me to post links or images for some reason)

So there are 2 main differences:

  1. The buttons are placed where I want them to.
  2. The hotkeys are bound as I want them to.

Number 2 is doable, you can add custom hotkeys for any command in the game.
Number 1 is not doable, buttons are hardcoded in their places.

It has nothing to do with moving control groups, or rebinding keys. It’s all about moving the buttons to the correct place, so I don’t have to re-learn the game every time I want to play it.

Is this clear enough?

EDIT: Still no response, does nobody really care about having a proper command card?

2 Likes
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Bumping instead of creating a duplicate. I’m also a fellow modified grid (fleet) player with LoL/DoTA experience.

I understand that this is not a problem for Veterans, who don’t use the command card at all. But for Novices like me or Abaddon it’s more of a hindrance than an aid.

Rearranging the command card is not about clicking on the buttons, but about using it as a visual cheat-sheet for grid-like layouts. “Reading a random key from command card” VS “Glancing at the keys grid location” are two completely different actions with one taking a lot more brainpower and time.