TLDR: Blizzard, please design WoW with human ergonomics in mind.
I often enjoy playing WoW. I use my eyes to see what’s on the screen and my hands to interact with a keyboard and mouse in order to issue commands to my WoW avatar.
My right hand is on my mouse. It has 5 fingers, though I don’t use the ring or pinky fingers (even if the mouse has over 12 buttons to press). Some of my buttons or mouse wheel are assigned to timing-sensitive actions that I need my character(s) to do during combat (or to survive or move about some other circumstance).
My left hand tries to hover around the “W A S D” keys, my primary means of movement combined with holding down the right-click on my mouse. My four non-thumb fingers are pretty close to hotkeys “1” through “4” to utilize my abilities on my Actionbar1, usually my main rotational abilities that I will need to press the most often.
Sometimes I stretch my left index finger to “5” or even “6”, but I try to reserve those spots for buttons I don’t have to press very often, such as major cooldowns.
My Actionbar2 has its hotkeys reassigned to reflect Actionbar1, but with “shift+[hotkey]”. My left pinky is pretty close to the left shift key, so this is relatively convenient. Several of my default keybinds (such as “6”, “7”, or higher) have been reassigned (such as “q” and “e”) so that everything is within reasonable physical reach of the default position of my left hand without requiring too much movement on a regular basis.
I learned how to write macros to condense multiple abilities into a single button press or change their functionality altogether based on @mouseover and so forth.
For most specs in the game, I can condense their timing-sensitive keybinds down to 24 buttons or less (Actionbar1 and Actionbar2) without compromising the spec’s performance too much in the process (due to talent choices and efficiency loss by combining several off-global-cooldown abilities onto other on-global-cooldown abilities).
For many specs, I’m even able to incorporate a mount hotkey and/or fishing/survey hotkeys into that self-imposed 24-button limit.
…But then I look at some class specs and wonder if Blizzard is intentionally designing the character to be played by concert pianists with perfect hand-eye coordination. I mean, does the Brewmaster (as an example) really need upwards of 30 or 40 separate timing-sensitive active abilities?
Should I really have to customize WoW’s UX myself in order to make a spec playable?
I don’t care for WoW to ever become a console-friendly game, but think console game’s benefit in that they are keenly aware of what the human on the other side is limited to when interacting with their game: an ergonomically designed controller that they hold comfortably with both hands.
WoW’s UX (User eXperience) design… doesn’t seem to care. WoW is (by default) played with a keyboard and mouse. There’s tons of unused keys on the keyboard, so WoW’s UX can just pawn responsible design off onto their users to redo keybinds for the users to figure stuff out on their own. Abilities don’t track well or aren’t designed to work intuitively in a target rich chaotic environment? No problem, WoW’s UX just lets users design and install addons to make up for its own shortcomings.
The UX is about much more than just UI, or keybinds, or system settings. It involves the design of the player’s avatar and the game systems themselves. A class spec’s abilities directly effect its keybind complexity, and its keybind complexity directly affects its enjoyability. Some specs manage to be really interesting despite having much fewer buttons to press.
I’ve actually abandoned efforts to play several classes because their keybind complexity wasn’t enjoyable despite otherwise enjoying their class fantasy immensely. Hybrid classes are often particularly offensive in regards to keybind complexity.
So please Blizzard, please… keep human ergonomics in mind when designing WoW going forward. The UI, keybinds, trackers, everything. Humans are trying to play your game (not lookin’ at you, bots!). Optimize it for human enjoyment. Efforts to respect player time goes a long way toward this, but there’s so much more that could be done.
