My Love & Hate Relationship with Gaming Devices

 

Gaming peripherals can make or break your game. With the right device and some time invested during the learning curve, you'll find yourself improving your game. Take the classic Belkin Nostromo keypad ( that design is now owned by Razer and is currently reborn as the Tartarus and Orbweaver ). We all have found that moving in WoW with the standard WASD keys while at the same time trying to activate our abilities on the hotkeys from 1 - 0, especially the 8,9,0, - and = keys can be a bit of a stretch. When Belkin first released the Nostromo keypad back in 2008, it was a game changer for me. I discovered I could alleviate three of my fingers to ability activation on the keypad as the keys were easily accessible in a 5 x 3 grid layout while my thumb did the movement work on the gamepad inspired D-pad, very much a like a gamepad from consoles. It made sense to me - why waste three fingers to do a one finger job?  It took me about a weeks worth of adjusting with the learning curve, but boy, once I got the hang of it, I never, ever wanted to go back playing with the standard keyboard layout. The sense of freedom of letting my fingers fly to comfortably activate abilities with ease without stretching them to uncomfortable positions and simply moving my character with my thumb on the D-pad was an absolute joy during Battlegrounds and dungeon runs.

 

Fast forward to 2015. I have owned several keypads over the last several years, from Belkin Nostromo N52Te, Logitech G13 and now Razer, with their latest Orbweaver, a direct descendant from the original Belkin Nostromo. On January 5th, only having the Orbweaver for a little more than 8 months, the D-pad's north directional switch gave out. I could no longer move forward in WoW. 

 

I figured, it can't be that bad. I can just migrate back to the old keyboard setup and play, besides, I have the Naga and just map the abilities to that instead.

 

Was I totally wrong.

 

The afternoon was a struggle. While I could move around in WoW with relative ease ( I grew up playing FPS games on the PC with the WASD layout ), activating abilities was a chore. What made things worse, I had to move every one of my hotkeys around to make things more accessible but it just wasn't the same. I then tried remapping all the abilities to my Naga but that brought in a completely new layout for me which I wasn't use to as I previously used the Naga as a modifier for Shift, Alt and Ctrl along with macros. That evening playing in Arena with the guildies ended up being a jokingly button mashing experience for me. Trying to fight while thinking felt sluggish and lethargic. My brain new what to do, but my fingers didn't. It was an absolutely frustrating experience.

 

I grew dependent on the keypad and once it was gone, it broke my game. So here I am, gimped in WoW, waiting for a return authorization from Razer to get an exchange. I realized without the Orbweaver, the gameplay experience in WoW completely changed for me. These keypads overtime became a natural extension of my body, as a direct interface for me to play games like WoW in a manner that I extremely enjoyed. Without the Orbweaver, WoW felt like something was irritably missing. Like driving a car without a manual stick, watching a movie without sound, eating pizza without cheese or worst drinking your favorite soda without carbonation ( yuck).

 

I love using the Orbweaver, but it sure sucks when it's broken. So to my fellow guildies, I will say this again to everybody that has plans on buying a gaming peripheral, especially from Razer, please PLEASE buy the extended warranty on it. And also, please bear with me for the time being as a gimped Paladin as I await for my exchange.