Santa was good to me this year, what a busy holiday. I’m safe and sound back snug in my home, with visions of… keyboards? Dancing in my head. One of my presents this year was the G15 gaming keyboard, by logitech. Which is pretty spiffy. Except. EQ2 doesn’t support it what so ever. It’s got an lcd screen, which can display various ‘things’, if any were supported. It’s also got programmable buttons.. for macro’s.. again, if any were supported.
Wait, that’s not exactly true. You CAN use them for macros – if – they use one of the three hotbars you have that come with key commands already. Ie: Those alt 1 alt 2 control 1 control 2 keys. But no more then those three. See, unlike WoW, where you can bind every single hotkey to your own personal command, EQ2 doesn’t give you that option. I know, the g15 has been discussed up one side and down the other, if it’s breaking user / game agreements, if it’s ‘cheating’, blah blah blah. But it’s just a gadget, much like any other gadget out there.
 I did find a use for it in eq2 though. Oh yes. My parse program, ACT, supports the g15 keyboard. And it will also time aoe’s for you. So on those icky raids where the mobs are tossing out aoe’s every 45 seconds or 30 seconds, it will tell you when they’re about to hit. Giving you time to back out of the way, if you’re in any way squishy, which I typically am. The keys also light up, nice for those dark nights. WoW is supported, and so is Vanguard even though the game isn’t even out yet.
I went and poked around looking for responces to why sony hadn’t added any sort of lcd support, and their response was basically that they figured the g15 was not used by enough people to bother with it. Glad to see their customers are so important. I know a good deal of people who use these keyboards, that’s the whole reason I even heard about them or have one.
It’s a fancy way to turn the pages of your hotkeys if you want, instead of hitting shift # to turn them you can bind it to a gkey, but other then that…again, there are good sides and bad sides to every argument. People are still bickering about how the paint used to come off the keys (which has since been fixed, and no longer presents an issue). It seems a little more complicated then I would have liked, I have a hard enough time learning computer stuff as is, but oh well.
One huge thing I like about the new keyboard vs. my old one, is that if I’m listening to music on winamp (since eq2 does not have an in game music player, unlike eq1.. which I miss) I can pause / change the song / start / skip etc. in game, as opposed to having to tab out to the music program I was using. Another huge bonus.