To me, it's clear that NCSoft put a feature on production without a deep usability analisys. They didn't even bother testing it. The screen for assigning shortcuts is totally unfunctional and full of bugs.
First of all, it is totally ridiculous how they managed conflict of hotkeys. Before I choose a key to assign to a function, I need to verify if it's being used by another function (and there's a ton of assignable functions), try to guess an unused hotkey (because NCSoft devs were lazy enought to put a button to clear a hotkey assignment), then change the conflictant function to that unused hotkey, and finally bind the hotkey to the function I want. All of this without screwing in any of the steps, because if I mistakenly set an used hotkey, the function simply disappears from the list, and only returns after I click "Reset to Defaults".
In most games and hotkey assignment UIs, when you try to assign an already used hotkey, it simply clears the old assignment and then sets the chosen hotkey to the function you want. Also, some UIs just warn the user before doing the action. It's simple to implement, it's functional, it *DOES* what the user wants, it makes the life of everyone a lot easier.
Second point, all the hotkey assignments is stored on server. Ok, this may make things easier if you play on different PCs, but this makes things much harder to people with various chars. You need to set all the hotkeys, one by one, for each char you create. IMO, it's a much more common scenario people with lots of chars than people that changes computers often, also, if you bothered creating a set of hotkeys, it's probable that you want to use it on all chars you play, it makes no sense in having different keys to open invetory in each of your chars. So, I think hotkeys should be stored on client side. If you want to keep your hotkeys, just copy the INI/CFG/whatever, like most gamers does when changing computers. And there's one more point agaisnt server side store of hotkeys, if you change to a different layout keyboard, you will be messed anyway (and different layouts keyboards is common on some countries, including mine).
Third point, it broke compatibility with old behavior, and there isn't an "easy way" to simulate it. Those who uses "Enter chat" option, have to spend a lot of time to make it similar to the old behavior. If the hotkey screen wasn't so messy, it wouldn't be a big trouble at all, but it is.
Forth point, it's so full of bugs that I can't believe a Software Engineer aproved it or it passed through QA. Really, I'm starting to have doubts about software development capabilities of NCSoft. I'll list a few ones that I've found so far:
1) As I said above, some functions simply disappears from the list if you try to assign an used hotkey, only returning after you hit "Reset to Defaults".
2) Some functions is still tied to the old hotkey, even if you change it. For example, I changed the function of PageUp to another hotkey, but it still does the camera change thing when I press PageUp. It also do that for PageDown and MouseMiddleButton. There may be others that I haven't tested so far.
3) I can't assign Mouse Middle Button to any other function because the box for selecting the new hotkey doesn't recognize when I click it.
4) Hidden key assignments. I'm trying to assing "P" to something, but it says it's in use. Well, I can't find any function with "P" assigned, so in the end, I can't use the letter "P" to any function I want. Again, there maybe others that I haven't tested so far.
To conclude my post, I'm not asking a miracle, because developing an UI for hotkey assignment isn't rocket science, it's a simple task, specially considering complex codes game devs should deal with. All I'm asking is to NCSoft doing things the right way, or not bothering doing at all. Can you, NCSoft, revise the functionality at all, taking into consideration all the points I've made? Or if you perhaps aren't confident you can redo the thing better, could you please remove it completely and make things the way it was on Interlude?
I'm not saying that I'm better than anyone or something like that, it's just that I get frustrated that a big company, with lots of resources, can't even acomplish the most simple tasks. I'm sorry if I sounded a bit aggressive, and also sorry for any mistake in my post, because english is not my native language.
With regards,