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Being ambidextrous, I've always prefered the Numpad. As a linear layout with lots of keys and bigger buttons around, it always seemed to make sense to me. But, apparently, Skyrim doesn't want people to move with the numpad. Am I that much in the minority here? There has to be other fellow-gerbils that game with the numpad. In my cursory research (wikipedia), there is a whole article about arrow keys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_keys

So what do you use?

wasd + mouse. Been that way since the original Half-Life in '99. Prior I used the arrow keys (not numpad), brokets, Enter, and Space, no mouse.

I'm used to WASD as well. Strange that they don't let you set your own if necessary, though.

WASD. In the Mechwarrior days it was arrow keys for legs and page navigation keys for torso twist/pitch and jump jets, with some numpad keys for legs / torse center. I'm doubting all other games I've played add up to the time I spent on mw3...

I almost never go with the default key bind settings, but the basic WASD+ stays the same.

Chalk up another for: WASD + mouse

I have a weird scheme that I developed during my Descent II days:

CTRL is forward, ALT is reverse, Z is left, X is right, C is crouch, Shift is Jump, Spacebar is "use", and various other buttons around that area perform various other functions depending on the game (S is often zoom, or "Scope", for instance).

So no, I don't use the WASD scheme...

ModernPrimitive wrote:

WASD. In the Mechwarrior days it was arrow keys for legs and page navigation keys for torso twist/pitch and jump jets, with some numpad keys for legs / torse center. I'm doubting all other games I've played add up to the time I spent on mw3...

Thanks for the nostalgia.

I'm all about WASD but I have been contemplating a gamepad like the Nostromo.

Mine is a slight variation of WASD.

I use WAXD and mouse. I map the S key to crouch or something usually because it was easier for some game in the past that had it mapped to the Shift or Alt button.

I'm a rightly, but mouse with my left hand.
So, with that said, I use the arrow keys (not the numb pad).

WASD + Mouse. However depending on the game I sometimes re-map to ESDF and macro the other keys. I played WoW ESDF.

Numpad + Mouse for main controls.
+ Arrow and the above 6 keys for extra functions.

And I also tries to keep the same functions on the same buttons no matter what the game. While the layout has changed slightly since more advanced games uses more keys and different ways, I always update within all my games. The biggest addition was adding quickknife / melee to Numpad 7 instead of having it for scope-zoom level since more and more games starting using the mousewheel for that function when scoped.

Flying / Mech / Descent will forever be on the joystick for me.

I usually use WASD but there are a few exceptions.

I think the default setup for the rainbow six games used the numpad (at least the older ones).

Also when playing Angband or any other 2d game where you want to move diagonally the numpad is better.

I think developers should support both.

I use the numpad on the right hand and mouse with the left in games. My right hand had been trained for years to use the numpad for games like King's Quest (and other Sierra games), and then Wolfenstein, and Doom used the numpad as well, so when 3D games came along like quake and then unreal, It was much easier for me to learn to use the left with the mouse than to train myself to do WASD. Also, I invert the mouse so moving down looks up. Chalk that up to too much flight sims when younger as well.

My preference is for Numpad. This probably came about as the movement keys are more horizontally aligned and there are more map-able surrounding keys that I find easier to find in a pinch. Looks like I'm in the minority. Though I've settled for WSAD when playing on a less spacious surface as I mouse right-handed.

Don't know why a game like Skyrim would make you pick one or the other...

I've always used the NumPad, also for the alignment and extra keys, and also for the usefulness of key shapes, the confined area, and the key bump to always be able to have my hand properly placed for using the right keys, without looking.

So, wait...is Skyrim another addition in the recent line of apparently incomprehensibly lazy or careless keybinding implementations that has issues with the Numeric Keypad? I was surprised by Mirror's Edge breaking this when prior Unreal Engine games seemed to do it properly, and then flabbergasted when an id game, for crying out loud, didn't handle the Numeric Keypad properly (mentioned it in my comments on Rage).

I really thought this was a solved problem, but this just seems to be getting worse recently...and I don't understand why when so many prior games handle it properly, and prior codebases from the companies having these problems. Seeing it with Rage, I began to wonder if this was something to do with XNA or some Microsoft game library or change in code or libraries handling keypresses that has been becoming more widespread or something...?

I used to re-map everything, using arrow keys, inverted look and right mouse as jump, but have since decided to adapt to the default controls of whatever game(s) I'm playing at the time. Switching from BF:BC2 to BF3 was kind of a pain though as the number row keys are transposed among other annoyances.

I actually used default keys in the BF3 Alpha and Beta, and boy, it was a pita. Now in the final release I use the numpad and it is just so much better, but yeah, some things are just hard to get working.

As demalion mentioned, Mirror's Edge was the first game I found that couldnt actually bind numpad-enter, which made me look for a solution. The first lazy solution was to download the AutoHotkey and run a script to rebind. That said, the AutoHotkey util is great. Not only can you rebind buttons or implement macros, you can also do it context dependent so if you alt-tab out, it disregards all bindings, switch bidningds dependon app, etc.

After a while I for some reason remembered the config-files and edited them directly as a solution. Beyond Mirror's Edge, the same problem was also in the new Deus Ex:HR, where you had to go in and bind the ascii-value for numpad enter if you wanted to be able to use it. People in the Deus Ex foras was glad for that a solution to that problem. What's weird is that it had to be crowd sourced instead of the game-maker just saying how to do it.

WASD for FPS games and QWES for WoW

I use WASD for everything including MMO's, 3rd person shooters, hack and slash games, and 1st person games.
use to use numpad and arrow keys back in the day of wolfenstein but have since changed it.... tho I don't remember when I've changed it.

Seems like almost every game uses WASD or some variation of it by default now.