Talk:The Incomplete and Unofficial Guide to /bind

Curveball's Guide

Is this Curveball's guide? - Snorii 07:53, 13 January 2007 (PST)

o.o and even more curios.. does this mean the talk with Lighthouse has gone well? --Sleepy Kitty 08:05, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Yes, Snorii, it is. The original source is here. As for the talk with Lighthouse, I told him (and the community-at-large) that I would convert a guide or two to give an idea of what it would be like to have player guides posted in the wiki. I've also posted a thread about it in the Paragon Forums. Let me know what you think! --TonyV 08:39, 13 January 2007 (PST)

I guess we need to add something to the guide giving acknowledgment to Curveball. Is Lighthouse's idea to make guides a community effort with no single author? Anyway, I think it looks very good, but I definitely like the way Wiki's work. Good job, Tony. - Snorii 08:44, 13 January 2007 (PST)

^^;; heh, was expecting that link to go to coh forums for some reason.. Anyway, o,o I would say this would tie into my earlier suggestion a couple weeks back about a thank you page.. so ppl who wrote these could get some recognition, but at the same time, leave it for others to improve and update. --Sleepy Kitty 08:55, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Regarding credit for work done: I'm not so keen for giving one person credit in the main article. It's not that I don't want people to have credit; I've found Curveball's work invaluable. But here is what I was thinking when I took his name off of it:

• The nature of the wiki is that articles aren't written for personal credit. For example, even though I wrote the original Tree of Thorns Respecification Trial article, it's not really "TonyV's Tree of Thorns Respecification Trial" article. it's our collective Tree of Thorns Respecification Trial article.
• If an article "belongs" to a person, it might give the impression that etiquette dictates that the article only be edited by that person; and attitude which is, of course, antithetical to the wiki concept.
• It's entirely possible that a player-written guide that gets posted in the wiki might be edited to the point that it bears little resemblance to the original guide. It's not unusual for someone to post an article, and that article is taken up by someone else who vastly improves it. I suspect that the same would happen with guides.
• Generally, given a choice, I'd rather have someone update an existing guide than create a new one. What I'd like to avoid is 10 guides to recording demorecord files, each basically covering the same thing.
• There are other ways--better ways, in my opinion--for folks to get credit for the work they do in the wiki. The most obvious is that they're listed in the history as the person who created the article. Another is to discuss it here, on the discussion pages.
• In the specific case of Curveball's article, there were lots of references to "me," "I," "my," and so on. Since I was posting the article, it kind of seemed weird for me to leave them in. I don't want someone to see me as the author in the history log and think that "me" in the guide actually refers to me, TonyV.

I just think that it's not really appropriate for folks to take title or content credit for wiki articles, even for player guides. Like I said, it's not that I don't want to recognize folks who contribute, but in my mind, the point of the wiki is to present the information in as clear and concise a manner as possible, and giving title or content credit ("This guide was written by...") kind of defeats that point.

Thoughts?

--TonyV 16:43, 21 January 2007 (PST)

Just found this a few days ago after being away from CoH for a year... Shows you how observant I am, right?

In my opinion, the original guide was written so very, very long ago (the bulk of it came from my time in the beta test, for crying out loud) that I don't see any reason, on my part, to insist on my name being in the wikified version. There have been a lot of people who have added to bind knowledge since 1.0 and 1.1 of the forum guide were published, figuring out tricks I never even thought of.

That said, as a general CYA rule of thumb, if you take information out of something that was previously written you're supposed to source it. If you look at the pages on Wikipedia you'll find that at the bottom of an article it will list references, or it will have a notification that it doesn't have references and needs them. For example, if you saw some interesting information about the CoH invention system in a print magazine, and you put that information in the wiki, you'd need to reference where you got that information or the publishers of the magazine might have grounds to sue you.

That's not a problem for this bind article, though. I posted it on the forums and in doing it technically became the property of NCSoft (I think) so they're the only people you need to worry about. :)

--"Curveball" 17:32, 15 June 2008 (CST)

Hey, I found this link on paragonwiki and through it found yours. You may want to mention it as a good example of the /bind command. Mastermind_Numpad_Pet_Controls

--"Powerisall" 20:11 10 July 2009 (EST)

Chords

I did some testing the other day with chord keys such as SHIFT, CTRL, ALT, LSHIFT, LCTRL, LALT, RSHIFT, RCTRL, RALT.

This was my bindfile:

LSHIFT+A "local LSHIFT+A"
RSHIFT+A "local RSHIFT+A"
SHIFT+A "local SHIFT+A"
SHIFT+CTRL+A "local SHIFT+CTRL+A"
SHIFT+ALT+A "local SHIFT+ALT+A"
CTRL+ALT+A "local CTRL+ALT+A"
CTRL+A "local CTRL+A"
ALT+A "local ALT+A"
SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+A "local SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+A"
A "local A"

This is the results I had when testing various keys:

Key combo pressed	Response in local
A	A
LSHIFT+A	SHIFT+A
RSHIFT+A	SHIFT+A
SHIFT+CTRL+A	CTRL+A SHIFT+A
SHIFT+ALT+A	SHIFT+A ALT+A
CTRL+ALT+A	CTRL+A ALT+A
SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+A	CTRL+A SHIFT+A ALT+A

I then did another test with this bindfile:

SHIFT+A "local SHIFT+A"
LSHIFT+A "local LSHIFT+A"
RSHIFT+A "local RSHIFT+A"
RCTRL+A "local RCTRL+A"
CTRL+A "local CTRL+A"
LCTRL+A "local LCTRL+A"
LALT+A "local LALT+A"
RALT+A "local RALT+A"
ALT+A "local ALT+A"

And the results were:

Key combo pressed	Response in local
LSHIFT+A	RSHIFT+A
RSHIFT+A	RSHIFT+A
LCTRL+A	LCTRL+A
RCTRL+A	LCTRL+A
LALT+A	ALT+A
RALT+A	ALT+A

My conclusions from these two tests are:

• When defining binds that use chords, the left, right, and normal variants of a chord key are all treated as being the same key. This means:
  • The left and right chord key will both activate the bind identically.
  • When multiple binds define to the same chord but differentiate on left, right, or normal, only the last one takes effect since there is no difference between the keys.
• Binds that try to use more than two keys in a single chord are ignored.
• When pressing more than two keys together in a single chord, all keybinds that match any of the key combinations will activate.

The above seems to contradict a lot of information that I've read in various bind guides, including this one. Before I go updating the wiki pages, can someone confirm that this behavior is consistent with their experiences on their own system? I want to make sure that parts of this aren't due to some sort of system-specific issue (such as my keyboard). -- Sekoia 23:30, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. I know on my characters I have ++up bound to LCTRL and RCTRL does nothing. So, by themselves, they work. I'll have to see if I have any binds set up with L or R keys in combination and check those out. --Eabrace 01:20, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I think that if you bind something to LCTRL (or any of the other keys) outside of a chord combination, it will work. It's only when those keys are part of a chord that the distinction seems to become lost. Put alternatively, it seems that the only time the left/right distinction is recognized is when you're using the key by itself (and not as part of a chord). -- Sekoia 01:58, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Additions and Changes to the Classic Guide

The Incomplete and Unofficial Guide to /bind is THE guide that players have been referencing to learn how to create keybinds since the beginning of the game. The version created at Paragon Wiki and copied here to this wiki is a good polish on the original guide, and the changes were also approved by @CurveBall, the author of the original guide. As such, I'm very hesitant to make any changes to this guide, and I feel that any changes that are made need to be thought through very carefully.

The only real alteration to this guide was done in June 2023 with the addition of the "Bind Chaining Method" section. The only thing that the new "Bind Chaining Method" section brings to the guide is to point out that Rotating Binds can be used to activate 2 powers. Is it needed? My opinion, not really. Is it harmful? My opinion, not really. So I went ahead and edited that new section a little to prevent players from being misled about how the game uses or works with command strings. Otherwise, I just left it as is for now. We might want to remove that section sometime in the future after more consideration, or make the decision to keep it.

That said, I do think the changes to the binding system in Issue 27, Page 7 need to be added to this guide. Also, some additional information might be worthwhile to add. We have a much better understanding of how binds work in the game today thanks to Homecoming's dev @NumberSix. That said, most of the new information that I'm aware of is not really necessary, but it's interesting and could be useful. There is quite a bit of information from my own guide, The Advanced Bind Guide, that could also be added to The Incomplete and Unofficial Guide to /bind; as well as other information found in the Homecoming forums that have laid out new techniques and discoveries.

Anyway, if this guide is to be rewritten or updated, I feel compelled to ask others to review any changes with me. I'm just a bit hesitant about making any changes to it. I'm still finishing up another project at the moment, but when I'm finished with that I'll turn my attention toward slash commands, binds, and this guide. BlackSpectre (talk) 21:01, 5 October 2024 (UTC)