Hi, hello, I’m new, made an account on the forum specifically to say this.
I’ll admit I don’t understand anything about the way PMU is coded, but isn’t there a way to have it detect the keyboard you’re using, the way almost every other game does? Clearly this game was made by American people and that’s also most of its playerbase, but that doesn’t seem like a good reason to make it so difficult to play for people who don’t live in the US.
When I type a period on my keyboard, it makes a slash. When I type a slash, it makes an ampersand. I installed this game for the third time ever today, and I had to google how the @ is typed on American keyboards to even be able to log in. It makes both getting into the game and playing it way more effort than it should be, in fact I’m pretty sure I uninstalled the game almost instantly last time I wanted to play it because of this issue.
There don’t seem to be any posts about this since 2011, and from those posts it seems even people with British keyboards had issues, so I know I’m not alone in this. I understand that the game may not be equipped to handle characters like Japanese text or umlauts, but shouldn’t it at least be able to recognize the Latin Alphabet and normal punctuation?
I’m not actually certain about the nationality/ies of the original founder(s) but I know that 4 of the current staff are not from America, two of which are from the UK and have been around for a decade. I think they and for sure other past staff suffer from this.
While I haven’t seen/looked for posts addressing how the layout Is locked, It’s known and multiple people here on the forums and the Discord brought up how they couldn’t type @, so yes everyone who doesn’t have the usual “qwerty, asdfgh, zxcvb” layout—even those with British keyboards—will have this problem.
I have an American keyboard so this has never been an Issue for me but It should absolutely be changed. For reference PMU’s coded In C#, and for whatever reason has had Its code be neglected and done poorly or something because all the programmers In the past left and drama or something. It’s complicated and there’s also many many other things that need to be worked on. I’m really not sure what their highest priority Is but stuff like this won’t be touched on In a long time unfortunately, especially with the lead programmer going through a recovery from an Injury past couple months. I’m positive they want to change this, but with so many other things that need to be done It’s just been sitting on the very long to-do list.