Hi there, I just stumbled on this. I always disable “Start with Tick Enabled” in all my BPs for optimization purposes and manually enable them if I need it. Yesterday, I disabled it in my player controller too and today I struggled for 5 hours to find why it wasnt receiving any input. I didnt find any information like this on the internet.
Is disabling tick in player controller and not receiving any input intentional? Why tick and input related at all? It doesnt block input if I disable tick in my pawn.
2 Likes
Today I disabled Tick on all of my C++ classes that don’t currently need it, and ran into this same issue after disabling Tick on the player controller.
So it seems this issue persists 3 years later, regardless of whether Tick is disabled in BP or C++.
1 week ago i disabled tick in my player controller and i wasted my 7 days to figure out what was the actual problem 
It seems like Player Controller relies on tick but they never mention this
You need tick enabled on the controller, as it’s checking for input every frame. Without tick it won’t check for Input. You may be able to work around this by setting up manual input events, but that would be counter productive IMO, and may or may not work. It’s smart to reduce tick for optimization purposes, but some things it’s necessary.
If your really wanting to optimize your game, look into soft references and world partition/level streaming. This can be just as effective if not more as it reduces the amount of data loaded into memory.