1: Actually, you force me to agree. I see now that it is the right option. I too have experienced the "death by pause screen" of PES Vs matches.
2 and 3: yeah they are minor issues anyway, I totally understand they can be harder to fix than it looks =)
Regarding the 4 players matches I was doing some preparation trying to test if I could have 3 controllers + 1 keyboard.
I have been using Keyboard and a xinput controller that is detected as an Xbox 360 controller. And that works fine.
But for 3rd and 4th player I only have Dinput controllers available.
With the D input controllers, the game detects them fine and after I configure all the inputs I can play the game, and control the players however the game interprets R1 trigger (the button I set to sprint) as "go to Pause menu" in the Dinput controllers. So on these controllers whenever someone sprints it goes to the pause menu.
Is there some kind of debug log or settings file I can fwd to you to help troubleshoot this?