When gaming, I foot Discord and my team thanks me for it

On July 3, 2022By Garmin Philip

Coughing, sneezing, smacking noises, clattering keyboards, traffic noise – all of this is annoying in every Discord chat and distracts the team. MeinMMO author Marko Jevtic definitely doesn’t want to be one of those annoying teammates who make annoying or even disgusting noises in voice chat. His solution to this is as unconventional as it is effective.

Nobody likes fellow players who abuse their microphone. In fact, to us, they’re some of the most annoying and nasty people to play shooters with. But you can’t completely prevent that, at least if the microphone is on all the time.

Even the quietest of gamers need to clear their throat, cough or sneeze. From time to time you may accidentally smack your lips, take a sip out of your coffee cup too close to the microphone or sniff a little more frequently during the pollen season. Or maybe you have a really satisfying but noisy keyboard that really annoys your friends.

It’s all human, but it doesn’t have to be. Because nobody would rather hear the body noises of the other players than the digital footsteps of the opponents in an intensive raid or a tight team deathmatch. Switching off the microphone all the time is impractical.

Only a push-to-talk button helps. But pressing it in the keyboard twister that you have to play in some games is not that easy. That’s why I only use a device for this, which also uses the often so lazy, lower half of my body. There is a foot pedal under my PC desk, and you can only hear me when I step on it.

I especially recommend the foot pedal from the well-known streamer brand Elgato, the so-called Stream Deck Pedal:

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Thanks to the Elgato foot pedal, you can only hear me when I want to

What are the advantages of a foot pedal? What many gamers overlook is that your gaming chair has two helpful things dangling down that you can use. Aside from impatiently tapping your feet, you certainly don’t use your legs when gambling. But that can be changed, and I recommend it.

You can easily connect the Elgato Stream Deck Pedal to your PC with USB-C, place it on the floor under your desk, and you’ve done most of the work with it. All you then have to do is place Push-to-Talk on one of the 3 buttons on the foot pedal.

All settings are easy and completely uncomplicated via the Elgato software. You simply slide the desired function onto the desired button.

Elgato’s foot pedal is unassuming, but very useful and versatile

How does this help with gameplay? Push-to-talk is actually extremely clever, but often very impractical. With this setting, voice chat is only activated while you are actively pressing the button set up for it. If the finger does not press this button, you are dumb as a fish. But find some space on the keyboard for this button. That’s where the foot pedal comes in.

After all, you want to run, switch weapons, fire skills, reload, jump, crouch, slide-cancel, ping, or whatever else you do in your games while you’re at it. You don’t have to be a skilled drummer to operate the thing while playing your games, either.

What I personally find even more practical at the moment is the opposite, i.e. push-to-mute. The microphone then turns off when I step on the pedal. So I can lean back in my chair when making small talk and only step on it when I have to cough.

This is how you set up the pedal correctly – and you should avoid a mistake as a matter of urgency

So I set up my own Elgato Stream Deck Pedal:

Left button: alt tab – It’s handy when I’m playing Elden Ring with the controller, for example, and I want to switch windows without leaning over to the keyboard.
Center button: Push to talk – It’s a quick and easy way to mute my microphone when I don’t want to be heard (e.g. when I have to cough).
Right button: Screenshot – Even with fast-paced action, I can take a screenshot with my foot right in the middle. Especially handy for my job of capturing gameplay images for articles.

Settings Stream Deck Pedal — These are my settings with the Elgato Stream Deck Pedal

No matter how I ended up setting it up: The teammates thank me for ‘talking with my feet’, because nobody likes hearing this unnecessary background noise. Especially not when the raid boss is causing a lot of stress. And I feel more comfortable knowing that I’m not annoying anyone.

But of course you can also set up the pedal in a completely different way. There are some Rainbow Six: Siege players who have put leaning around corners on the pedals, for example. This way they can keep their fingers free for WASD and still peek past a wall.

Bypasses this error: But I still have a small recommendation, which derives from a funny anecdote from reddit – use the pedal with your left foot, not your right. A poor guy on reddit came up with the idea of the foot pedal years ago and has made it a habit to only talk when he’s pressing a pedal with his right foot.