I have been an avid gamer for over 20 years. I also teach part-time at a state ducky keyboard and am involved with several student LAN parties. This has helped give me some very unique experience when it comes to computer gaming. Don’t laugh too hard when you read this but that is what I have discovered.
1. No matter how big the rubber feet are on the bottom of my ducky keyboard, it still moves when I play. I am a bit older and I play hard. When I am furiously slamming keys to throw a grenade, I sometimes move the keyboard. The best way I have found to remedy this issue is to cover my desktop in some kind of cloth. I started with an old towel but that moved too. My wife came up with the idea of sewing Velcro to the towel and then gluing the other side of the Velcro under my desk. This way I could secure the towel to my desk and my keyboard was stable. My wife later purchased some cloth and made a nice cover for my desk that Velcro’s under the desktop to stay in place. Now I can eat chips while I play, my keyboard does not move and cleanup is a breeze!
2. Since I went to school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I never took a typing class. Back in those days only ladies took that class. As a result, I have to look down at the keys a bit when I play. The easiest way around this for me was to stick a very small piece of Velcro to the grenade key. Now when I play I don’t have to look down to find the grenade key, as soon as I feel the Velcro, I know I am about to throw a grenade and watch someone’s avatar blow up. Some of the newer boards have a little tick that marks where the forward key is so you can reposition your hand when you move it. I have seen some people put a drop of glue on a key to mark it and still others have resorted to using a knife to crave a small notch in it to mark it. Regardless, if you have the same issue with looking down sometimes to find the right key, try marking it in some way you can feel.
3. Clean that keyboard! Many of us eat and drink while playing. The foods we eat have a ton of salt in them and the drinks are loaded with sugar. Today’s keyboards use a small rubber piece to push the keys back up. Over time this rubber can dry out. All the salt and sugar we drip in there doesn’t help much either. Most of us turn the keyboard over and shake it once in a while but every year you should probably take remove the screws from the bottom of the keyboard and open that sucker up to give it a good cleaning. You will be shocked and amazed at what you might find in your keyboard. It will also give you the opportunity to inspect the little rubber pieces and see if it is time to move on to a newer board.
4. Get a new keyboard. The one thing that shocks me is when I am at a LAN party and a guy is rocking some incredible PC that costs over a grand and yet he is playing on a $9 keyboard that looks 10 years old. Seriously, you handle the keyboard more than anything else. It is like your weapon in the military. If you are playing on an old board and want to see your scores improve and get a ton of nice new features like USB and audio to the keyboard, then think about a new keyboard. The newer ones have some awesome features and don’t really cost that much.
