(Image Source: DoD photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway, U.S. Air Force, photo from article here) Summary: I have the following suggestion concerning the radio and local voice chat. Add the new function "focus-listening" which allows to focus-listen on one particular channel while automatically tuning down the volume of the other channels. Let me explain in more details what I mean and how it could work. How does this feature work: When listing on radio or local chat to conversations, you hold Left-Shift and the corresponding key of the channel you want to listen to. While you do this, the volumes of the other channels are lowered while the full volume of the "focused-listened channel" remains, allowing you to clearly understand what's being said there. I consider this feature not only extremely useful but also realistic. In the real world when using your mobile phone, you often cover your other ear with your hand to cancel out environmenal noices and other people's chatter. A radio can be used exactly in the same way. This also works the other way around. If you hold your radio away from your ear, the radio voices are muted while you can focus on the person speaking next to you. My rationale for focus-listening to one particular radio channel and ignoring other radio channel is this: with a walkie-talkie you would listen only to one particular channel at any given time, not ALL available channel. On a music radio you also listen to only one station, not all stations at the same time. I admit that I don't know how military radios work, but I assume they also listen only to one channel at a time, right? Focus-listening would work just the same once we get radio channels for each squad (numpad 1 to 9). Just hold the Left-Shift and the corresponding number on the numbpad. While you hold down the focus-listen key, you see onscreen an coloured indicator (lets call it "focus-listen indicator") that tells you A: you are currently focus-listening and B: on which channel you are doing this (the indicator is using the colour of the channel, i.e. blue, green or red). It could look like the following icon - it's similar to the speaker icon we see when we actively speak on a channel. The icon below intents to look like an ear shape - please excuse my lack of designer skills - but you get the idea. This icon could appear exactly at the same spot where the speaker icon appears, as both icons cannot appear at the same time (you cannot focus-listen and speak at the same time - to speak, you have to let go of the Left-Shift key). I think the "focus-listen indicator" alone is probably not enough visualization. When focus-listing is active we should also highlight or mark incoming channels in some way to show which of them you are focusing on and which you are ignoring - this will help you even more to home in to the channel you are really interested in and make clear which person you are currently listening to. Here some ideas how this could be visulized on the HUD. Of course, this is optional and just an additional way of aiding the player. Suggestion 1: Use a lighter font colour for un-focused incoming channels and the normal dark font colour on focused channels. Downside: depending on the background, this could be hard to read. I don't like this idea much. Suggestion 2: Cross out channels you are not focusing on. I like this idea. The cross-out is a simple and intuitive visual hint to the player. Suggestion 3: We could also highlight the channel you listen to with an additional icon or marking of some kind. I have no specific idea, but we sure could come up with some design. All these HUD ideas are just my first thoughts/concepts how we can visually indicate focus-listing to the player. I am sure if we set AJAX or the devs to the task they will come up with something much better and workable. Game settings could look like this: We also need the ability to rebind the "Shift" key, as the focus-listener modifier, to another key. Not everybody has long enough fingers to easily reach B when holding Shift. Example: As a Squad Leader you want to focus-listen to an important conversation on the Squad Leader radio channel and ignore loud chatter on the squad radio. You hold Left-Shift and G on your keyboard for as long as you want to focus-listen to the Squad Leader radio channel. While you do this, you will hear the Squad Leader channel on full volume while any chatter on the Squad radio and local voice chat is tuned down and hardly audible. This allows you to fully follow the converation on the Squad Leader channel. Additional sub-features/variations: 1. Optional feature "mute environmental sounds" (highly recommended): We could even go further and reduce the surrounding environmental sounds while we focus-listen on any channel. This is still realistic, as this would also happen in the real world if you covered your ears with your hands and the radio. The benefit of this would be to reduce surrounding noices like machine gun fire and therefore being able to hear what is being said on the radio even in noisy situations. A really useful feature. If we want to be hyper realistic, reducing environmental noises only works when focus-listening to radio channels and not local voice chat as you can hold shut one ear to cancel out the environmental sounds while you press the radio close to your other ear, but you can't do that in any form when listening to local voices next to you with your open ears. 2. Optional feature "close both ears/gun&hand-free vision" (nice-to-have): And for the fun (and realism of it), we can also assign a new button that represents holding shut both your ears with both your hands, i.e. all sounds are slightly muted. If we want to go even further, add animations that have the gun and your hands disappear from view when we do this. Additional benefit: this feature would help taking scenic screenshots without a gun and hands in the way - NICE! I admit, it's a silly idea as muting all sounds in general does not really serve a useful purpose (if you want that, you just turn down your computer/headset speakers) but having a gun/hand-free vision would be really useful to take screenshots. Therefore, completely independent of my suggestion here, we could assign a new key to select no equipment/weapon (for example key 0 (zero) or any other key; it could also just be a console command). This will just remove the hands and weapons/equipment entirely from the screen. Just an idea. I may bring this up in a new suggestions thread some time in the future. 3. Optional feature "use both hands" (not recommended): For hard-core realism, when using focus-listening, force players to let go of the mouse and use both hands on the keyboard to simulate that they would not have a free hand to fire a gun while focus-listening to the radio as both hands are needed to do this. Possible keyboard shortcuts to achieve this: hold down three keys far across from each other on the keyboard, for example Left-Shift + Right-Shift + channel key. This is just taking the original idea further, but in my opinion too far. This would make using the focus-listen feature too annoying and would compromise its practical use ingame. I thought I just mention the idea here to show that taking an idea too far turns it into something counterproductive. Why do we need this feature: We all know that it's hard to follow ANY conversation when you are overwhelmed by simulatenous conversation on multiple channels. This is particularly difficult for Squad Leaders who have to speak on three channels. Yes, as Squad Leader you can tell your guys on the Squad radio to shut up and ask the other Squad Leader to repeat his statement, but often it's annoying and often people won't listen. Yes, the real world is also messy and noisy and you have to deal with it. But in the real world you also have your hands which you can use to cover your ears and you don't listen to multiple channels at the same time. Adding focus-listening to the game would make listening much easier while still being realistic. The control scheme I propose is simple and intuitive. It will not make things more complicated. It will add another level of realism to the game and is just plain practical. I consider this feature as important because it will help communication in Squad - and communication is THE key feature of Squad. Lets make communciation as good and effective as possible. Focus-listening is a small but powerful and useful feature to help with this. Give my post a "Like" if you want to see this feature implemented. The guy in picture below says loud and clearly: "We NEED this feature, ASAP!" What speaks against this feature: Nothing I can think of. I just don't know if it can be easily implemented with Mumble or not. (Image Source: Copyright Steve R., direct link, more amazing picture by Steve here)