First, I feel like this needs to be said in advance, this post is not applicable to all you auto squelch lobbyist. This is for those who actually enjoy using emotes along with when their opponent uses them.
I am one who enjoys using emotes. I personally like to say hello to my opponent, and I also use the “well played” emote after the match ends regardless of who won. While some of you may argue that using emotes is bad manners, I for one, view it as good sportsmanship.
With that being said, I feel that Blizzard could do a better job when it comes to emotes for portrait skins. For one, they don’t give us the ability to preview the voice lines in the shop when deciding to purchase a skin. The only exception to this was the very expensive skins for Death Knight and Hunter. They provided emote previews for those, so regular portraits should be no different and allow players to preview them.
There are many skins that I like, unfortunately, many of the voice lines that are included with the emotes are pretty terrible. I find that some of the voice lines themselves come across as BM. For example Magistars Dawngrasp legedary’s well played emote is “Wonderful, Just wonderful”. When I win the match, I feel it would be better to have ability to say “Well Played” rather than something that I feel comes across as condescending, because it’s not wonderful that your opponent lost. So that leads me to my next suggestion.
I think it would be great if we had the ability to select different voice lines for different emotes for skins. Just like in Overwatch and Battlegrounds, how one can change the voice lines for their hero’s, and in battlegrounds, the same thing where you change your emotes, (granted bg’s don’t offer vocal voice lines)
I’ve noticed that depending on what skin I have on, my opponent will respond differently when I use them. For example, when saying hello with the new Mal’Gains skin, barely anyone will say hello back when I say hello at the start. My opponent will generally emote their threatening voice line at the end if they win, and won’t if they lose.
However, when using the 1000 win Jana skin, she say’s Hello, and most of the time my opponents will say hello back.
I just think this would be a great quality of life feature that provides more customization for players and could encourage people to use the emotes more and possibly view them as fun as opposed to some who feel like they are simply BM.