An inside look at the ping system in Overwatch 2

Is Overwatch 2 also introducing the highly requested hero balancing system too?

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And thats actually a good thing because they didnt add a whole new system to further clutter the gaming experience.

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Wow! You really are making nice decisions now!

Awesome, the ping system is very useful and a lot of games could use it.

Nicely done, Overwatch team! :purple_heart:

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Finally! Now calling out the solo dive players wont be hard right now.

Looking good, will make it a lot easier for teams to organize themselves.

Their initial concerns at the time was the amount of spam a ping system could have. Here is the original quote.

Right now there is no recent hints that a mini-map will ever be a thing in Overwatch.

Source: Overwatch Forums Developer Post Archives

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but sombra can already do that to an extent. The difference it’s easier without having to rely on everyone on the team having a good mental map or knowledge of the locations you’re mentioning (especially when many locations in ow are user created terms not everyone knows.

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Same. I turned off my microphone and in-game voice chat off a long time ago. There’s too many people who will become toxic and become the worst types of people over the microphone. I also almost never got any good advice or feedback with voice on. It almost always affected my performance the moment the team got toxic. Glad I can at least ping where an enemy is, that’s the most important part of communication.

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See I think this is fair but slightly misses the point. Even when I have games where literally my entire team is using comms sometimes it’s hard to describe where someone is. I know at the very high end of the ranks especially there are many terms to describe areas and almost all the players know what they are because they play with the same small number of people. But also some people just don’t want to talk like you said. You see it at every rank.

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Ping systems are rather new to games. We’ve had slight early variations of it before in games like Left 4 Dead, but beyond that they pretty much only popped up around 2018/2019 with Deep Rock Galactic and Apex to my knowledge.

Apex had one of the best ping systems for competitive multiplayer games - however it’s implementation only works as smoothly as it does because Apex can have at most 3 players on a team, meaning UI clutter can be kept to a minimum even if there is spam, and deaths are semi-permanent, unlike in OW where you technically have the leeway to goof off with lighter punishment.

This actually sounds pretty cool.

You’re just like…never happy with anything, are ya?

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This is awesome. In a game that requires so much communication, having randoms in voice is just going to be inevitably toxic. However, if you change the way players communicate with each in-game, you can minimize a lot of that negative behavior.

Then, on top of all that, contextual pings are just so freaking helpful. When there’s a Reaper behind me, sometimes the words that come out of my mouth are jibberish bc I’m so stressed. Now, I can just point him out while screaming :slight_smile:

Anyone else notice that they were wearing overwatch 1 skins :face_with_monocle::thinking:

they have been in the ghost recon games for quite sometime now, since early 2000s. they were co op pve games

they didnt seem to pop up in pvp shooters until more recently though

Hi, everyone!! I have been working with Gavin Winter and Adam Puhl to respond to some of the concerns brought up in this thread!

Thanks for looking out for potential issues with the ping system! We agree that Sombra is the hero most affected by this system, and we knew this was always going to be true if we decided to build Ping. She’s the main reason for a lot of the nuance in the Ping System.

Here’s an example:
If a player on your team pings an enemy hero that is not in your Line of Sight, we place a stationary ping with a question mark on it that will never update its position.
Obviously spamming ping as frequently as you can on an enemy hero will still happen. This would place those stationary pings as often as possible, but even if we didn’t automatically place these pings, Sombra could simply ping nearby them instead to convey the same data in a slightly less user-friendly way.

Each player can only place one ping in the world at a time. If they place a new one, their previous one is immediately deleted. This means Sombra can only track one enemy for her team with any degree of accuracy, even if she’s spamming. It also means our overall clutter on screen is reduced tremendously.

Sombra can already effectively track one enemy’s position now by informing their team that “the Widowmaker is always directly in front of me”, because of how we show silhouettes through surfaces. I’ve talked to some high level players that do this in Overwatch now (and I was so silly that I thought I was the only person that did this!), although this requires voice or text chat in the live game.

Ping empowers our players in new ways and will affect some heroes more than others, so we’re ready to make more changes if ping feels overpowered when used by some heroes. We’ve already made a few changes to ping with regards to Sombra because of feedback from the Alpha, and I have some other ideas in mind if Sombra+Ping feels oppressive.

Having said all that, we do want a Sombra player that isn’t using voice chat to have some of the power a Sombra player using voice chat has. This hero has always been the most enabled by good communication and another goal of ours with ping was try to level the playing field for players that don’t want to be in voice chat.

Hearing this feedback now is great because it confirms that our concerns weren’t misplaced. We can’t wait for the Beta when more of you will get to test this system in action!

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It was sarcasm. After 6 years of gameplay it is not even necessary anymore.
Same thing with the ping system. Too little too late.

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Awesome. Thanks for the update - I think the biggest thing this article was missing was what the ping looks like from the perspective of your teammates, so this helps a lot.

I will say though, if Sombra ends up needing to be tweaked, I think changing how she can interact with the ping system would be a pretty cool way to buff her in other areas without having to change her damage or health numbers.

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I’m aware they were in some Co-Op games, that’s why I mention L4D. I just wasn’t certain exactly what games featured them because I haven’t played most of those games since, well, the early 2000s. I also haven’t played any Ghost Recon aside from Future Soldier- but I do recall at least Rainbow Six Vegas having a ping system through the cameras I believe.

The difference with Co-Op PvE games having ping systems though was the fact that balancing isn’t really an issue - the AI doesn’t really care if you can see them through walls and such, after all. Also, online matchmaking wasn’t as popular as it is today, so more often than not you were playing Co-Op with people you actually knew, so trolling didn’t need to be dealt with by the developers.

I like the increased communication, but I’d like it even more if there were videos or even slowly rolling back the NDA (allowing talk of officially revealed content only) as you reveal stuff so that you could control the rollout but still hear more of the ins and outs of the revealed content in a action.

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