I’ve seen footage, the game looks like fun, playing is ‘fun’…but man I absolutely despise battle royal games. It gives me virtual fever. But there’s one mechanic I wish OW would have… well at least console OW, I don’t know if it’s a feature already existing on PC.
I’ll feel dumb if it actually exists but I never found it before. The feature? Ping. Man I would love to be able to ping that 10hp Zen who’s about to get to cover and get his shield points back etc. It would help so much in trying to get people to play together even if they don’t join voice chat.
Put a CD on it obviously which increases if you spam it, just like voicelines. For console, allow us to put the command on an already used button becaude our buttons are already super limited.
I like the idea of ping because of how many people don’t use voice come, but we have communication buttons too. Maybe they can just be repurposed. Plus, if everyone saw what you were pinging then Overwatch would have way too much visual pollution. Have you tried to explain what’s happening to a non player during a team fight? It’s just colors and chaos to them.
Pinging in Apex Legends was playtested with everyone muted and only using pings in order to get it right. They designed the game so that it was fun also playing solo with no mics. It’s great. The solo-queue experience in AL is so good, especially for a BR game; the fact that it’s so good for a BR game is amazing.
Now that I think about it Overwatch really does need a ping mechanic, it’s such a team based game, much more so than Apex and it works absolutely fantastically there.
I have to agree with this, while I haven’t played Apex Legends (horrible name), and don’t care for BR games in general, this one I might look into. The original point, ping makes a heck of a lot of sense for OW…
…and given they’ve announced via IG that they’ve hit/surpassed 10M users in 3 days (with 1M concurrent users), you’d think OW would take an idea or two from them…
The pinging system in Apex Legends is pretty good. Overwatch might be a little too hectic for it to function as well, but it’s not a bad idea. Much like Apex Legends has auto callouts similar overwatch’s.
Other first person games that have used similar ping or callout systems in the past include Portal 2’s co-op, and Evolve.
Another idea that is nice os that AL gives everybody the chance to take the lead: where to land, first, second picks etc.
I think that could also be beneficial to OW. In order to avoid getting a cluster of info, you get one ‘teamleader’ randomly appointed (at first) whose pings will flash, similar to objectives. If the team is happy with his callouts, give him a new shotcaller endotsement which would actually mean something. Players that keep getting this new shotcaller title would get more and more often the teamleader role and actually be someone a team will be able to trust at some point depending on his decoration.
That way you can give an actual value to endorsements, not have a big cluster of pings and make it work… kinda. Of course other players could still ping but less frequently. It would never replace voicechat but it would still be a better alternative to spamming ‘group up’ and have nobody even listen or even notice the call.
You would replace the wheel with the pings and have a group up, defend/protect and attack ping. The attack can be a signal to go on the objective, or attack/focus a target which would get flagged similar to zen’s discord. Defend protect could be a turret, choke, objective or teammate that needs peels. And group up could be again with a teammate standing somehwere or a specific spot or with the leader.
That would keep it simple without having too much to remember and stick to essentials. There would certainly still be flaws as usual… but that’s just because we’re humans and we’re the ones ruining the game in the end.
![:wink:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")