I disagree, we have the understood, need healing, and voice lines. Why not this?
I never use the command wheel (UI), I use single and double click of the mouse wheel.
It would be insanely useful for scouting and planning pushes. Saying “Push left side” sometimes doesn’t always work because half of the people ignore voice or aren’t in it, just like calling out targets doesn’t work. But you know what does get people to focus targets? discord orb, it’s a visual thing. You know what would coordinate pushes? A ping on a doorway or a “enemy here” on an out of position character.
I think it would be a bit annoying with 6 people but it would be worth a shot experimenting with it internally.
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I don’t think a copy paste of the Apex ping system would be very good for OW but I think being able to place a 3 dimensional pointer into the game world could be quite valuable.
In OW they could make it so that you only have one ping that places down your character portrait, that way people on the mic could communicate a location by saying something like:
‘Over by the ana ping, we have a Reaper flank.’
Anything more complicated than that would likely make the experience worse by cluttering the screen.
Honestly the robust sound system and close proximity combat makes up quite a bit for the lack of a ping system but I would be lying if I didn’t admit after coming back to OW from playing some Apex I’ve been trying to ping locations to point out a threat 
3 Likes
Crap! That’s a good point.
Been in rainbow for 4 years now, but yes a ping marker would be nice, shame it got removed because people would spam the objective ping.
While it’s amazing in Apex, I think it would be horrible in Overwatch.
You’re in a team of 6, that is on a very small map. The other team is pretty much always infront of you aisde from flankers. And so you just have a screen full of makers of things you can very clearly see. And probably can’t even see that we’ll after all those markers.
Even for pointing out snipers it’s not need, if you die you now know where they are. And your whole team probably does. In Apex it can be hard to see people because of how far away they are, and if you get killed then it’s game over.
I should have read the comments first, they all say the same thing.
1 Like
Respawn did such a good job with the Ping System in Apex Legends. It works really well.
Back in early development of Overwatch, we actually had a very similar ping system. Ours was inspired from MOBA’s like League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm.
We eventually removed it because of a few issues.
- With 6 people on the team, it got very spammy if more than a few people were using it
- The geography of Overwatch maps as well as the engagement distances is fairly constrained. This made pinging upwards challenging and often frustrating. An example is standing at the gate of point A of Temple of Anubis and trying to ping the upper ledge above the gate entering point B. Our engagement distances tend to be in the 10-30 meter range (for perspective it’s about 45 meters all the way across the entire dojo in Hanamura B). In Apex, you have very long engagement distances and very big maps… it makes it easier to ping below you
It would be fun to revisit the system and see if we could make something like that workable. We do have some designs for improvements and customization to the communication wheel that we’re trying to get in. But we’re always appreciative of feedback and suggestions.
236 Likes
we dont need the ping system… overwatch is faster than apex, you ping a tracer and she is already gone. it will cause more confusion than doing good.
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exactly. I mean, when exactly would you ever need to ping something other than to annoy your teammates? people usually push through the choke as a group or stand on the objective - there really isn’t much of a reason for it. (unlike a battle royale of course)
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I think this would be super cool, apex did a great job with it, even BioWare is thinking of adding it to anthem👌
They could tweak it for overwatch.
Add cooldowns to the ping system at least 15 secs to avoid people spam that. Same with emotes and voice-lines some people are REALLy SPAMY lol
Can we introduce a shotcaller system where one teammate gets voted at the beginning to be the shot caller and he has the option to mark enemies, so everyone knows who to target?
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Help.
Command.
Please.
I beg you.
The auto help call supports have does nothing to help supports.
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Why not make it a support-class-only feature?
Lucio, Mercy, and Zen seem like they could benefit the most from a pinging feature – Lucio and Mercy are typically more vertical the more skilled they are, and Zen’s Discord already functions similarly to a enemy ping/mark…
Ana could benefit too, if she slept a flanker.
ping in OW is not needed…maps are small and predictable and action is constant.No spotting needed in this game.
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I want you to know that I LOVE how you have been replying on the forums with cool and useful stuff lately. It’s really wonderful, I have never felt so… listened to in Overwatch before, and that is a really good step forward. There’s still a lot of things that we want answers for, but this will be for later I guess. Keep up the good work, and thank you
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You’ve mentioned it before that everyone’s grown as players and they’re a lot smarter. If you ping the wall up there on the choke to point B, it’s pretty common knowledge these days where someone’s going to be standing based on the character. If you ping it and say reaper, they know he’s hiding on the circular pillar. If you ping and say hanzo, they know he’s probably ontop of the archway, ya know? I would expect that to be an issue for new players, but seasoned players should (and usually do) know exactly where people are likely to be hiding, they just need to be alerted to the general location.
One thing I was wondering about was what did your pings look like? I know a lot of people just outright turn off objective markers these days cause they’re sight blockers. I feel like pings from 6 players could get out of hand if they aren’t small, and if they’re small, they might get lost in all of the visual spam.
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Yea this was my thought.
In any Battle Royals game, a good shot can start picking people off over a kilometer away because maps are just so open. In this game, as you said, it’s rare to even see 50 meters without anything breaking your LoS.
Not to mention maps are fairly linear in design. Sure, you have flank routes, but you typically always know enemy and objective are forward, team is back. Compared to a game like Apex, where the enemy can engage from any direction as there is no set pathing and directional pings become much more usable there than here.
Applying a spam-Enforcer cool down like voice line spamming would go a long way where.
Improved non-voice communications would help a lot of able-gamers to engage with team mates better.
Making the ping similar to sprays with a longer range - a wheel of options where you target an area and have different defined markers:
Attack / Defend Objective
Enemy here
Follow This Way
Key target
Enemy Ulting
Are just a few to start
2 Likes