[MEGATHREAD] Can You Hear the Audio Issues? I Bet You Can! 🔇

Thanks for sharing your experience! Hopefully we can keep up the momentum and get Blizzard to look into this soon.

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Missing audio on ultimate voice lines is very prominent for me. Last time I played, my only indication that our hanzo cast a spawn dragon was when it passed right through me on my way back from spawn. LOL

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I haven’t heard Reaper’s footsteps at all in ages, and sometimes (but not all that often) ult voicelines seem to go missing. The missing footsteps are a huge and consistent problem because a Reaper can just run up behind me and shoot me in the head and I won’t hear a thing…

Also a new sound bug has appeared quite recently where I’ll say a voice line in spawn and it’ll sometimes sound like it’s someone else saying it a thousand miles away, it’s so muted and distant sounding.

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Exactly, it’s like the enemies who are the most dangerous at close quarters are also the hardest to hear, which makes absolutely no sense. I find it strange that I can hear a Widowmaker walking down say a Petra corridor and not have any difficulty reacting at all, but if a McCree emerges from the same direction I have no idea until he’s already within flashbang killing range. It’s a major issue that’s happening way too often in the game nowadays.

That new sound bug sounds strange, I haven’t encountered it myself but I have heard of people having issues where they’ll suddenly hear enemy comm’s (e.g. they’ll hear a Hanzo request healing when there isn’t a Hanzo on their team, but the enemy has one). Some people were also saying that some spawn voice interactions weren’t playing properly, specifically between Pharah and Mercy, I wonder if it might be related? :thinking:

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That’s been happening to me too, weird things with certain ult announcements whether it’s on your team or the enemy’s. The last few times it happened my capture storage was full and I couldn’t clip it, but if it happens again anytime soon I’ll try to get it onto this thread.

This issue has had an official Blizzard response from Tom Powers, Community Manager, and is being worked on:

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It’s nice to know they’re somewhat conscious of the issue, but they don’t realize just how widespread and problematic the issue is. This isn’t happening on just “some machines”, this is happening to many players across platforms. If the PS4 (which I’m playing on when experiencing these issues) is too underpowered to handle the “intensive fights” that cause the memory losses that result in these audio drops, then that holds true for every other PS4 player in the world. :sweat: And this is known to be happening to players on laptops and on PCs as well, which also presents a huge segment of the playing population.

And he posted about this a month ago, as a random thread comment, it’s not currently listed as a known issue. Either they didn’t list it because they’re still looking at it on the side, or they erroneously believe they’ve already addressed/fixed the issue when the problem still persists. They also seem to be under the impression it’s related to a specific patch contemporaneous to that comments posting, when in reality people have been experiencing these bizarre sound issues for months. That much is evinced from the compiled list of threads raising this issue in my second comment in this thread, some stretch back as far as March (with some players commenting they’ve been experiencing this issue even earlier, as far back as Christmas).

This issue needs to be raised to a much higher priority, pronto, before it really gets out of hand. If they’re under the mistaken impression that the issue is resolved, they need to know that it’s still there and causing major problems, as corroborated by the many players in this thread alone.

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Games so buggy lately. With these audio bugs and getting thrown through the map geometry 10x a game it’s feeling REALLY stupid

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As of yesterday I have no audio whatsoever on Overwatch PC. It’s like its not detecting my usb razer headset anymore yet whenever i use the PTR i hear audio just fine. The game is truly unplayable because i have NO audio

I’ve been noticing sound issues since the last couple of patches, I’m not totally sure if it was the D.Va challenge or the Summer Games patch but. Up to then I’d had some few and far between bugs that I was happy to put down to my internet being a little slow but now, I’m noticing things like the sound of Mercy’s heal beam cutting out. So far I’ve had nothing game breaking or even especially major, I’ve not noticed many missed ultimates or anything, but the slew of thread I’ve seen recently complaining of the sound issues says it’s not a problem on my end. It does need fixing, sound is very important.

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this is from July, but , I had my sound randomly go mute like, completely…

https ://twitter. com/hajima_7/status/1021762100643938304
[remove the spaces, still not lvl3 sry]
of course i didn’t get any response, not that i expected it since i’m sure they get a lot of notifications but, when people talk about that in forums, they could at least check it out…

since then, it hasn;t been as bad, but, sounds have been missing here and there, idk what’s going on.

I would like to add my own two cents:

  • Pressing the voice line key will not produce a voice line
  • Pressing the voice line continiously will not produce a voice line until the voice line wheel is silently disabled
  • When the shadowban of the voice line wheel is done, one voice line can be used if it was the one being previously selected
  • Pressing the voice line continuously after this will not produce a voice line until the voice wheel is disabled again with an announced cooldown
    But note at any time if you are killed and see yourself in a kill feed you will hear yourself spamming voice lines. Similar glitches happen with the Ult Status hotkey and Group Up hotkey. They, seemingly randomly, will be audible by my character or have a notification in the chatbox, hardly both anymore. A problem I have never seen in this game until a few months ago.

I am also not hearing many point capture sound effects. All this seemed to start when the voice interactions in spawn mysteriously fixed themselves, eg:
Zarya: “I heard it was your birthday old man, so I went easy on you.” ~ Used to be a line I only heard in spawn by itself, now Rein replies.

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Thanks for sharing your experience, how noticeable or severe the sound issues are seems to vary from person to person especially depending on who they play. For me I had no idea that heal request voicelines were cutting out because I don’t play healer very often in team based modes. However, the footsteps being dropped were very noticeable for me since I play a lot of deathmatch where hearing those sounds regularly means the difference between victory and defeat.

Strangely it also seems to depend on who you’re playing against at times, as for example Widowmaker’s footsteps are almost always easy to hear while other heroes like Mei, Reaper or McCree are often absurdly quiet. It also seems to depend on whether or not other specific sounds are playing (i.e., if someone just ulted), as it seems that the system gets overwhelmed/confused and temporarily messes up the audio priorities causing otherwise important sounds you would normally hear easily suddenly arbitrarily quiet.

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anyone who gets on mic sounds like a distorted loud mess on PS4. I have to mute everyone’s mic every damn game because of it.

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Yes, this is yet another major audio issue plaguing the game, there’s a thread about it but unfortunately Blizzard hasn’t done anything about it yet either, if you like you can share you experience with this mic/chat problem here:

Well unfortunately my initial post has been locked so I can’t edit it to post anymore videos of the problems, but after having avoided the game for a week I went back last night to at least get my weekly arcade lootboxes when I finally experienced the “no healthpacks sound effect” glitch:

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I play on PC and I’ve had to deal with the majority of these audio bugs. The ones I encoutered today were the silent voice lines in game, silent footsteps and the silent healthpacks.

I also have had another audio issue since Summer Games 2017, the audio will cut out every now and then. This issue is not because of my headphones/headset since I’ve switched them since and I’ve never had this issue with any other game or video or anything of the sort. It’s really annoying and I’ve tried everything, re-installing the game, repairing the game, resetting the settings, disabling all other playback devices, etc.

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Thanks so much for sharing, the more the better. If you experience these problems again and can get a recording be sure to post here, it helps to keep this issue bumped and provide the devs more information to work with.

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having same issues… sometimes can’t hear some ults like mccree, footsteps, heal pack too… pls fix blizzard… thanks!

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Just wanted to give some records of stuff happening - Here’s some links to vids of me and team wiping to a highnoon ult from behind. I play with full voice volumes just for these situations to be able to react accordingly.

Luckily this was just a QP game (and hey we won anyway), but this kinda needs fixing.

Interesting facts:
When turning in-game voice volume to 100 and the rest to 0 from voice options, you can hear every other ult voice line play (ana, reaper, gengu, mercy), but not even a whistle from mcree (just a “Draw!” at the end).
If you play with only sound effects volume at 100 and the other two at 0, you hear the whistle and all the gunshots etc.

Actual gameplay experience

Sounds according to Highlight save mechanic

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