[MEGATHREAD] Can You Hear the Audio Issues? I Bet You Can! šŸ”‡

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

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

since then, it hasn;t been as bad, but, sounds have been missing here and there, idk whatā€™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: ā€œI heard it was your birthday old man, so I went easy on you.ā€ ~ 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 donā€™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 youā€™re playing against at times, as for example Widowmakerā€™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 everyoneā€™s mic every damn game because of it.

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Yes, this is yet another major audio issue plaguing the game, thereā€™s a thread about it but unfortunately Blizzard hasnā€™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 canā€™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 ā€œno healthpacks sound effectā€ glitch:

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I play on PC and Iā€™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 Iā€™ve switched them since and Iā€™ve never had this issue with any other game or video or anything of the sort. Itā€™s really annoying and Iā€™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 issuesā€¦ sometimes canā€™t hear some ults like mccree, footsteps, heal pack tooā€¦ pls fix blizzardā€¦ thanks!

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Just wanted to give some records of stuff happening - Hereā€™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 ā€œDraw!ā€ 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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So itā€™s not just me. The other day a Reaper teleported right next to me and I didnā€™t hear anything. I thought I just didnā€™t pay attention because the kill cam had his voice line and sounds during the teleport.

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Thank you for bringing light to this issue. Getting ulted by a Genji or a Mei with no vocal cues often has me feeling cheated.

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Thank you for sharing your experience, itā€™s much appreciated. It looks like the problems with the missing ult voices lines extends to more heroes than I realized (Iā€™ve only had it happen with Hanzo and McCree so far), good information to have.

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Many people like yourself have experienced the ā€œno footstepsā€ Reaper issue, hereā€™s one such video of the problem:

In the killcam he even says ā€œHi!ā€ from point blank behind Widow before killing her, and you donā€™t even hear it. :unamused:

Itā€™s funny because in their original GDC video the Overwatch sound designers stated specifically that Reapers flank killing out of nowhere was a huge problem and that they designed the sound system specifically to address the issueā€¦ Guess somethingā€™s gone wrong in the system. :expressionless:

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Thanks so much for sharing your videos! How strange, so the audio is lost in-game but when replayed in highlight the sound FX come back, how bizarre. I have level 3 so Iā€™ll repost these so itā€™s easier for others to playback:

In Game (Missing Audio)

In Highlight (Audio Restored)

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For a while Iā€™ve been playing Mcree a lot and when Iā€™m in the training room with the bots the head shot sound sometime happens sometimes you only see the mark that indicated that you hit the target but not sound cue whatsoever. Is the same when collecting health packs and in game is almost a nightmare because you barely hear enemies approaching before you can react and that is the best case when you do.

Iā€™ve uninstall and reinstalled every software and follow all the troubleshoot info giving by blizzard

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I am having same problem too. I can not hear hit sounds sometimes on pc. Especially when playing Winston.

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Someone in General Discussion just made a thread about the audio cutoff issues theyā€™re experiencing:

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