I usually give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt, but considering how theyâve ignored all the player complaints about this major issue over the past months, and how theyâve once again moved this thread back into the bug forums to die and locked my original post so I canât move it back to General Discussion to get more eyes on the problem, well at this point Iâm leaning towards this being a cover-up. It looks like they donât want people talking about this or spreading awareness of such a major issue affecting the playerbase.
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I and many players have been talking about the âno footsteps audioâ issue, particularly with regards to Reaper. Iâve personally experienced it against McCree, Mei, Brigitte and other characters. Itâs insanely problematic to have an extremely dangerous CQC character get right next to you and not know it until itâs already too late, it doesnât give players a chance at counterplay.
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Itâs just as bad with Pharah cause suddenly you get justice rained on you from behind by a flanking Pharah. Iâm coming from 1,500+ hours in Team Fortress 2 because of Spies Iâm always paranoid and listening/looking for flankers. But this audio bug is just letting enemies walk/fly behind me without a sound.
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Flankers have a really easy time flanking when they have zero footstep sounds. =p
But Iâve also been flanked by reinhardts with no sound effects so eh.
Some voicelines in Lootbox donât work, reaper has 0 footsteps sound, healthpacks donât make the noise when you take them. Bumping this thread so we can get an answer
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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 havenât heard Reaperâs 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 wonât hear a thingâŚ
Also a new sound bug has appeared quite recently where Iâll say a voice line in spawn and itâll sometimes sound like itâs someone else saying it a thousand miles away, itâs so muted and distant sounding.
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Exactly, itâs 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 heâs already within flashbang killing range. Itâs a major issue thatâs happening way too often in the game nowadays.
That new sound bug sounds strange, I havenât encountered it myself but I have heard of people having issues where theyâll suddenly hear enemy commâs (e.g. theyâll hear a Hanzo request healing when there isnât a Hanzo on their team, but the enemy has one). Some people were also saying that some spawn voice interactions werenât playing properly, specifically between Pharah and Mercy, I wonder if it might be related? 
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Thatâs been happening to me too, weird things with certain ult announcements whether itâs on your team or the enemyâs. The last few times it happened my capture storage was full and I couldnât clip it, but if it happens again anytime soon Iâll 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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Itâs nice to know theyâre somewhat conscious of the issue, but they donât realize just how widespread and problematic the issue is. This isnât happening on just âsome machinesâ, this is happening to many players across platforms. If the PS4 (which Iâm playing on when experiencing these issues) is too underpowered to handle the âintensive fightsâ that cause the memory losses that result in these audio drops, then that holds true for every other PS4 player in the world. 
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, itâs not currently listed as a known issue. Either they didnât list it because theyâre still looking at it on the side, or they erroneously believe theyâve already addressed/fixed the issue when the problem still persists. They also seem to be under the impression itâs 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 theyâve 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 theyâre under the mistaken impression that the issue is resolved, they need to know that itâs 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 itâs feeling REALLY stupid
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As of yesterday I have no audio whatsoever on Overwatch PC. Itâs 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
Iâve been noticing sound issues since the last couple of patches, Iâm not totally sure if it was the D.Va challenge or the Summer Games patch but. Up to then Iâd had some few and far between bugs that I was happy to put down to my internet being a little slow but now, Iâm noticing things like the sound of Mercyâs heal beam cutting out. So far Iâve had nothing game breaking or even especially major, Iâve not noticed many missed ultimates or anything, but the slew of thread Iâve seen recently complaining of the sound issues says itâs 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, completelyâŚ
https ://twitter. com/hajima_7/status/1021762100643938304
[remove the spaces, still not lvl3 sry]
of course i didnât get any response, not that i expected it since iâm sure they get a lot of notifications but, when people talk about that in forums, they could at least check it outâŚ
since then, it hasn;t been as bad, but, sounds have been missing here and there, idk whatâs 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: âI heard it was your birthday old man, so I went easy on you.â ~ 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 donât 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 youâre playing against at times, as for example Widowmakerâs 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 everyoneâs mic every damn game because of it.
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Yes, this is yet another major audio issue plaguing the game, thereâs a thread about it but unfortunately Blizzard hasnât done anything about it yet either, if you like you can share you experience with this mic/chat problem here: