The Overwatch 2 development team at Blizzard recently revealed the details of their new communication ping system that has already seen mixed reviews.
The Overwatch 2 PVP private beta has been underway, with the public beta coming next month, and Blizzard released full details on their new ping system last week on Thursday, March 24. The call for a ping system or communication solution has been long-awaited since Overwatch; however, fans have pointed out it may be overpowered for specific heroes. The developers have also sent their responses and recognized the development of this new system is still a work in progress and implore the community to provide more feedback.
The Systems Designer at Blizzard, Gavin Winter, commented on the draft of the ping system, “One of our goals was to augment speech and give people a way to visually interpret voice communication. We also wanted to support all voices and create a system to communicate for players that would prefer to avoid voice chat.”
The button to open the ping wheel was unclear, but it was shown to look like most other competitive FPS ping wheels in games like Valorant or Apex Legends. The report stated that the ping system would also help with improving the accuracy of callouts being made. The Principal Designer, Adam Puhl explained, “It’s a more accurate, clear, and understandable way of communicating rather than hearing someone yell, ‘Reaper behind,’ or, ‘Reaper, Reaper, Reaper!’”
Multiple community members’ concerns had pointed out that Sombra would be the number one hero to benefit from the new communication system as she has the ability to go invisible while moving around the map. This was already an advantage she had for getting intel on the enemies’ locations through voice chat. As a counterpoint to the argument, it was noted that there are many Sombra players who have not used voice chat, so having the ping system would help fill in.
The Blizzard Community Manager, Jodie, brought this specific concern to Winter and Puhl as well as the issue with only being able to ping one enemy’s position at a time—especially as this would nerf Sombra. This would be a disadvantage for a non-voice chat user versus a voice chat user because someone could relay multiple enemies’ positions by talking and explaining it. Non-voice chat players would only be able to communicate one enemy’s position at a time.
She passed on the response from the Blizzard devs, “We’ve already made a few changes to ping with regards to Sombra because of feedback from the Alpha, and I have some other ideas in mind if Sombra+Ping feels oppressive.” Winter stressed in the details of the ping system that the system would also “help with the toxicity in-game”, so that way players do not have to face verbal abuse in voice chat. Winter also revealed that there would be an option to turn off another player’s pings from their own POV if they were ping spamming.
