#1 - March 24, 2022, 6:03 p.m.
Overwatch 2 is introducing the highly requested ping system to the game!
An inside look at the ping system in Overwatch 2
#63 - March 24, 2022, 9 p.m.
Hi, everyone!! I have been working with Gavin Winter and Adam Puhl to respond to some of the concerns brought up in this thread!
Thanks for looking out for potential issues with the ping system! We agree that Sombra is the hero most affected by this system, and we knew this was always going to be true if we decided to build Ping. She’s the main reason for a lot of the nuance in the Ping System.
Here’s an example:
If a player on your team pings an enemy hero that is not in your Line of Sight, we place a stationary ping with a question mark on it that will never update its position.
Obviously spamming ping as frequently as you can on an enemy hero will still happen. This would place those stationary pings as often as possible, but even if we didn’t automatically place these pings, Sombra could simply ping nearby them instead to convey the same data in a slightly less user-friendly way.
Each player can only place one ping in the world at a time. If they place a new one, their previous one is immediately deleted. This means Sombra can only track one enemy for her team with any degree of accuracy, even if she’s spamming. It also means our overall clutter on screen is reduced tremendously.
Sombra can already effectively track one enemy’s position now by informing their team that “the Widowmaker is always directly in front of me”, because of how we show silhouettes through surfaces. I’ve talked to some high level players that do this in Overwatch now (and I was so silly that I thought I was the only person that did this!), although this requires voice or text chat in the live game.
Ping empowers our players in new ways and will affect some heroes more than others, so we’re ready to make more changes if ping feels overpowered when used by some heroes. 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.
Having said all that, we do want a Sombra player that isn’t using voice chat to have some of the power a Sombra player using voice chat has. This hero has always been the most enabled by good communication and another goal of ours with ping was try to level the playing field for players that don’t want to be in voice chat.
Hearing this feedback now is great because it confirms that our concerns weren’t misplaced. We can’t wait for the Beta when more of you will get to test this system in action!
#75 - March 24, 2022, 11:34 p.m.
First, thank you so much for this incredibly illustration. I appreciate your work.
Second, the answer is the latter of your two scenarios. The ping detaches where their yellow X is for player 2.