- Overwatch 2’s ping system has often been a source of complaints
- Players have reported important prompts not being announced accurately
- A Blizzard employee said the devs are working on this issue currently
Overwatch 2’s inaccurate ping system is going to be fixed in the mid-seasonal update, a spokesperson said, but players can currently tweak some settings as a temporary workaround.
Players Complain About the Ping System
Team-focused multiplayer games need some kind of a ping system, but the one of Overwatch 2 has been under scrutiny by fans for quite some time. Players have often had difficulties with properly using important prompts like “Group Up” and “Need Healing”. Fortunately, it seems that Blizzard will finally be addressing the issues.
Ironically, the news comes from the comments of a Reddit post complaining about the broken pinging system. The OP highlighted the “Group Up” and “Need Healing” pings, however, several players have also reported facing trouble with the “Fall Back” prompt. The Overwatch 2 community has been reporting instances for a long time where the game’s ping system out the wrong message, despite players using the right prompt.
The post quickly gained a lot of attention, with players complaining about the issue. Some even had trouble pinging the objective or a location on the map, with the system often announcing a completely unrelated message like “Come to me for healing,” forcing a countdown, or a respawn time.
Blizzard Responds
All of these complaints prompted a Blizzard employee to comment on the original post, saying that the company will soon address these issues. “Hey all, in the mid-season patch we're adding a new setting that will control whether contextual pings for Group Up and Need Healing would be used when aiming at an allied hero. The default will be “Off”,” the Blizzard spokesperson going by the username blizz_winter wrote under the post.
In addition to that, the Blizzard spokesperson also told players a tip on how to reduce instances of inaccurate contextual pings by increasing the value of the Ping Wheel Press Delay. “With regards to general concerns about Ping – In World placing the wrong pings from the wheel, I suspect these are mostly commonly cases where the default setting of Ping Wheel Press Delay (found in Options -> Controls -> Communication -> Ping Options) is too low for some players,” the tip reads. “Increasing it from the .18 second default to a higher value (like .3) should prevent any cases of this occurring.”
However, this fix is only temporary, and Blizzard plans on looking deeper into the issue. As blizz_winter said, the company hasn’t ruled out a possible bug to be the cause. The Blizzard spokesperson also wrote that the workaround might not do it for every player, so the dev team will be on the lookout for a better fix.
