What the "?" (Enemy mia) Ping has become

I'm sure many here are familiar with what has happened to this wonderful ping, but for those who do not, it has become a ping that is often spammed on players who are being blamed for one thing or another. An example would be a 2/3 health Vayne player tumbling in 1v3, dying, and spamming the ping 5-30 times over their 1/3 health 80 mana Janna for not helping in the fight beyond setting up a Q to help her possibly escape.

Now regardless of how you feel over whether the Janna should have followed a different course of action or not, there is a greater issue here.

The "?" ping is now being used as a method of complaining about allied players. While it is still being used for its intended purpose of calling "enemy mia"s, this new use dilutes that purpose.

While I have never done this personally, I have had people mistake me for doing this when I was simply calling mia. In one such instance, my top laner pinged "?" over her lane to signal that her laner was missing, but I was too tunneled in on my opponent in mid lane to notice. One easy gank later, I was color blind, and finally noticed her ping in the chat, causing me to understand that it was 100% my fault that I died. About 30 seconds into my wait to revive, I noticed that the enemy top laner had not returned to their lane despite still being near full health. Thus I pinged "?" over top lane, and was starting to type a more detailed warning to bot lane when I saw our top laner respond to my ping in chat. She said (slightly rudely, but understandably) that she had called mia and that it was my own fault that I was caught in the gank.

Only then did I realize that my "?" ping was being misinterpreted as a complaint towards her.

While this was sorted out fine a few lines later in the chat, it made me realize the harm that this change in use has brought. The "?" ping has switched from a quick, friendly warning of possible danger to a potential attack from your own teammate. This not only makes it function worse as the the easy communication tool it was designed to be (people now feel the need to check themselves if it's just a complaint), but it can also cause hostility when there was none before. In that game, the top laner and I had been getting along fine (little communication outside of pings, but no raging or anything either), but that little misunderstanding caused some friction for a little bit.

While this post probably won't reach many of those people who spam the "?" ping over their allies, I urge those of you who do read this to consciously avoid doing it in the future and stop other people from doing it as well.