Mechanic Concept: More Ping Types and Communication

Tokala13·6/13/2016, 7:42:33 PM·4 votes·650 views

A long time ago I wrote to Riot support about this topic and was told I should make a thread in the board about it, never did it back then due to shyness, but once again I find myself thinking that the idea might be helpful to put forward.

I am sure we have all had moments in a match where we need to communicate something simple or common to an ally, such as "Enemy ward in this bush" without having to find a safe spot, caution ping the location and type "enemy ward". Or the inevitable Bard roaming who on his minimap sees a perfect trail of chimes and what he is doing, but to his allies is on a chaotic crash course as if Gragas has given him something to drink.

The current pings in game each serve a valid and viable function, and adding more to the wheel might make it harder to quickly ping, I would think adding a second hotkey to bring a second wheel of pings up might be best, perhaps ctrl+shift for the secondary pings, with ctrl as the standard pings, but a few ideas for pings follow:

One would be the previously mentioned "this is warded" or "enemy ward" ping, as a support main I notice often having to stop to tell a jungler that the bush they are in is warded, or tell a midlaner that I saw their lane opponent drop a pink into a bush due to the standard pings not communicating the message fully, I also see other lanes doing this of course, mid and top often have to stop to tell a jungler the enemy warded a spot, or that they have been spotted, I imagine an eyeball shape of some kind might be a valid signal for an area being warded by the enemy.

Another would be a slightly more complex idea, but would borrow some idea from the "On my way" ping, but allow a player to show either a path, or a number of points, often I see players tap the 'g' key and leave a trail of a few of the generic blue pings in a line for example to guide a player to escape or guide them towards incoming allies, or to tell them which jungle path to take to avoid a pursuer. I understand that might be a more complex ping or more difficult to implement/use properly though, I would imagine control-wise starting the ping, holding down the mouse to draw a short trail, which would then appear as a series of small markers or a glowing line of some kind with ping marked start and endpoints.

Another might be a "Group up here" ping, or something to call your team to gather, where most times I see someone on the team stop and say "Group mid" a large ping with perhaps a banner shape dropped on the mid lane would give a quick means to communicate, putting it on dragon or baron would tell your team to gather there, and be a nice counterpoint to the general caution ping there to tell your team the enemy is there.

Two other general ideas would be "Initiate" or "Back up and defend", both are common things I see, typically involving objective control/stealing, or the typical "Enemy team got baron, pull back to turrets and defend to stall it out"

And finally a couple basic ones, potentially as ideas, or to fill space, would be "out of mana" or "low on health" or such, though typing "oom", or "lowhp" is easy and not greatly difficult to do I just mention them for completeness.

I know this might seem like an odd idea in general, but I think it would greatly improve team communication, especially for randoms, and lessen cases of "died or lost chance to initiate/steal objective while typing to try to communicate with team to get them to join in" and lessen time spent trying to stay safe and type to team members.

2 Comments

Arakadia6/14/2016, 12:16:23 AM2 votes

It would also be cool if the announcer said each ping, "Enemies are missing in our bot jungle!"

It would say where enemies are missing based on where you pinged. Each lane and each quadrant of the jungle.