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Pings rock. Comms are unmatched and truly necessary in a proper team environment. A button will never replace 5 players yelling single-syllable shorthand for the hero a team is focusing. I don't expect perfection, but there are painful areas that can be amended.
The biggest ping issue is ping cooldowns. As example, I'll pull from experience playing Ana on Gibraltar, A-cap defense. When the enemy team begins staging for a teamfight, an attentive player with sightlines can use the ping system to communicate enemy locations quickly, pointing out the tank, or the backline, or a flanker, or some combination therein. Maybe you also Z your ult progress, or remind your Winston to mind your sightlines with a Come to me for healing, or you use a double-ping (caution) to plan out a dive angle. These are great features the ping system offers! There is gold in the bones.
It's all perfect until you hit a sleep and you receive a ping spam warning. Or an extended, high-tension poke phase leaves you without ping access the moment the teamfight starts. I cannot count the number of times I've died to a Widow mid-fight, tried to death ping to communicate her location, and been hit with a rate limitation only to watch a teammate unknowingly walk into her gaze seconds later.
Yeah, yeah, pings could be spammed. It could be annoying. But nowhere near as annoying as having a useful communication system stop working in the fast-paced situations where it's most needed. Tie it to comm volume, or tie it to endorsement status, or whatever other system you need to clamp down. Maybe make a priority system, where a certain set of messages -- location pings on CC'd and/or low HP targets, killcam pings, caution alerts -- can be communicated even through current rate limits. Try some things out! I'm here to play Overwatch, voracious for the parsing of a constant flow of time-sensitive information. Just give us an option to use the systems which enable that, even if opt-in.
TL;DR: There should be some way to not get rate-limited with pings. Imagine your mic got cut off 15 seconds into an OT cart clear because you were "lulululululululu"ing too much. Give us an option to always use the game's systems.
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