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".
Contextual pings were a feature OW1, but as someone with thousands of hours in OW1 I didn't know this until players in the OW2 beta started pointing out that they weren't getting their intended "I'm with you" prompts anymore when aiming their Group Up comms at allies. When I reimplemented this feature for OW2 just before launch I made some mistakes, like letting this ping type pass through walls and letting it go an effectively infinite distance. This meant that before Season 4 we had that happening way too often.
Those bugs are all fixed now, but I realized a few months ago (because of reddit posts like these) that the number of players that wanted this feature is likely much smaller than the number of players that do not want this feature, hence why we've taken the time to make it a setting. You can read the post history of my account if you'd like to know more about this topic.
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. Increasing it from the .18 second default to a higher value (like .3) should prevent any cases of this occurring.
This was a really hard number to tune, because the higher this number is the less responsive the system feels, but the lower it is the more frequently we get these accidental pings from the wheel. Other posters in this thread mention the movement-based shortcut we had when OW2 launched being a potential problem. This was removed last season, so it shouldn't be the cause anymore.
In the specific case the OP is describing though (based on their comments in this thread), it sounds like we may have a bug. The last person I helped solve this problem had a faulty mouse, but several months ago it was possible for Ping - In World to fire an unintended type of ping under some very specific circumstances. We fixed that bug, but if there's another like it I wouldn't be surprised. If you have any video of this or any other undesirable behavior from the ping/comms wheel occurring that would be very helpful!
Another highly upvoted comment in this thread mentions the "Come to me for healing" prompt being used when aiming at injured allies near an objective. You can reduce the likelihood of this occurring by reducing the Injured Ally Ping Sensitivity setting in Options -> Controls -> Communication -> Ping Options -> Advanced. This is really a question of priority though, and our objective pings have the lowest priority of all ping types. It sounds like this setting probably isn't handling this issue well enough, so I'll be thinking about future solutions for this one.
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