LoL 13.22 Ping Changes - A Massive Issue for Team Communication

League of Legends' newest 13.22 patch added changes to how often you can use the ping system in-game. This update has caused some frustration among the player base as many are questioning the decisions of Rioters in the Balance Team.

Communication in League of Legends

Every player is familiar with the toxicity in the game, that is why Riot has added the option of muting your chat so you can instead focus on the game and give it your all instead of giving in to a player who is having a bad day and flaming you for your mistakes.

However, the recent change in how the system works might cause more issues than initially expected. In Patch 13.22 the following change was implemented: 

• The “Alert” and “Enemy Missing” pings can only be used 3 times before being rate-limited.

In the game, players would spam a ping to show frustration or mock you for bad decision-making to bypass the chat restriction. Everyone can understand how annoying it can be for someone to spam pings at you instead of allowing you to pick yourself up and keep a clear mind.

But this change comes with a cost as players often use this system to also ping their allies for a champion to use a global ultimate or to indicate that an enemy player does not have abilities like Flash or their ultimate available. All of this was heavily changed in Patch 13.19. 

Pinging any allied information on the tab scoreboard and UI now only displays that information to the pinger in the chat and will be designated by [SELF]. This will affect the following pings: 

• Allied Portrait (Alive and Time until Respawn)
• Allied Level
• Allied Ultimate Cooldown
• Allied Primary and Secondary Rune Trees
• Allied Summoner Spells 1 and 2
• Allied Item Slots 1-6
• Allied Trinket Slot

Consequences of this Change

By limiting the frequency at which you can communicate with your team via pings, your coordination and game will be affected in the long run. One of the main developers 'Phreak' stated in his recent Patch 13.22 rundown that players can simply type in the chat, but that is not an effective solution because as stated above, players often mute their chat. 

Pings also help players who have certain disadvantages that hinder them from typing as fast as others, so pings are a crucial crutch for them to better communicate with their teammates. Providing critical information to your team is very important. 

It seems that Riot Games are regressing the way players interact with each other as pings were introduced namely to offer an alternative way of talking with your teammates instead of using the chat option and tolerating abuse and profane language that in no way helps you win the game.

Community Reaction

Almost every player is not happy with the changes to pings as more and more outrage is building up in the community with players often creating new posts on Reddit or providing constructive criticism on other platforms to beg Riot to listen to their thoughts as the data Rioters are using is not enough to determine the positives of this drastic decision.

Of course, some humor is also found with players creatively mocking the design philosophy presented by 'Phreak'.

Summary

The solution of Rioters to battle toxicity might lead to even more toxicity as limiting a feature that was introduced to bring more clarity in a faster and more effective way seems to be backfiring with more and more players growing frustrated over the decision of implementing these changes to the game.

The ever-increasing feedback regarding pings is causing major disruptions within the community, hopefully, the feedback will result in either reversing these changes or giving Riot Games another chance to think of fixing the issue of toxicity in the game. Perhaps the solution will not be to completely remove toxicity from the game, but instead to provide more utility to communication methods that reward team play, and coordination that offer more benefits than drawbacks as there is no ideal solution for a game that was never intended to be perfect in the first place.