Tactical communications

[deferred-impact]

Emotes are cute, and they add a lot of value to the game (elevating it above a glorified singleplayer vs bots). But, in terms of actual gameplay value, there is very little value. The best you can hope to do is the shield, sword emotes for attack and defend (and those are far from unambiguous...) and the medkit/ammo emotes. And even then, to use them you need to waste emote slots and give up the fun emotes.

We had a bit of a discussion in the main game discord. Clearly people want tactical crap. Here's a bit of a compendium of the ideas that have been voiced, and that seem the most feasible and relevant to me:

• i should be able to ping a specific location on my screen, or on the map, and have nearby players see the ping. "Squad, attention there!"
• i should be able to ping a specific location on my screen, or on the map, and have all players on the team see the ping. "Attention all, need assistance"
• pings should be rate limited to prevent spam. Players who are better at making tactical decisions should be able to send pings more often. How to decide which player is better? The simple solution is to consider their level, but that is far from ideal (i say this as a lvl 600 player with terrible strategic thinking). The better solution would be to consider their % of won games - someone who wins often, is probably good at strategy
• allow players to draw on the map in general. Arrows outlining attack directions would be highly valuable
• a second emote wheel which can only accept "tactical" emotes, so that we don't have to deal with the conundrum of "well, do i pick this funny crying face or do i pick this emote which looks like a flag"
• on PC, the new tactical-only emote wheel is bound to a customizable key on the keyboard
• on mobile, it is accessed by double tapping the emote button
• where's the :triangular_flag_on_post: emote?
• remove random spawn locations. I think the hodgepodge of both teams spawning all over the place goes a long way towards preventing all kinds of strategic thinking. Why plan your flanking path if you can just die and respawn in a randomly provided flanking direction?

[NOTGregory]

This should have been a feature in bd from the start.

[ghost]

Fully agree with this.