Vision pings are coming to League of Legends soon

In a League of Legends board post, lead game designer Riot Meddler dropped some news about a new ping for players. The frequently requested warded ping is coming very, very soon.

Warded Ping

Is on its way. Odds are reasonable, though not guaranteed, it will be in the next patch or the one after.

Yes, we are finally getting a way to deter our junglers, and yes, junglers will now be able to complain about not getting warded pings when their ganks go bad.

As far as how the ping will actually be implemented in the game, Meddler said that they are testing a few implementations.

Likely approach is two step:

1. We add it to the game without a key binding/ping wheel position. People can then bind it as desired. Not perfect, but lets us get it out as quickly as possible.

2. We get a better solution in the medium term that makes it more easily accessible. The ping wheel's being recoded anyway soonish (old tech) so then's the right time to look at it.

Looks like the ping wheel will also see somewhat of an upgrade in the next few months. Perhaps more pings could be coming with it?

Associate Software Engineer, Riot NoopMoney, popped into their own board to give some additional context about the warded ping, as well as a short video.

There is a short section in this blog about why this highly requested ping has been on the back-burner for so long.

Why now, why not before?

We’ve been pretty torn between wanting to add new functionality and preserving the ease of use of the current cardinal wheel. For now we want to sidestep these concerns by adding a low-scope hotkey bind, and have the ping wheel conversation after this is done.

Every team is trying to deliver stuff as quickly as possible, but there are a plenty of ideas that don't fit easily into an existing effort (which makes it harder to prioritize against everything else we're working on). It's surprisingly tough to do, but we're trying to get better at pulling our heads up and looking for areas that we’re missing. In this case we felt strongly about adding the ping, so we decided to take a few days away from our normal day to day to take a first pass at this.

At the end of the post, Riot NoopMoney lists out the things that the team is still working on. Art, audio and terminology are the main focuses. In this case, terminology meaning what exactly the ping can indicate. Enemy ward, please ward here, Hawkshot over there. All sorts of things.

The warded ping has been a highly requested feature for years. While it never quite reached the level of some of the more meme-y features — Yorick rework, I’m lookin’ at you — it is great to see that Riot is looking at player requests. Hopefully we will see this feature hit sooner rather than later, but for now, it is nice to know that it is at least being worked on.

Riot NoopMoney lists 7.14 or 7.15 as the tentative release patches for this new feature.

This post has been updated with additional information and a WIP video