Ping Etiquette

One of the great things about Apex is its ping system, which other games have since borrowed. It allows for communication in game without using the game chat audio and for easily keeping track of items and locations.

Pinging Landing and Locations

Landing, especially when there are other squads landing nearby, is fraught with problems - especially since your survival is largely dependent on who gets what loot when. So let’s follow some best practices:

• The jump master should ping a landing location prior to or immediately after jumping. Do not leave your teammates guessing where you are landing - that leads to teammates breaking off and getting split far apart or not breaking off and competing for loot in the exact same location.
• Each individual squad member should ping their specific landing location. That also means that you:
  • Need to break off prior to landing dammit!
  • Do not ping or land at a specific location your teammate has already pinged.

Post-landing, ping the locations where you are headed for loot or for general movement as the game progresses. Do not expect your teammates to know where you are headed if you do not ping. Do not expect them to be nearby if you are in a firefight but failed to communicate your location. And, for crying out loud, do not get pissed or ping incessantly when you run off without communicating and get knocked or killed.

Pinging Loot

There are really just simple rules to follow when pinging loot:

• Don’t ping everything! Ping only those things likely to be difficult to find and useful to your teammates or things they have indicated a need for. They don’t need to know about every white shield or every random weapon.
• He/she who dibs’d it, loots it! If someone already dibs’d an item, in the name of all that is holy, leave it for them!

Pinging Enemies

Again, the rules of pinging enemies are simple:

• Ping only real enemies. Don’t randomly ping enemies where enemies don’t exist just to get your squad’s attention.
• Don’t ping enemies constantly during launch. Once is enough and only at locations that you are landing or considering landing.
• Don’t ping enemies incessantly. This is especially true if you are knocked. Pinging enemies incessantly not only isn’t going to make your teammate want to help, but is often detrimental to their ability to assist (it is distracting and nerve-wracking). Only ping when their location may be useful to their (not your) survival.