League of Legends Preseason Update Makes Pings Much More Useful

League of Legends pings are about to become much more useful (and plentiful) whenever the next season starts with the preseason period set to test an expanded range of ping options for those looking to better communicate with their teams. Updated communication tools being tested on the PBE servers first ahead of their live releases include a total of six new pings for players to utilize while they coordinate with teammates on what should be done next and what areas players should stay away from.

The new pings were detailed recently by Riot in a post going over all things preseason with communication tools being just one part of a sweeping update. Those who use pings now (and pretty much every League player does) will recall that the current ping wheel houses four different core pings: Retreat, On My Way, Assist Me, and Enemy Missing. Those will also be brought back in their same places, but between each of the established pings in ordinal slots on the ping wheel will be four additional options: Push, All-In, Hold, and Bait.

Those terms should be pretty recognizable already to League players, so it should be helpful to have them assigned to different concrete ping options now instead of making players translate what someone's contextless ping means. If a bot-lane marksman wants to shove a lane before going back, for example, their best ping option currently is to spam the neutral ping on the minion wave so that the support and whoever else is there hopefully understands the request. Soon, players will simply be able to say "Push" instead.

In addition to those new pings, there's a second ping wheel that's being added solely for vision. The Enemy Vision ping is returning, and it'll be flanked this time by a Vision Cleared ping on the left and a Need Vision ping on the right. For those who have trouble keeping up with pings already and are worried about that becoming even more complicated with these expanded options, Riot is also adding an off-screen ping feature that'll make it easier to see where pings came from if they're beyond your immediate perspective.

"The last communication change we have for you is a small quality-of-life update that will notify which direction an off-screen ping came from by displaying it on the edge of your screen," Riot said. "Enemy Missing pings will show on your screen regardless of where they are pinged on the map while Retreat, On My Way, Assist Me, Hold, All-In, and Push pings will only be displayed if they're pinged within 3000 units (approximately corner to corner of your screen when fully zoomed out or 20 Teemo's) of your screen's edge."

All these changes and more will be tested on the PBE servers first before they go live for all players to use.