Ping To Win? Pings And Their Impact On Performance
Pings—an essential tool of non-verbal communication in MOBA games. But, are they actually helpful or a distraction? This study tells you how much you should ping in-game.
• Are pings in MOBA games a distraction or helpful?
• 46.32% of players use one or zero pings per game, with an average of 3.3 pings per match.
• Jungle players pinged the most.
• An increase in the number of pings led to more kills, assists, and deaths, and a lower gold-per-minute ratio.
• Ping likely increases the odds of winning until a certain point.
No MOBA game today (at least I'm not aware of one) exists without pings—alerts that trigger auditory and visual cues of team mates. This kind of non-verbal communication may be specifically important where voice communication is not available (e.g., your average League game).
As we've discussion in numerous episode of this newsletter earlier, communication is a potent driver for gaming performance. However, the impact of pings on performance may not be clear. It can either be seen as a tool to improve situational awareness, call for action, and communicate intention, or as an interruption of your team mates' flow and focus that overloads their attention.
"[Therefore,] our study examines the role of non-verbal, communicative alerts called “pings” and their impact on performance... in League of Legends (LoL)." [1]
The dataset the researchers analyzed consisted of 10,293 games, comprising 84,489 player actions. In addition, they did some housekeeping and cleaned up the data. For instance, pings within a 2-second window were counted as one ping. This reduced the total amount of pings by 27.79%.
That being said, each player—on average—pinged 3.3 times, with a minimum of zero pings and a maximum of 92 (that guy's puttin' in some work, or it was just the longest LoL game in history). Also, 46.32% of players pinged either once or never during a match. So half of the players basically don't ping at all.
🌫️ It's Always the Junglers...
First, the researchers found that:
- Jungle players pinged the most out of all roles. This makes sense, they signal their team mates where and when they will gank lanes.
- Teams that queues up as a due or team had viewer pings. That's a no-brainer too. They are probably talking on team comps with each other and don't need (many) pings.
- Players with a higher gold-per-minute ratio had a lower amount of pings. Here it gets interesting. Players who focus on farming don't ping much? Why? Does it distract them?
- "Players who send more pings get more kills... and more assists... but they also die more..." [1] These are mixed results but may also make sense. More pings signal your intention to fight, especially when the jungler is the one pinging. More fights/ganks mean more kills, assists, but also deaths.
Second, the researchers expected there to be a curvilinear relationship between performance and pings, meaning no pings are bad, some pings are good, and too many pings are also bad. The figure below shows the results of their analysis.
"We again find mixed evidence for the linkage between ping use and performance. More pings result in a concave relationship..." [1]
As you can see, more pings lead to more assists and kills, but also deaths and gold per minute. The researchers also not that the magnitude (the strength of the effect) is relatively small. However, pings do have a significant effect on in-game performance.
🧂 28 Pings and a Grain of Salt
Deaths increased with the amount of pings: according to the researchers, this may be a side effect of other variables that impact deaths. Another aspect worth mentioning is that the LoL data were from 2014. I don't know how much gold minions and killing on enemy gave back then. So maybe pings actually are a distraction to top, mid, and bot players that lead to fewer farm. Also, if more pings mean more fights, then losing farm in the mean time means also losing a lot of gold.
Taking an educated guess based on the data here, using pings as a tool to communicate with your team mates is a good thing that likely boosts your odds of winning. If you take a look at the figure again, kills, assists, and deaths rise (while gold per minute stay relatively flat) until ~28 pings. So maybe that's a good number to aim for.
However, what makes me a bit skeptical—it would be nice to have a closer look at that—is the lack of a temporal dimension. What do I mean by that: more pings mean we're, likely, in a longer game. In a longer game, it's more about setting up vision, fight for objectives etc. than farming or team fights (because the death timers are so long and losing a team fight may end the game). This may lead to fewer gold per minute.
Anyway, read you next week. Best,
Christian 🙂
