The Spammer

Battle royales offer tons of ways for players to show off their personalities (or the size of their wallets), from special skins and weapon charms to voice lines and emotes. Unfortunately, like any other tool given to gamers, we have found a way to abuse them. Couple voice lines and emotes with extensive ping systems like the one in Apex Legends and you’ve got the recipe for the perfect chaos buffet. It is at this buffet you will find The Spammer, gorging themselves on a smorgasbord of sounds.

Listen, we love pings here. Pings let players communicate if they don’t have a mic or don’t feel comfortable talking into one. Pings offer more accessibility options when it comes to communicating important information in a battle royale: where enemies are, the location of good loot, the planned path to tread.

But the ping wheel and the voice line/emote wheels are clearly too enticing for some gamers, and they’ll relentlessly spam them in matches—in some cases to such an extent that games like Apex Legends have had to change characters’ voice lines because spamming them resulted in some NSFW sounds. While other FPS titles like Overwatch 2 limit how often you can spam “I need healing,” that’s not the case for many battle royale games. The sound a downed player makes when relentlessly pinging the floor at their feet haunts me long after I rage quit and shut off my console.