Over the head emoticons on certain emotes

[Frank_Stein]

I'm really against replacing existing hotkeys with these. Also just find emotes cringy in any context. So I'm just against these in generally. I also feel like this would just make people ignore the radio/chat even more then they do now. Call me a old man but communicating in nothing but emotes is god awful.

Is it the face ones in particular that you find cringy, the concept, or people using emotes at all?

After drawing a few, I do like my icon ones more than the face ones, so if it's the former I can get behind keeping it limited to icons and pictures

I started drawing a few ones like the gun, fire, bomb and medical one because I was thinking, which would be faster to do in a situation in which reaction time mattered:

1. Typing "Watch out a gun!"
   
2. Pressing a hot key that displays an icon
   

Number 2 also has the advantage of having the message in the same area as the action, meaning less dividing your attention.

As for the icons taking focus away from chat, I feel like some, like the exclamation mark or ellipse, would act as an invitation to look at the chat for more details.

Could this be exploited? Will people use it as a distraction to sucker punch people? Probably, but people hedge their bets lots of ways. Conversation itself is already used by people, asking someone a question and then attacking them while they're probably answering it.

I guess I just see more reasons this adds to the game beyond personal preferences visual wise