In a team-driven game like Overwatch, coordination is crucial to winning matches. Synergized actions and thoughtful decision making are the fundamentals of securing objectives and holding points. With coherent callouts, strategic shotcalling and a positive outlook, you can direct your team to victory!

Fundamentals



Firstly, voice communication is near-essential in Overwatch. While Skype, Discord and Curse are all effective voice-chat programs to use, in-game voice chat works perfectly fine.

The three important settings under ‘Sound’ options are:

‘Group Voice Chat’ set to ON

‘Team Voice Chat’ set to AUTO-JOIN

‘Voice Chat Mode’ set to 'PUSH TO TALK'

This will ensure that you’re connected with your premade group’s voice channel before matches, placed into the main voice channel automatically upon joining a match, and mic input will only work when your input key is held. You may also want to change your ‘Push-to-Talk’ keybind under ‘Controls’ to a suitable key that’ll have minimal impact on your hand positions during gameplay. Good options include the left alt key or any side mouse buttons. If you ever wish to mute teammates or change voice channels, you can do so from the comms interface (default ‘P’).

When beginning a match and deciding on your team composition, it’s a good idea to prompt your teammates to join the main channel through text chat if they haven’t already. Communicate with your allies in the preliminary moments before the match begins to familiarize yourself with them and negotiate roles. Once the match begins, you’ll want to begin making a good mix of callouts and shotcalls to steer your team towards victory.



Callouts

Callouts are brief, factual statements pertaining to current facts of the game. These include:

Declaring your status

Highlighting an enemy target

Emphasizing a threat

Calling for help

Callouts may include basic facts such as ‘Reaper’s above’, ‘McCree’s low’ or ‘I have rez’. To not congest the communications channel, callouts should be short and no more than three or four words in length. They don’t need to be complete sentences; they should be bite-sized pieces of information that are clear and easily processed. Nearly all players of a team should be making occasional callouts.

Callouts should nearly always be factual, and should very rarely begin with ‘I think…’ or ‘Maybe…’. Uncertain callouts can sometimes be beneficial, such as preparing your team from a potential Reaper flank since he’s been unseen for a while. However, don’t vocalize information unless it’s highly likely or certain. Vague calls may influence your teammates' playstyles negatively by pressuring them to play too safely, and may result in them being less willing to commit to fights due to indefinite threats. Keep unconfirmed information to a minimum.

Communication within a well-acquainted premade team is different to a match composed of strangers, since players will be more familiar with each other's voices, mannerisms, and terminologies. In a solo-queue environment, you’ll be wanting to make your callouts in a way that is easily understood by teammates who are unfamiliar with you. The best way to do this is to keep your callouts concise and to-the-point. Since your teammates are less familiar with your voice, it’s best to address yourself and teammates with constant terminologies, i.e. hero and ability names. Say you’re playing Reinhardt; it’s best to say ‘I have Earthshatter’ instead of ‘my ult’s up’, since this is short, blunt and doesn’t require your teammates to process who actually made the call.

Callouts regarding positions are best made with directional terminologies, e.g. ‘Above’, ‘Top-left’ or ‘Behind’. Unlike games like Counter-Strike and League of Legends, there are fewer well-established terms for locations and landmarks on maps, outside of ‘on point’ or ‘at spawn’. Since teams are typically positioned close together in relation to the opposition, it’s always best to address an enemy’s location in accordance with where your team’s main formation is positioned and directed.



Shotcalling

Shotcalling pertains to discussion of your team’s overall strategy. This includes:

Calling to engage/disengage

Proposing ally priorities

Shifting overall positioning

While callouts are quick facts pertaining to the game state, shotcalling pertains to personal suggestions regarding how the match should be approached, sometimes leading to a brief discussion within your team to conclude on a course of action.

Standard shotcalls may include ‘Fight this’, ‘Dive them’, or ‘Punish the Reinhardt’ to start fights, prompting all teammates to move ahead and use abilities to engage. At lower levels of play, shotcalls may need to be slightly more explicit, and you may have to call for Lucio speed-boosts and core ultimates to be used. You can repeat the statement a couple of times to ensure your teammates hear it, and to reinforce the decision that you want to commit to.

During teamfights, shotcalling should address which enemies should be focused, who is low on health, and whether to continue fighting or disengage. Calling out a key target is important, as your team will have better luck when taking down one or two specific targets at a time, systematically. If these calls aren’t made during a teamfight, your team’s damage output will likely be unfocused. Directing fire by calling targets within the teamfight will give you an advantage, especially against less coordinated teams.

The kill feed is a clear indicator of whether your team is winning or losing a teamfight. When a fight clearly isn’t going your way and is essentially lost, it’s a good idea to call for your allies to disengage in an attempt to minimize deaths and to not waste any unnecessary ultimates. On the contrary, when your team is clearly winning the fight, you may tell them to continue battling, while highlighting fleeing targets to chase down.

The effectiveness of your shotcalling comes down to your level of game knowledge. If you believe this is your weakest area, you may be better off only making simple calls or letting other allies step forward to do so. Game knowledge is best developed through experience and will lead to you learning how to recognize opportunities to fight or retreat from a point. If you want to further extend your knowledge, watching high-level competitive play VODs or streams can be beneficial.

When responding to seemingly poor shotcalls with little opportunity for discussion, it’s usually in your best interest to follow through with the call anyway. Even if you think it’s a bad decision, six heroes committing to a risky fight has a higher likelihood of succeeding than four heroes engaging, while two others are split off. The worst that could happen is you get team-wiped, but you can just respawn together and reevaluate the decision. Although the call may be crazy, it won’t hurt to die trying.



Planning & Negotiation

Outside of directing teammates and stating facts of the game, discussion amongst your allies will help you organize your team composition or deduce problems in your strategy.

The process of picking a team composition usually begins with allies locking in heroes that they’re in the mood to play. While team compositions sometimes fall in place without any discussion, other times you’ll end up with a lack of a role, or teammates unwilling to play a certain type of hero. In cases like these, team-directed statements like ‘Who can play X?’ or mentioning your hero pool can help initiate discussion to construct an effective composition.

When planning and discussing strategies, be sure that you talk to your allies, and don’t talk down to them. While you may talk louder than your teammates and boast more confidence, it doesn’t mean you know more than them. You’re the rank you are for a reason. Be open minded, and know that their input is likely as valuable as yours.

The topic of hero-swaps is controversial and should be handled delicately. It’s hard to diagnose what should be changed within a composition when no metrics are readily available regarding your teammate’s performance. If you believe an ally should swap heroes, only suggest it to them (i.e. I think that…), and give a good reason as to why. If you think that Hanzo is doing little for your team, don’t just say ‘Hanzo, go a tank’. Something along the lines of ‘We lack enough of a frontline to hold the choke. Could you play a tank?’ would be a better approach, since it prompts for a response and suggests why they should change. If they refuse to swap, you can either make a broader suggestion to your teammates at large to swap, or even change heroes yourself.

If an ally declines a swap, do not pressure them into changing. If anything, just state the implications of the team composition, like ‘We don’t have a tank, so we have to hold further back’ or ‘We've only got one support, so don’t take too much poke damage’. These suggest a course of action to make do with the team composition that you have while emphasizing its weaknesses, which may also influence a teammate to swap.



Role Communication

Different roles and heroes will inherently be better at conveying certain information according to their typical positioning and playstyles.

A tank’s behaviour will largely dictate their allies’ positioning, and they often act as the catalysts for teamfights with their displacing ultimates. As a result of their frontline, close-range playstyle, tanks will typically have a more narrow field of view, with a clear perspective of what’s ahead but less knowledge of their flanks. Communication will primarily concern initiation and positioning, like ‘I’m about to Graviton’ or ‘Push up with me’, as well as the status of shield abilities (namely as Reinhardt, calling out when your barrier is low/being dropped).

DPS heroes are typically focused on the enemy frontline, and will usually be positioned between the team’s tanks and supports, or alongside the supports. They'll usually have access to broad ranges of vision with opportunities to look around, since allied tanks and healers are supporting them. Your vision will largely focus on the enemy frontline, as you fire away at the targets ahead of you. As the main source of reliable damage, DPS heroes will often be the ones making the call to chase after stragglers, or even calling to collapse on over-extended enemies. Damage heroes have the duty to respond to support and frontline callouts, as they’ll need to play according to both their tank’s behaviour and impending flanks highlighted by supports.

Supports are normally positioned further back, behind DPS and tank heroes. Therefore, they will often have a large field of view, overlooking both allies and the enemy frontline. For this reason, supports will have a clear view of your team’s formation and health, and will be best for making position-related calls, such as asking teammates to reposition due to an enemy threat or telling over-extended allies to fall back. Supports are also prime targets for flanks from heroes like Tracer, and more likely to spot or fall victim to flankers before their allies due to their vulnerability. For this reason, communication regarding enemy flanks is an absolute necessity since your supports' high-impact ultimates are crucial to success.

A few hero-specific callouts that will highly benefit your team include:

Calling out Discord Orb targets as Zenyatta

Most Reinhardt actions, namely charging and shielding

Backline dives as Winston, Genji and D.Va

Projected Barrier’s availability as Zarya (situationally, e.g. for Genji)

Sleep-darted enemies as Ana



Congesting the Comms

The ideal use of in-game communication would maximize information conveyed between teammates, while having minimal interference on their performance. Remember that your allies will be attempting to process all of your statements and swamping them with information will have a negative impact by distracting them.

Ensure that the information that you’re relaying is actually meaningful. While you may have little faith in your allies’ decision-making, narrating the game with a near endless stream of callouts will only stress teammates out by overloading them with too much information to process. Use callouts sparingly, only pointing out information that may not be obvious to allies.

When it comes to reflection and discussion with your team, only do so during the downtime of the match. If you die at the start of a battle, don’t proceed to rabble about shortcomings while the fight is still taking place. Let your allies focus and play it out, and you can discuss strategy after the teamfight is over while you’re respawning and recuperating.

Outside of a few specific scenarios, try to avoid using voice communication to convey your ultimate’s charge progress. Use the communication menu option for ult charge (default ‘C’), or the ‘ultimate charge’ communication option (default ‘Z’) to convey this information, because narrating your progress towards 100% isn’t too meaningful. Only callout your ultimate charge if it’s at 100% and you are about to use it, or if you are moments away from acquiring a game-changing ultimate (e.g. Resurrect) that your teammates will need to prepare for.





Positivity & Mediation

Keeping a good mindset and maintaining your team’s drive to win will have a strong impact on a game. Choosing your words thoughtfully when addressing your teammates can make the difference between them continuing to fight willingly, or giving up while victory is still within reach.

While it’s important to coordinate and identify missteps that your allies may take, keep your focus on yourself and don’t expect your teammates to carry you or think that they’re obliged to perform as well as you. It’s much harder to fall into a negative mindset if you acknowledge that you, individually, have room to improve. While you may have a teammate who’s failing constantly, be sure to direct your focus on your own play.

Don’t shut out your teammates’ critiques just because you’ve got a few gold medals. Even if you have a strong kill/death ratio and decent game impact, you should still strive to improve. Take on board others’ advice and work on facets of your own play like accuracy or positioning to continue doing your best.

Personally conquering a negative mindset begins with acknowledging that raging is redundant. While you may get instant gratification by venting your anger at your teammate’s underperformance, flaming them and losing composure will only impair you by shifting blame elsewhere and clouding your focus. Anger will hamper your logic and can result in spreading your negativity to your allies, so it’s illogical if you desire to improve as a player and win matches. Limit your communication to positive or neutral statements to avoid any unnecessary toxicity.

If your teammates are bickering amongst themselves, it’s a good idea to bring their focus back to the game at hand. Make sure you don’t fuel the argument by inputting further negativity; a simple, neutral statement like ‘Let’s just focus on the game now’ or ‘Don’t worry about it, just hold the point’ are ways to interject between your allies’ bickering. While you may want to say ‘Just shut up and play’, teammates could react badly to this depending on their nature.

Being negative doesn’t only come in the form of directly flaming teammates. Nearly any statement can be delivered with an optimistic or pessimistic vibe, and depending on a person’s personality, your allies may be easily offended or have their confidence shattered by a negative remark. For example, a teamfight may have been lost because your allied Zarya died before they could use Graviton Surge. While you could say ‘We lost the point because Zarya didn’t ult’, you can instead say ‘Next fight, we can win if we land a good Zarya ultimate’. While the former statement isn’t incredibly negative, it only bluntly states why the teamfight was lost. On the other hand, the latter statement places less direct blame on the Zarya, and suggests further action that can result in a positive outcome.

Projecting positivity and raising morale can be done simply by recognizing your teammates’ achievements. A simple ‘Good job!’ or ‘Nice ult!’ can be enough to boost a teammate’s confidence, especially when recovering from a losing position.

Additional Resources

Refz from Tempo Storm scrim gameplay on Numbani, with full comms: Link

Former Splyce player Steel scrimming against Hammer Esports on King's Row, with full comms: Link

Intelligent shotcalling, streamlined callouts and meaningful discussion can turn dire situations into wins. Coordinate together and trust in your teammates, and you can lead your team to victory!