Feature Suggestion - Painting / Drawing on the Ingame Map

Hi there,

I have a neat little suggestion for Apex Legends that I believe would benefit the experience of solo-queuing into ranked games and/or just communications in general. I tend to take on the role as the "in-game leader" in most of my ranked matches, and when discussing plays / strategies / rotations with my team, sometimes I get lost with how to clearly describe locations on the map. Anyways, my idea is pretty simple-- allow each player on the team to draw on the map. The colour of each team mate's paintbrush could be linked to their legend card's colour in the ingame HUD (for example, rampart's paint colour would be orange, wraith's teal, and pathfinder's green). Here's a quick breakdown of the positives and negatives I've thought of for this feature:

Positives:

• Allows players who do not speak the same language to communicate with one another effectively, helps lower language barriers and improve overall cohesiveness. Pablo_Gonzales69 may not speak english, and I may not speak spanish, but we both speak the language of virtual doodles on a computer monitor!
• Adds more focus / detail to how the game is played as a team
• Enables greater fluidity in communications
• Allows players who "random queued" (did not queue as a squad) into the same team to communicate better with one another
• Allows players to get creative with their use of their paintbrush (i.e. drawing X's around buildings that have enemies in them in the final circles to keep track of where the enemies are hiding)
• Contributes to the feeling of how well put together Apex is. In my view as a player of this game (and many others), a lot of what makes me feel "good" about a game has to do with the understated attention to detail / quality of life features that are present in a game. It helps the player feel like the developers of the game know their target audience and care about putting out a polished product.
• Could be used by esports commentators / tournament hosts / shoutcasters to describe what is going on ingame for the average viewer better (instead of relying on shorthand location "callouts" that not all viewers may be acquainted with).
  • Perhaps while working on this feature, the Apex devs could make a special version of it available for tournament hosts where the host can select any colour they want using a palette or something like that? Perhaps even add "layers" to the map that they can cycle through / toggle visibility of, so they could paint out a description of one team's movements, then without erasing their painting they could click a button to switch to a new layer and draw out the other team's movements and toggle between the two to show how they overlap/interact with one another.

Negatives:

• Given that this is an online game, some players are inevitably going to be childish and paint inappropriate stuff on the map. This would be a problem especially for streamers who would risk getting banned from their streaming platform if one of their teammates decided to troll them and write a slur or something like that. Here are some ideas I have that could serve to address this downfall / limit it's affect to the player:
  • Make the amount of "paint" limited for each team mate, so each team mate has a limited amount of paint that can be active on the map at any given time. Show a bar (or if we want to be cute and artsy, a little ink / paint jar) on the map that shows how much paint is remaining for the player when they open their map. Let the player use common keybinds like ctrl + z / ctrl + y to undo / redo their last paintbrush strokes, and another key to quickly remove all their paintstrokes from the screen. Any paint that is removed from the screen goes back into the player's remaining "paint amount". This would prevent players from griefing the map by covering it in useless scribbles, as well at least ensure that if they are going to draw anything inappropriate, they cannot be too elaborate with their drawing.
  • Add buttons in the map UI that allow you to toggle on/off the drawings from any player in your team at the click of a button
  • Allow players to opt in or out of seeing map paintings in their gameplay menu (akin to how players can opt in or out of team voice chat)
  • Allow players to selectively "mute" the drawings of certain players on their team (put a button next to the "mute voice" button in the ingame tab -> squad menu for each team mate that would toggle rendering of that team mate's drawings on the map)
  • Add a new report option to be able to report players abusing this mechanic, when a report is sent for that reason, the game could send a drawing history / timeline of changes for that player to Apex Legends moderators, where they'd be able to quickly jump through all the changes that player made to their drawings over the time of that match and see if the accused player drew anything naughty quickly and easily. From there it's up to your moderators to determine how to deal with the player (e.g. temporarily / permanently ban them from drawing on the map, temp/perm ban their account entirely, etc depending on severity of infraction and total offenses?)
• The map could become less legible / clear for more casual players, especially if there is a lot of paint on the map. Some of the suggestions above would serve to limit this effect as well, but another way to address it would be to make the opacity of any paint on the map semi-transparent, so you could still see the map / terrain underneath the paint.
• Might not be super useable for console players -- don't have any good idea on how to solve this, since I play on PC and have never really ever even had a console. Maybe add some sort of "stroke smoothing" mechanic that makes whatever you're drawing look less like a MS paint scribble drawn with a track pad and more "smooth"? Here is an example of what I mean, although if any Apex artists are reading, they likely already know exactly what I am talking about

Personally, I would definitely enjoy seeing this feature ingame, and I would definitely use it to help me call shots and communicate with my team better. I tend to play late at night, which means many of my games are filled with people from different timezones / regions. Quite often my teammates and I do not speak the same language(s), or if we do, our level of fluency is not the same which hinders how effectively we can communicate and work together. Being able to express strategies in a "universal language" (hey, if we can figure out what humans meant by 100,000 year old cave drawings, I'm certain that we can all figure out what each of us mean by our amateur level doodling skills) would allow me to play so much more effectively in situations like that.

I've also cross-posted this suggestion to the ApexLegends Subreddit to get additional feedback there, in case any developers are reading.