@jip couldn't garden variety pings be "issued" instead of making a parallel system? I'm sure there's a reason why they couldn't, I was just curious. Unfortunate to hear it's such a daunting task though.
It does bring up a trivia question, though, maybe some AI dev could chime in: technically, can an AI ally ping a human player? If yes, that would be an interesting way of realizing such a feature, and a good way of making sure new players get to see it. I'm no programmer but this feels like the kind of problem that's right up that alley and an AI might already implement much of the functionality needed for such a feature, like detecting threats, for instance.