Here’s a bit of a head scratcher for everyone to sink their teeth into while another faceless Valorant streamer drones tirelessly on in the background of your PC; Overwatch is finally fixing their hero bans to wait the community has been asking for, and it only took a singular month. This might be a record for Blizzard, although we’ll pencil that in until we fact-check it.
Goofs and gaffes aside, Blizzard introduced a weekly hero ban that would take into account every week, and the ban pool was separate for Overwatch League and Ranked play in Overwatch. This led to more than a few problems that the community pointed out during the announcement, yet it needed to actually occur before Blizzard altered them.
Overwatch League players were unable to practice their primary heroes for upcoming matches outside of scrimmages in-game that were specifically set to imitate the Overwatch League hero bans.
As Overwatch itself had a separate iteration of banned heroes for the week based on the most popular played, it meant that Ranked matches were wildly different from the League, and not necessarily in a good way. This coming Sunday, Blizzard has announced that all versions of Overwatch (League, Contenders, and Ranked play) will now be operating off of a singular ban list.
We’ve got an important update to Hero Pools as you know them 👀
Starting this Sunday, Watchpoint will be announcing each week’s unified Hero Pool for #OWL2020, @owpathtopro Contenders, AND @PlayOverwatch Competitive Play 🙌
Read more here ➡ https://t.co/fav5Yf3tyk pic.twitter.com/AVtxFHQI0i
— Overwatch Esports (@OW_Esports) April 9, 2020
This is the third attempt at bringing some communal satisfaction regarding the hero ban situation that allows Overwatch to be less…stagnant in terms of play and strategy month after month, thus hopefully avoiding another GOATs situation where you had six heroes played for over a year in all forms of Overwatch.
It was misery for the vast majority of players and fans that simply wouldn’t die, although that meta still holds some die-hard fans as the best of Overwatch, even when the League was hemorrhaging DPS players that were stuck on the bench for the length of the meta.
With it, however, comes equally interesting thoughts: Overwatch recently decided to ban whatever they wanted in an attempt to get Ashe some playtime in matches, bucking the rules they set for themselves in regards to hero bans. It saw four DPS bans, along with Baptiste and D. Va; it was a showdown of Pharah against Ashe, and if teams didn’t have an Ashe it was as good as forfeiting entirely in regards to counter-play. There’s some speculation in regards to whether or not this trend of altering the rules to check balancing will have any impact on the unified hero pools.
