A Competitive Banning System that works

This is a bit of a long one, so buckle up, its about making comp less of a repetitive cesspool.

While my friend and I were playing competitive this season, and for the last few, we have been continually frustrated with the almost identical comps considering the low number of players in our rank. I am Diamond 3 (whereabouts#1531) and my friend is Platinum 2 (ToastySponge#1237). The main problems we think need to be addressed are pre-made comps, 1-tricks, a lack of new and interesting characters in play, a lack of bans, and flexibility of people and heroes.
Now, the solution we think would best benefit this, a pool of heroes banned out each week. Similar to the 16 Free-to-Play heroes each week, there would be 16 heroes banned from the competitive pool each week. It would be a random selection with a balanced amount from each role. Ok, before you start complaining in the replies, please read through our reasoning.

  1. Pre-mades would be harder to create.
    If a random 16 heroes were banned each week, stacks of 4 or 5 people could not go into a competitive game with a stun-lock composition that is highly coordinated to be the most efficient to take on our lowly 2 stack.
  2. Less viability for 1-tricks.
    While it is impossible to completely eradicate 1-tricks from the game, it would be nice to occasionally be free from their characters. The pool of players in our ranks is not very large, especially considering we are both college students and we typically play before we go to bed. So seeing an enemy who we know one tricks a hero means we either ban the hero, and leave open other annoying or unbalanced heroes, or leave it, and hope to deal with it.
  3. There would be new and interesting heroes in play.
    With a random pool of heroes being banned, some of the main heroes that get played nearly every game are likely to get banned each week, and will not have to be worried about as first pick/first ban. New heroes may be shown as a counterpart to the heroes that are banned, possibly because they were countered by one of them. This allows for a broader game, and more enjoyable and diverse games, getting us farther away form the repetitiveness of League of Legends.
  4. There would be no need to increase ban numbers.
    Having the number of heroes grow at what can still be considered a decently high rate, there has been an issue with too few bans being available to counteract the numerous heroes that seem to always get played. If 16 heroes are banned from competitive each week, there is no need to increase ban size, because odds are at least a one or two of these heroes will not be in the pool, so no need to increase the ban size.
  5. Backs up the idea of trying heroes in different ways.
    If a hero that you like to play at a given time is one of the 16 heroes banned for the week, then you will be forced to try a new hero, but this is NOT a bad thing. By trying out similar heroes, or even those completely different, you may experience them in a new way that you had not thought of them before. For example, ToastySponge is a support main, and typically has a set of healers that he prefers to play. However, at one point he decided to try Kharazim, which he did not particularly pride himself in. He tried out a different build, and it worked much better than he had before. It was a different play style, and he enjoyed the character so much more. If people are forced to try these things, they will likely experience the same types of game-changing realizations as well.
  6. It already happens in Overwatch
    In Overwatch, there is already a pool of characters that are banned each week, and it shifts the meta a considerable amount. AND THE POOL OF CHARACTERS IS ALREADY SO MUCH SMALLER. If it works in Overwatch with a much smaller pool, why could it not work in shifting the way Heroes of the Storm is played as well.

I write all of this out hoping that its something that at least gets looked at and tried. My friend and I are getting extremely tired of the same compositions over and over again, and we want to have a diverse and changing game. If we could try this out in the PTR at some point, I am sure it would at least gain a little traction.

Thank you for reading through my TED Talk.

1 Like

Problem with this is that people will just not play during the weeks that their favourite heroes are banned. People play because they want to play, not because they have to play. Make them not want to play, by temporarily banning their favourite heroes, and they will not play.

Cannot really compare due to how drastically different the game design and balance is. Overwatch is all about hard countering and dynamically swapping heroes as far as I am aware. As such the players know and regularly use multiple heroes every match. Being denied a single hero makes little difference other than to the strengths or weaknesses of heroes which will make them better or worse choices given the current situation.

This is very different from Heroes of the Strom where a single hero must be used throughout an entire match and there are a lot more heroes to choose from. This rather static nature of the player’s hero means that players will generally spend more time with specific heroes they like to play than others. Additionally HotS has a lot more heroes than Overwatch so the player will average significantly less time with each hero individually which will make their skills with such heroes significantly worse than with their best heroes. The result is that removing a specific hero from being available will seriously detract from the fun of anyone who mostly plays that hero to the point they might not even play.

The reason draft bans do not detract from fun in the same way is that they are not known in advance. People have already committed to play a match by the time the draft bans happen, and as such having their favourite hero banned from time to time is unavoidable, unpredictable and something they must work with as part of the game.

Well what’s the issue with a couple people not playing when their favorite hero is banned. I would personally wait an extra 5 or 6 minutes in queue if it meant that I was given a more exciting game. If people choose to only play the same couple of heroes, and don’t like to have fun and experiment, then let them not play for the week that the heroes are banned. I would prefer to have a more fun and changing game then have the same people playing the same heroes in pre-mades or as 1-tricks. Also, 16 of 89 heroes is not a lot considering how many ranged assassins there are. In my idea, it would be proportional to how many heroes are in each category. So 2-3 tanks and bruisers. 3-4 healers and melee assassins, and the rest ranged assassins, with an occasional ban on support heroes. The number of similar heroes that could fill the role of one of the banned heroes should make it so that a niche is never unfilled. Finally, with the number of heroes in the game, people SHOULDN’T be focused on the same couple heroes in order to “master” them. It is currently required in low ranks in order to have any chance of ranking up as I recall, but this would solve that. People they are playing against would also not be able to make pre-mades or main a few heroes, because they may be banned. So this diversified gameplay for everybody. Having 16 of 89 heroes banned in competitive each week will just create a shifting meta, same as Overwatch, and allow for more diversification in lower and higher ranks. Sorry if this was a little confusing, typed it on my phone, let me know if I need to reexplain anything.