Hero pools are staying, map pools are removed starting April 13

To simplify the competitive experience, we are going to no longer have rotating Map Pools starting April 14. Instead, Competitive Play will include all of the maps, with the exception of Paris and Horizon Lunar Colony. When we make updates to those two maps to improve their play in the future, we’ll add them back into the pool at that time.

Cool stuff I must say.

8 Likes

ok, this is epic!

2 Likes

I still don’t think Horizons is a bad map. Paris is trash but horizons is fine

1 Like

Meh, it could be better but overall I don’t despise it!

Like… What’s the gripe about it?

I don’t know about others but my main problem is that it’s really hard to do well on it if your team isn’t willing to work together and I’m in gold where we have a nice mix of throwers, tryhards and people who are better off in quickplay!

I prefer it over Paris any day although Paris does look nice!

2 Likes

Have you ever been to Paris? The city is filthy!! Much filthier than Los Angeles!! By a lot :worried::worried::worried::worried:

Dude it requires not a lot of coordination. Usually you only need the main tank and one healer to be paying attention.

But I feel you. Gold is a mess. Plat is even worse. And I here it doesn’t get any better the higher you go unfortunately.

2 Likes

I knew they wouldn’t get away with the stupiditity of random hero pools with no explanation. I still don’t like the fact it isn’t the same bans as owl but this is far better than the current situation.
I’m glad to see that they actually listened for once.

2 Likes

Low diamond all you get is overleveled players, people who bought their account, 6 stack tryhards or people who leave due to “lack” of co-operation

Its not fun to be attacked by 5 stack who will blame you, because they cant ever blame their group members.

I saw the “Removing Map Rotation” and I had to check to make sure this wasn’t an april fools joke gone wrong. Saw that paris and lunar colony are also excluded until they fix it, I had to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming. You guys would let me know if this was a dream or not right? Bliz finally listening to people and fixing something they did? This just can’t be real can it? Theres no way things are this good right?

2 Likes

Yeah the map changes are all good and well but have you actually put any thought into the hero ban changes?

Now because 0.1% of people and their picks IE Pro’s will get to decide whether you can or cannot play your hero in the up coming week. So to summarise 0.1% of the games population dictate for 99.9% what can and cannot be banned.

I literally do not think they grasp the concept of the two different audiences, requiring two different things.

While I don’t want to bring another game into the equation, this is literally the best analogy… the League off Legends current Tier lists are different for low sr and high sr.

They have multiple tier lists for different elo (SR), so the tier list of reccomended/best performing champions in low rank will be different to that of the list for top tier champions at high rank. They realise not everyone is a mechanical genius at the champion to make them top tier.

Blizzard are essentially assuming we are all pro’s, capable of playing every hero to its maximum potential, which is crazy and soo ridiculous.

Firstly let me start off by saying I like the map pool change I think that is a good decision.

The ban is a terrible and naive choice.

So they are changing the ban system next week, it’ll gather the pick rates over the high competetive play matches and only heroes with a pickrate above a certain percentage from the previous week will be banned.

That is even worse though for Supports, like literally we have 7 and only 1 hitscan style healing support… you are going to remove the most popular most likely each week? (Have you even considered what this will do to your dps queues?)

I just really have no clue why this is going to be a thing? Your market is not mostly comprised of high competetive play/OWL, the top competive gameplay is in no way representitive or relfective of your playerbase or what it requires.

Tell me do most people even pick meta or do they pick what they are good at and what they enjoy? We dont need the oppression of the top comp scene/OWL hero bans to be universally applied to all competeive ranks.

We play for different reasons at different levels. Top comp/OWL will play whichever hero will give them the highest chance of winning regardless of if they enjoy it or not. People playing recreactionally will not.

Why are you forcing this upon all of us? This going to be like Anna banned (0 hitscan healers availalble for a week), Anna available and immune from ban, Anna banned again… supports quit because they are fed up with the oppression.

It would be different if we had mulltiple hitscan healers, but we don’t annas playstyle if very unique, yet you look at dps and you have hitscan mcree, soilder, widow, ashe ect. So they all have alternatives, we don’t. You can ban 2 hitscans and still have 2 hitscans left, you ban Anna and 0 hitscan healers (baptiste is projectile btw).

What I am trying to say is, you are killing whats left of your playerbase

Have you really not learnt anything? The fact you think this is proportionate to the feedback provided by your primary player base and what they want is just perplexing to me.

1 Like

They’ve completely failed to address the massive underlying cause of 90% of the problems with this game. Expectation of utter strangers to play together in a team.

They utterly failed to gave any kind of inbuilt clan / guild finder in the game, and had the bright idea of punishing players using group up after win with harder opposition.

Even a bog standard mobile game has inbuilt alliance finder. Can’t believe a AAA rated team based shooter doesn’t.

So rather than bite the bullet and develop a decent clan system they’re doing all these bull crap measures: 222, hero bans, map bans (thank god that’s gone).

Really hoping Ow2 has inbuilt clan finder, or I can see it degenerating into a mass of throwers and leavers super quickly.

I’m really glad that they realized that map rotations wasn’t really what we needed but I guess it was just a stop gap for changing up gameplay.

Perhaps hero bans isn’t the correct choice but it’s the best we have until someone comes up with a better way for us to change up what heroes get played in games across the board. I feel like that’s what they are trying to figure out.

1 Like

Yes, they basically said that high level players are going to decide which heroes are going to be banned each week. I mean, they are deciding based on the heroes they will pick with active hero bans.

So in a way, players are choosing which heroes are getting banned for a week and yes, I don’t expect that they will decide based on someone like me, who is not playing on top level, which heroes will get banned.

They are high level players because they understand and play game better than I do, for example.

On the other hand, I don’t understand their reason why everyone else gets same hero bans if it’s top players that decide the bans? Why not just above diamond or something like that get hero bans while the rest of us keep “learning” so to say?

For lower tiers, meta doesn’t mean anything. And people who follow meta that is on top level, they can still play it on lower tier and progress fast if that’s what they want to do.

Finally! Now we know if hero pools are staying or leaving!

And I’m severely disappointing in Blizzard. This season has been the worst season I have ever played. I have never felt so restricted in my OW career then I have this past month with limited map pools, unbalanced heros, and the worst of all hero bans.

I didnt even want to try it but I knew my whining would be less genuine unless I gave it a shot. Well, I tried it. I tried getting into the spirit of it. But it sucks. I hate it.

Now that I know, I can quit OW now. Take your hero bans and shove it.

We initially implemented Map Pools to accomplish two major goals:

  • In the short-term, greatly reduce the number of matches played on Paris and Horizon Lunar Colony. We’ve seen a lot of good feedback that these two maps could use some changes

Well, if that’s such a major thing why include Lunar this season without any changes… Also if paris and lunar is so disliked wouldn’t it make more sense to just remove them to begin with rather than introducing a map pool system? Seems like a very overcomplicated solution.

Also when are they gonna admit that people have about the same hatred towards the rest of the 2CP maps as they do for Lunar and Paris? Just trash 2CP and be done with it already…

Good I cant wait!!!

I don’t fault that, I play in a 3 stack but at least try to invite people to parties. Lotta people out here who just blame others for the way they play when in fact it’s the blamer who can’t get kills for crap