Hero pools is a brave and holistic change

Jeff, if you have a static meta, it’s because you’re doing a poor job at balancing. Make more frequent, smaller changes so that every hero is viable in some situations. Removing heroes from the pool is a horrible idea. Tracer one tricks get to go up 500 SR the week Winston is removed, and then ruin games for their team the next month once he’s back and they fall back down? Pharah drops to 0% pick rate because you removed Mercy? Doomfist wrecks everything because you removed McCree? The game is about constantly adjusting your composition MID-GAME to the changes the other team makes. By restricting that, you’re ruining what makes Overwatch Overwatch.

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It’s pretty nice to hear from you guys & what thoughts you have about it.

Would it be possible if we’d got scoreboard in the future too? And what do ya think about it?
I think it’d add more to the game than the current medal system & such.

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Yes. We’ve definitely considered it. Let’s try a week and see how it feels and if we need to make adjustments we will. But yeah… we’ve talked about rotating every day. We’ve also talked about rotating every match. We don’t like going longer than a week because we want more heroes played… but open to feedback.

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Have you considered doing game mode rotations at some point? I know we don’t have too many at the moment but if you were to add more game modes in the future (like the new one that will be in OW2) it would be fun to see this. I’d love to see a team version of “keep away” where a player carries an item and is defended by their team vs. the enemy, I would think this would help with utilizing the entire map rather than just certain points.

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Oh no he said symmetra this totally means a rework

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Its good that you are saying that if people dont like it you won’t continue with it. I think most people are scared that once you bring something, you wont take it away no matter how the feedback is.

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I’m concerned about SR variance. Are SR losses and gains being looked at too?

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One tricks will take the -50 SR penalty and leave, then play their hero in 10 minutes. You can’t do every game. You should scratch the whole idea, actually as I addressed above.

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Sorry to pop now and say this, may feel off topic but this is a good oportunity

do you guys have any ideas for bastion?

dude is doing so bad he doesnt even show in overbuff anymore

The discussion is open for OW2.

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Was there any talks about doing hero pools once per season? If so, why was that ultimately voted against?

Is the profile update gonna bring new level borders?

Please do this, more stats would be awesome to have.

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Jeff is on a roll today.

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Feels a bit too much to have hero bans and constant balance changes at the same time.

I don’t think hero pools will achieve your goal and will just create another ban meta as a single, random ban for tanks will ultimately lead to Dive being the only consistently reliable composition since it is the only tank composition with a redundant character compared to deathball or bunker.

The game was not designed with bans in mind nor were the rosters made with enough depth in order to support the idea. If you had implemented hero pools with OW2, and presumably more tanks and supports, it might have been better received. But as the game is, I think it is both premature and just another feature that we didn’t ask for that is indcative of the devs trying to do more by actually doing less - ultimately a lazy approach that only reduces player agency in the end.

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The only thing I wish Blizzard did to the profile is an ability to hide your own rank.

I don’t want to see it, because sometimes it gets on my nerves. I just want to focus on the game, not playing for the numbers. Could that possibly happen?

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Well there be a warning for the banned heroes before you join a competitive game? I feel like it would be a bad situation if a Mercy player comes from QP into competitive, only to find that Mercy can’t be played, and is basically ‘dead weight’ as a support player.

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Well, there’s another issue with this. If you change it too often, things will be chaotic as people will be confused as to what the meta would be for a certain week (or a day or 3 days).

What about maybe a seasonal rotation?
This way people can get used to certain ways to play and even used to certain heroes without having the issue of having a stale 5 month meta.

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no [i have to type twenty characters even though i work here]

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