Hero pools vs Hero bans or OWL vs. Playerbase

General Discussion
41

Solution:
Vote before you queue, have the system save your settings per role basis.

Vote options: Ban 2 heroes, Protect 1 against banning

12 players = 24 ban slots, 12 protection slots

Minimum votes needed for a hero to be banned = 3

Maximum heroes that can be banned per role = 1 tank, 2 dps, 1 support

Ban only the heroes that have at least 3 slots confidence, once the ban slots have been calculated against protection slots.

If two heroes have the same number of ban slots, let the system randomly ban either of the two if they would go over the hero per role ban limit.

Realistically, you will rarely have more than 2 heroes banned per match if that, which is more than enough to shake up the established meta, while being chaotic enough for the “ban meta” to have a hard time settling in.

Once in match votes can’t be changed, so pressuring to change their votes is pointless.

Make voting anonymous.

42

He was wrong. Only in top tier play would somewhat of a ban meta develop but not really because it would vary map to map. Straw poll posted on forums a while ago on who people would ban showed a very wide variety of heroes.

43

All you’re really saying here is “I don’t trust the player base to not ban my favorite over powered hero every game”

44

Straw poll where there’s no consequences nor social pressure from seeing prior selections or knowledge of what better players prefer?

Jeff said they researched it, and I believe him. What he said also makes sense to me as a result.

You seriously think people wouldn’t get salty over ban picks not going their way?

45

Who have abused every tool they’ve been given.

literally the same thing for hero pools, as the most picked gets banned the following week.

same thing as the last.

And hero pools provides clear statistical input without player bias. Which undeniably is a better option.

https://clips.twitch.tv/SlipperyAttractiveTrayOpieOP

This clip really needs to be spammed on these forums i feel.

46

Both are terrible ideas and never should have even been considered.

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47

Have the bans resolved prior to starting the match then? If they want ban picks going their way, they can always form a six stack and ensure at least one of their ban picks goes their way. Basically, more people you queue with - provided they make the same ban picks as you, increases your chances of having that particular hero banned / protected.

48

Jeff also said that they would revert the Mercy rework if it didn’t work out and players didn’t like it.

… it needed 14 additional nerfs and players still don’t like it. He is a liar.

49

Hero bans are even worse than hero pools for us average players imo, as players can troll players by banning their mains, the ban will not be known before Qing up, it’s hard to reach a consensus in pug teams, and it will take up more time.

For OWL I think hero bans could be more interesting than pools, but pools could be interesting too.

For normal comp play I don’t want either.

50

That’s basically why hero bans would work. They’re designed in such a way that people will abuse the system to get rid of the heroes that are op at their rank. Have the community work for you, not against you.

Banning most picked heroes solves absolutely nothing. It will just ensure that most popular heroes get banned. Genji and Mccree are extremely popular, yet they are in no way shape or op meta defining or op at their ranks. Ban Mercy - whatever for?

I disagree. Popularity of a hero does not directly equate its strength at any rank but the highest.

I like Emongg, but lets not pretend that guy always plays what his team needs him to play. Or did you forget his Roadhog and Wreckingball escapades and how much games he lost for straight out refusing to switch?

51

People have abused every tool they have been given… so giving them hero bans would work?

Did you think that one out? There would become a ban meta which defeats the entire purpose of curbing the meta with hero bans, creating a new meta, and we would continue to stagnant on a single team comp until the next big balance patch comes out.

Banning the most picked the next week solves the meta from stagnanting, forcing people to play something else the following week.

Good, then something else can be played the next week and the hero’s they counter will get be stronger when they’re banned.

You disagree because you’re conflating popularity with pick rate, meanwhile pick rate has shown time and time again to be upheld by some of the strongest picks during that patch.

The guy literally knew this was coming. Should clue you into thinking he also knows why it’s coming

52

I mean I don’t play comp so hero pools doesn’t affect me anyway, but realistically I can and have played any number of heroes within both the tank and support roles both pre- and post-RQ. I play a lot of Orisa but I’ve been doing that since she was released; I like her as a tank a lot and even with the back-to-back nerfs she’s gotten I continue to enjoy her more than almost any other tank.

The only role I don’t have a lot of diversity in is DPS where I’m mostly Pharah, and I don’t think anyone is calling her OP in any seriousness.

My lack of trust is from watching how hero bans are handled in LoL, which several friends of mine play: they weaponize apps like Blitz and third-party performance trackers to determine who is good at what heroes then ban based off that information after banning the OP new releases or reworks. It looks and sounds toxic as hell, which is appropriate given how toxic my friends are in the game.

1 Like
53

Most of the negative opinions seem to be coming from mid to low ranks. I expect season 22 will remove hero pools for diamond and below or even masters and below. Streamers and pros seem very on board, so the top 5% of players will probably like keeping the system. I think once the dust settles on season 21, the devs will know pretty well what the community wants and can tune it accordingly

54

You don’t get it: GMs can’t form 6 stacks.

55

Jeff did say they’d considered an SR barrier. Given the forum response that may be necessary, lol.

It’s interesting that the barrier between ranks has been getting more and more defined. SR gains change at Diamond, and at GM stacking becomes banned. I wonder if at some point they would need different UI or more explicit walls between certain ranks.

56

This is kinda what I am talking about. We have vastly different perspectives, yet neither of us is wrong. GOATS was a huge problem for those of us who played a lot of six stacks, because sooner or later GOATS would be whipped out if the other team started losing - forcing you to go GOATS as well, provided they just didn’t go full GOATS to begin with. Dive had a lot of problems on its own, because it was at its core a race to which team could kill the other team’s zen first. Just because you didn’t encounter GOATS in solo Q doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real problem - like people switching to GOATS when they were losing.

Brand new game - you mean like Warcraft: III was supposed to be “reforged?”. Phbt or how their wow classic servers are actually worse than private servers? Or how Diablo Immortal was meant for phones. I’ve lost that blind faith in Blizzard to deliver a good game. I am more inclined to believe that Overwatch 2 will be a reskin of the old game. It is also the reason why we haven’t received any new heroes - because they’ve been “working on them” and saving them for Overwatch 2. I’ll be honest, Overwatch 2 failed to impress. We got to see potentially 2 new heroes and that was it. They told us that Overwatch will contain 3 new heroes, which btw if they continued their original pace of releasing new heroes - we would’ve gotten more at a time where we desperately need more tanks and supports.

Unfortunately hard counters exist, and there’s not much you can do about them sometimes. Way teamwork has been baked into the game, is that you pretty much have to rely on your teammates to do their job. This is also, in my opinion the root of so much toxicity.

Pray tell, what’s your SR? I don’t know because your profile is hidden. I am genuinely curious how you would deal with them in diamond, let alone in lower ranks where your dps lack the mechanical skills to counter them properly (or god forbid - they don’t even try which is what happens more often than not)

So far, the main difference between my tanking in diamond and in gold, is that if I join voice chat I posess enough charisma to “persuade” people to do what I want which is enough to maintain a positive win percentage.
Me tanking in diamond is not much different than me dtanking in gold except that I will get away with more mistakes and my supports are less likely to enable me in gold. (game just feels slower)

Certain heroes are only a problem at certain ranks. Similarly, some heroes are actually EASIER to play in high ranks, for example wrecking ball in higher ranks tends to work because your dps can take advantage of the space you make. DPS in lower ranks are lost without a shield to play behind.
Similarly, I find that it’s actually easier to play around reaper in diamond than it is in low plat as a main tank, because your teammates are less likely to punish him. So pray tell me, I obviously know what I am doing - and yet I struggle at lower ranks because… maybe, just maybe some characters are overtuned in certain ranks while perfectly balanced or even underpowered in others.

And yet, I have climbed as a tank. It is by far harder to “counter” certain heroes in lower ranks as a tank than it is in higher ranks. It’s just the way this game works. Each rank has its own meta, which you have to play - and then forget it once you get into the other rank unless you have superior reaction times, mechanical skill, or great shotcalling - provided you have enough charisma for it.

Anyways, we’re getting off track.

Because unless you’re at the very top ranks, you can still play non-meta heroes and win if you’re good with them. By limiting the hero pool even further, you’re narrowing the pool of viable comps even further.

Strength of the hero does not directly correspond to its pick rage. Mccree, Genji and Mercy are quite “weak” heroes, and in no way meta defining - yet they are extremely popular because of their playstyle. If most popular heroes are banned for pools, it achieves nothing other than pissing people off. People often know what the meta is, and don’t want to play it because they enjoy playing something else, provided that something else doesn’t put them at a significant disadvantage where they feel they “can’t win”.
Hero bans allow us to regulate the hero pool at each rank. Furthermore, it takes more time for ban meta to develop - which means we can expect ladder to be generally chaotic with hero bans, which is more likely to result in a greater variety of camps from match to match.

Didn’t they just say that they are going to pursue aggressive rebalancing to target the meta heroes? Even if they didn’t - people get bored of the meta. Hero bans allow the community to channel that boredom constructively. If they form groups - the larger the better, and specifically target key meta heroes, they can force the other team to play non-meta comp as well. Because of hero bans, there is always a greater pool of heroes to pick from that are considered meta, and that in itself is a win. If we can’t remove meta - we might as well make more heroes meta.

I am interested in diversity, but I see no benefits of hero pools that hero bans already don’t provide in addition to other benefits.

57

Hero bans in the base game is a terrible idea. People’s opinions on who is op and not will make certain heroes unplayable due to being banned. I put in over 1k hours on Tracer alone on my main account and I would hate to see Tracer banned every single game.

I would not be playing this game if it was for hero bans.

58

A hero being banned 100% of the time is a clear indication that that hero needs to be revamped though.

That said, I highly doubt that tracer will be banned any single game, let alone every single game - though admittedly I do not know which rank you play at.

59

Not much more dramatically than metas do now, and no differently than other players banning heroes that you want to play with/against.

Sure, technically this reduces the number of options, but the fact that meta matters less down here also means that the impact of a limited hero pool will be felt less (unless something pubstompy is among the banned heroes).

I am a pleb’s pleb, but even I have been in matches where people jump down each other’s throat for picking off-meta heroes. While the meta legitimately does matter less here, it does not stop people from thinking it is the be-all and end-all—and the worse someone understands the game, the more unbending they are apt to be on that point.

I am cautiously hopeful that a rotating hero pool will keep the meta slaves off-balance enough to sap some venom away from the teammate micromanagement they try to do.

Entrenched metas already do this. I was watching a stream the other day where someone was yelling at DSPStanky (who has been variety streaming and recently dipping back into OW on occasion) for picking Lucio in the spawn room, because Lucio was not what they deemed to be the meta pick. DSPStanky.

Mirror matches are already nearly mandatory in the top ranks / OWL, and far too many people think they’re mandatory below that, and maybe—just maybe—more frequent changes will prompt people to assume less about team comps and try more new tactics.

Good. Bastion/Reaper/etc. should not be banned at low levels and unviable at high levels.

We have just as much access to posting complaints and suggestions as we ever have. And where the playerbase follows so very hard the opinions of certain streamers, a non-trivial number of heroes who get banished to the shadow realms will be 100% down to some nonsense that someone said on a YouTube rant with little basis in reality (i.e. “RNG orbs” “more damage than Soldier” “shoots logs” “superjump is skilless and unkillable”)

Unless you main a hero who gets constantly banned, or you are solo queuing and get outvoted every game, or are a main/OTP who is forever getting locked down by the enemy, etc. etc.

Heroes being removed from the pool drops the number of possible viable comps, no matter whether it’s the players or devs doing it. Players’ perception of OP/UP is not especially reliable and very susceptible to outside influence.

No more or less than a limited hero pool does. Player-led bans would stagnate instantly into a ban meta, where some heroes would be must-bans and others would be counter-bans.

So, once again, nobody ever gets to play Bastion/Sym/Reaper/Pharah below the ranks where those heroes start getting dunked on. Super cool.

And also, that means you never have to improve and learn how to deal with those heroes; you just get to remove the obstacle.

Devs have many ways to assess this already, from the firm numbers on their end of things, to the stream of comments on here and on social media.

This, IMO, is why metas have become so very entrenched so very fast already. The majority of the ladder doesn’t have much business worrying about what’s “meta”, because we and our teammates aren’t at a skill level where the tiniest differences in team comps give us an edge over one another. But because OWL / favorite streamer / YT channel says “This is meta”, everyone instantly takes that as gospel and runs it into the ground while crying about it, regardless of if they like those heroes or are any good at them. People yell at each other on the hero select screen over reasonably strong heroes who just aren’t THE meta pick.

Rotating hero pools means there will be less time for firm metas to form, which means that OWL isn’t going to have rock-solid meta comps, and it means that people have less grounds to go, “THIS IS WHAT OWL DID SO DO IT OR I THROW”.

Having an overlap of a limited hero pool and more aggressive balancing will mean that sometimes, the unquestionably strongest hero choice in any given category may not be available to play, or maybe the hero that enables them the best is not available (i.e. what happens to GOATS if either Rein or Brig is off the table), which means you have to actually think about what you’re going to do rather than dutifully yelling at your teammates to play what [YTPersonality] said was the only hero worth playing.

60

kaplan logic was flawed tho. basically stating that we will ban the same. u think low ranks wont ban moria??? they complain about her tons. while high ranks would prob ban double shield hero.
the next ban being a flex ban choose the outcome of the games style.
only ban meta would be first ban pick other than that, each ban would be different. like if ur team wants to dive, brig might be the next ban. or bap if u want to do the zarya hanzo combo.