OW should get hero bans

First hot take, we should get hero bans.

Second hot take, they should be in all ranks.

1st take. Hero bans are positive, you can ban OP heroes or stop OP hero combos from becoming a thing.

My beloved Pharah was reworked because of 1 basic ability on Mercy, if hero bans were a thing you could ban the Pharah or the Mercy or both and my beloved character wouldn’t have had to been reworked, this is 1 example of why it’s better for balance and game experience.

2nd take. It should be available at all ranks because all ranks have issues with certain heroes, and it can improve the game experience at all ranks.

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Not a hot take, it’s needed.
Who cares about hero agency in comp, and at the high end only 5-6 heroes are ever picked anyway…

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The game would be so much better with hero bans.

I don’t care to see Sojourn nerfed so she’s useless in low elo just because she’s too strong for like less than 800 people.

Just ban her and move on, I’m sure high elo players would agree with this too.

I haven’t seen any complaints about bans in MR.

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High elo players and t200 players would ban Widow every game, dive doesn’t work against her at the highest skill floor… Winton is dead before he ever reaches her, Genji dies if he even attempts to go on her, they took sombra removed all her skill expression to counter widow than dumpstered her into the brainless reworked version we have now.

99% of players are never reaching this skill floor which is why they actually think dive works (when it doesn’t, if a t200 team can’t deal with widow any better than say a t100 team… than I’m sorry it proves that widow is actually busted but requires a ton of skill to actually play outside of just god aim)

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It’s true, Widow is a cancer on this game that they refuse to deal with.

Fact is, either rework her or allow players to ban her. It’s really that simple.

MR is on the scene now and I can see a lot of high elo players running ship to MR by the simple fact that they don’t have to deal with Widow 24/7 and also Hela and Hawkeye are banned almost every game anyway.

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Unlike widow, hawkeye can be dived and killed, but hela… nah she’s as busted as widow.

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It comes with its downsides but at this point I’m willing to give it a test to see how it is.

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Are those downsides really worse tho?

Hero bans and either open profiles or let us hover over playwr banner to see most played

What’s the benefit of open profiles? people just use them to flame.

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Releasing hero bans in game where people are already struggling to find a reason to play, the last thing it needs is having ppl’s mains banned from the game.

One thing you are right about: Mercy will begetting banned across the board.

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People’s mains will be banned, but idk if that would cause less people to play, I mean OW2 is already at it’s lowest point.

It’s possible bans could bring more people back.

It is one more limit that ppl will have to deal with.
If MR’s popularity is anything to go by, ppl doesn’t seems like like being limited too much.

People are gonna flame no matter what.

No. Banning “OP heroes” just causes a new meta to exist in it’s place while simultaneously ruining the experience for anyone who plays said banned characters. It’s a Band-Aid solution that doesn’t actually fix anything.

Just look at Rainbow Six Siege.

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Yeah, so lets give them more tools to do so, that makes sense.

But you can’t escape meta’s, but some metas are better than others, that is, if the OP hero is banned the meta thats formed after is probably better.

Vs no band aids at all and just letting the wound fester

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It also can mean less flaming, if i get some 2 10 dps refusing to swap against hard counters and i see theyre an otp i know to jist accept the L and move on

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A copy/paste from the last post I read saying hero bans should be added:

[quote]Hero bans would only make the game worse no matter how you look at it. The only characters that would get banned without a doubt would always be:

“OP” characters who are truly only as useful as the player.
Throw picks/ weak characters.
Or characters no one likes playing against.

And who falls into these categories? Over half the characters in each role. Of course, rank will definitely be a factor in whether Widow for example gets banned in bronze over Torb or Bastion, but the point still stands. And since they balance characters based on usage AND win rate, we’d be adding ban rate into the pick as well, effectively adding a BROAD definition of feedback into the mix. Feedback btw that contradicts the previous two things they use for balancing, which by default, is a bad idea.

Thus, resulting in otherwise unnecessary balance changes and players losing interest in playing because they don’t get to play their preferred choices when they want to. And considering how toxic the Overwatch community can be when it wants to, even in QP, all that is going to accomplish is either hold players back, resulting in more toxicity due to them effectively playing with a handicap and losing, or players will simply be spiteful and throw without actually throwing according to the TOS or whatever. I’m talking “I can’t play Reaper, so I’ll play Torbjorn, but never use my gun or turret” spiteful.

With that said, it would only result in more false reports/ bans due to this game’s easy to abuse report system in a situation that ultimately comes down to players having their fun/ performance hindered unnecessarily and players being salty over others playing just within the boundaries of the rules. Case in point, the Torb who’s playing like Rein because he can’t play Reaper.

No. Just no. The ONLY way a ban system would work is if it’s comp exclusive, all 10-12 players agree to bans each round, and those bans only last the one round. And even that would be iffy.[/quote]

Now, you can argue that a character that gets banned frequently is one that needs to be changed, but keep in mind awesome in bronze is probably trash in diamond. Bastion gets banned constantly in bronze, he gets nerfed to accommodate those players, now he’s garbage above gold.

Widow gets banned constantly in masters, now she gets nerfed so hard she’s a worse Ashe in every way that matters. Now Ashe gets nerfed to accommodate Widow because the sharpshooter should ALWAYS lose to the sniper at med-long range.

One meta replaces another because players decide the new one is too annoying and they go right back at square one once they get a couple bad matches of (insert character) being more annoying than the other.

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I don’t think anybody has ever said it should be in QP? So…half your argument is completely moot anyway.

Hero bans only really needs doing at the highest ranks where meta actually does matter. That’s it. In lower ranks “balance” barely matters.

What they need to do is give up on this pipe dream of achieving ultimate “balance”. It’s never going to happen. It never will happen. And they should stop focusing on it.

They should focus on making fun & unique heroes with great hero identities and interesting kits first. Hero bans in comp at the highest ranks will stop anything that’s too strong from taking over and being played therefore they can focus more on fun rather than this impossible “balance”

Yes, you can still tweak stuff and make balance changes, but you don’t have to ruin entire hero identities and playstyles to do so.

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The problem is that most reworks removed the identity of the heroes.
They should’ve made all other heroes more crazy instead of standardizing everything.

Ironman in Rivals can also perma-fly, basically Pharah on cracks, but he’s barely problematic

I don’t think that the metal ranks’ problem is the broken heroes. There is still much more to learn at those ranks that balance barely matters.