Alright, counterpoint. Let me poke some holes in hero bans and let me know how you might solve these issues.
First, what is the purpose of adding hero bans? What problem/s do you believe it would solve and does it solve them and how well does it solve them?
What problems are introduced by adding hero bans and how impactful are they?
How would picking a character to ban work?
Does everyone on the team in every role get a say in banning heroes from each role?
Example: A tank player may want a say in which enemy support character is banned.
If someone doesnât get to ban the character they want (outvoted), will it cause some players to be upset and possibly throw because they didnât get their way?
How many bans does each role get?
Are we talking about just banning one hero from each role?
Does the ban apply to both teams or just the enemy team?
If âTeam Aâ chooses to ban Ana, will that just be for the enemy team or does Ana get banned from both teams?
If banning a character applies to both teams, not only would this most likely lead to infighting (you may be banning a character that your team wants to play), but it limits the roster by 2 characters for every role (if each team gets to ban one hero from each role).
Supports would go from 11 characters to choose from, but only gets to choose from 9 of those options.
If it only applies to one team, then it can become very one sided fights due to bad ban picks on one team.
If you canât beat x character and want to ban them, are you actually improving at the game?
So you are in Silver and you hate playing against Moira, so you constantly ban Moira, but if you canât beat a Moira in Silver, you are going to struggle with a lot of other things if you climb by being able to avoid playing against a character you struggle against in Silver. You havenât helped yourself, youâve just inflated a bunch of peopleâs ranks because they can avoid certain characters for awhile, but thatâs only helpful for so long. You eventually have to learn how to fight against them not only because you will not always get to ban the character you want, but also, youâve climbed, but still struggle with other similar issues from other characters.
Maybe the next rank up, Moira isnât the hero that often gets banned and now you are just getting stomped by Moira again and they are at a higher skill level, so you struggle even more.
One team can randomly benefit a lot more from hero bans than the other team:
Say one team just always wants to ban Widow⌠but the other team doesnât even have players that play Widow. Itâs basically a waste, but the other team may pick to ban a character that the other team does play often and they have to play other characters that they arenât as good with or that doesnât go well with their team comp.
It can easily become a game of chance and hoping you banned the correct character.
One Tricks:
Whether you think one tricking is fine or a bad thing, itâs irrelevant because they do exist. If someone one tricks and their hero gets banned (especially often), they might pick up other characters to play or they may just stop playing the game.
Even outside of one tricks, most players want to play their favorite character, especially on certain maps. If they canât, they may not want to play the game cause their favorite character may be one that gets banned often.
Players are most likely going to either ban pretty specific characters or just their own counters.
In low ranks you can expect the same 4 characters to be banned the most, effectively removing them from the game in those ranks. Players that play those characters arenât going to want to play if their favorite character is always banned.
The players in that rank also never learn how to properly play against those characters and when they move up a couple ranks and that player is no longer the favored banned character, they will most likely struggle even harder.
If a player is just picking their own counters and the character they play doesnât get banned, it could lead to very one sided fights since one team will not be able to easily counter throughout the entire game.
Overall, adding hero bans seems to be trying to solve one of two issues that should be solved in other ways.
- A playerâs skill. By removing a specific character because they are hard to play against isnât great because the player isnât learning how to fight against whatever character they have issues playing against. They arenât improving, weâve just sometimes removed a character they struggle against. We shouldnât be trying to replace player skill with an option to avoid that player learning how to deal with whatever character they struggle against. Like everyone else, they need to learn how to deal with that character.
- Balance issues. If the issue is that a character is too OP, so they get banned a lot until they are nerfed isnât that helpful either. The devs watch pick rate / win rates of each character and the complaints from players when a character is over tuned and they make adjustments. Banning a character over and over until the next patch might be somewhat helpful until it gets changed, but the change is going to happen anyways.
Adding bans seems to introduce a lot of possible issues that donât exist while not really solving any issues.
