The reason I say hero bans won’t benefit anyone is because it will inevitably affect everyone either due to the rotations or balance changes. Not everyone likes comp, and if your main keeps getting banned in comp, why would you keep playing comp if your fun and performance are more limited?
As for the parts about Widow? Not a widow main, but she makes up most of the complaints when people make posts against OHKs or snipers. How is Widow not a problem? I already answered that. She’s a sniper, it’s her job to be at long range and OHK with head shots. “She doesn’t belong in a game like overwatch” as some people say, but that same thing could be applied to varying degrees on several other characters, and the number of complaints against them are significantly lower if not non-existent.
One character on a roster of around 40 isn’t ever going to have the power to ruin a game. And nerfing her like how people keep demanding will only accomplish the problem I keep repeating. If the actual sniper is nerfed to a sharpshooter, what is the og sharpshooter getting nerfed to so the (former) sniper can keep enough of her identity to stay a sniper?
Hanzo gets nerfed too because why wouldn’t he on the logic of snipers, then we’re back to either his S8 state which obviously didn’t work, or we get something comparable to the useless version of him from that last workshop playlist several months ago (scatter arrow replaced Storm and was useless, 10 shots per “mag”, faster draw speed, arrows didn’t feel any bigger despite doing so little damage he took like 5 to kill 1 guy). The “no skill spammer” becomes a projectile sharpshooter again with buffs to other parts of his kit so he can operate better than back in S8, or he becomes a spammer that’s less reliable in every way.
And who would get nerfed to accommodate him so he can better operate at his intended ranges? Cassidy would be my first guess.
Again. No one, even you, will benefit because either they’ll inevitably find themselves on the receiving end of not being able to play their character, false reports that we both know will increase, the problem shifting over to QP so people can play who they want, spiteful players who would be wrongfully banned, or their characters (once they roll around) will get nerfed into oblivion and the cycle will continue. But believe what you want. I understand some people can’t see as far ahead as I tend to do accurately.
This entire argument hinges on “me not being able to play an OP hero” somehow makes OW a less fun place and outweighs the other 8 people in the lobby having more fun because they don’t have to play against an OP hero.
Cause fundamentally if people don’t have problems with a hero, they’re not gunna ban it.
Like Widow cops a lot of flak in these conversations, but I bet that if a hero ban was implemented, you’d see a LOT more people willing to play Tank because they’d have the option to NOT play against Ana or Sombra, because those two heroes are massive fun vampires for the Tank role.
You obviously didn’t read the other 4 paragraphs, so I guess this is it. You have a right to your opinion, and I have a right to be right based on logic and pattern recognition.
I just described how bans work in other games. People overwhelmingly choose to ban heroes that they do not like playing against.
To emphasize this. In League of Legends:
In the top 15 most banned heroes, only ONE has a win-rate in the top 15. (Lulu)
In the top 15 most banned heroes, FOUR have a pick-rate in the top 15.
From this we can figure out that there’s a significantly stronger correlation between people banning stuff because it’s annoying to play against (or they’re just sick of playing against it) than them just banning it because there’s strong.
Obviously though that’s just a surface level analysis and you’d have to get into the reeds of individual play patterns, ranks, coordinations, matchups and so on.
Lmao, mixing up quotes to try and make someone look like a fool. Try reading more than just bits and pieces of a response, or you just do it and more to yourself. I know what to expect if hero bans are implemented, and I know you wouldn’t like them for very long.
Yes, logic and pattern recognition, something a surprising number of people lack these days. But oh well, it’s 2025, I shouldn’t expect the minimum at this point.
I mean your “logic” is already on shaky grounds when you say stuff like “1 hero in 40 doesn’t have the power to ruin a game” when this conversation wouldn’t exist if that weren’t the case.
Like half the most hated metas in the game just straight up could have not existed if a ban system allowed us to remove core pieces of those metas, whether it be Brig, Widow, Mercy, Sojourn, Orisa, Sigma, Mauga, Sombra and so on.
Because a significantly underrated aspect of hero bans is that it allows you to remove parasitic synergies that massively impact a heroes strength, whether that be Brig + Lucio, Mercy + Widow, Ana + Genji and so on.
We all know why hero bans are being brought up again in here… it’s because of Marvel Rivals…
I know it’s hard to get it through some of the thickest heads within the OW community but Overwatch =/= Marvel Rivals.
Overwatch is a counter-pick hero based game and always has been since Day 1.
Just because 5v5 turned Overwatch into more of a Deathmatch type of game doesn’t really take away the relevance of the counter-pick system, it is still very strong and needed, in order to have a good gaming experience.
Even though the playerbase enforced the “one-trick” mindset and even though the OW team enforced the “one role” type of mindset since RQ in 2019, it doesn’t change anything to the counter-pick mechanic that is still there.
The OW team promised they would tone down the counter-pick effectiveness at some point (just like they promised the weapon inspect animation ) but they didn’t…
Anyway, my point is that counter-picking in Marvel Rivals is not as strong as in Overwatch since it’s not even the same type of game (FPS vs TPS) and it’s far easier to be effective with a hero you’re good at, even against another hero who counters you on paper, whereas in Overwatch it’s a completely different story.
OW coud get hero bans someday again (it was a failure the first time around for obvious reasons I just explained), but it would first need a lot of rework or changes to the core of Overwatch and I don’t see that happening just yet… They’re barely working on 6v6…
And if widow weren’t the case, the next character that would be “ruining” the game, when the only people who are good enough to make her an actual threat make up probably 10-15% of the players, would be Ashe, Sojourn, Cass, and S76. And more people can probably play any of them effectively than Widow, so that “(insert character) is ruining the game” argument would fail about as quickly as it’s made after the fact, especially when these characters are more likely to be pocketed than Widow.
So, if she is actually ruining the game for anyone, it’s not a significant enough number of people for Blizzard to care about swapping her sniper for a marksman rifle. And if they do, you’ll have a more frequent mess to deal with that’s probably just as hard if not harder to deal with than the Widow, except you may not have access to a good counter because that counter got banned.
And if she actually is ruining the game for anyone, why are they still here and not playing anything else where 1 weapon or character isn’t ruining their experience?
Again, this ENTIRE argument rests upon the idea that people ban on what is objectively the strongest, instead of what they actually ban, which is whatever makes them miserable to play against.
This just highlights a design problem with Overwatch in that heroes have to be balanced around the idea of their hard-counters being omnipresent.
If X hero starts being oppressive because Widowmaker is essentially deleted from the game, just nerf that hero lmao.
A single ranked match is already long enough for me to be able to grill a steak. Adding hero ban is gonna take more time. Not to mention its not necessary because horrible players are horrible no matter who you ban. I am against to implement it pre Masters.
I feel overwatch is one of the shorter ranked games to complete, i can finish a ranked game in like 10 minutes to 20 minutes (unless its one of those games where we keep going into overtime).
That happens anyway right now with all the “balancing” they’ve done. How that completely flies over your head I really do not know.
They’ve ruined entire hero identities and changed so many heroes from what made them actually fun to play in order to achieve absolute “balance”.
Which is impossible.
They’ve tried to make every single hero as equally as competitively viable for balance and it hasn’t worked.
With hero bans you don’t have to really do this, you can focus on making heroes, strong and most importantly fun. That’s what should be important. Heroes are the core of this game and them being unique and fun is what draws people to them. Making each hero more and more similar for them to be “balanced” has been nothing but negative the vast majority of the time.
Hero bans will allow high rank competitive players to ban certain heroes that are causing too much of a problem in high ranks and change what heroes and metas are played match to match as well. This only helps with competitive integrity as more heroes will be able to see play rather than the same few exact heroes for months on end until the next “balance” patch.
You can still do tweaks to heroes and stuff, but you don’t need to do nowhere near as much as you do now.
The game has done nothing but balance and balance and balance and has it got anymore fun? Really? Has it? No.
) but they didn’t…