You know how blizz stripped us the freedom to play who we want, when we want? They took it a step further and introducing hero pools, like maps pools (also not what we wanted). So starting next season, you can only play heroes they give us.
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What about the issue of player enjoyment, freedom, agency, creativity. The ability to play the same game they’ve come to expect for years? The fact that people will straight up boycott, meme, and deliberately trash the entire competitive experience?
You don’t see those issues or problems?
IQ check: What is the next number in the following sequence? 1,1,2,3,…
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Games change, especially games still updating and bringing new content along with constant balance changes.
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Yes, they’re very similar but there is a difference between Hero bans and the Hero pool system coming to Ranked.
Hero bans would most likely be in the hands of the player.
While Hero pools will not, which is a good thing IMO. 
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This is hero bans, just controlled by blizzard and not the player. I was fine with it either way.
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Because you seemed to have missed it, here’s the full paragraph that you’re quoting:
In other words, hero pools bring the upside of hero bans without enforcing the “ban meta” he was talking about.
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Player-chosen hero bans*
Fixed for you.
So instead of giving the players the power to pick and ban the characters they want, they just rebranded that power and gave it to themselves? Wow great job devs smart move. They must really hate this community.
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Hero pools are the perfect example of the top-down, patriarchal, “customer is always wrong” Activision corporate culture. Let the customer ban heroes? No, they’re idiots! We’re Blizzard, we’re geniuses, of course we should be the ones banning heroes!
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I’d prefer player picked hero bans on a game to game basis, but this has promise as well.
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Still updating and bringing new content? Debatable.
The heropool change is equivalent to making SC2 turn-based, or Hearthstone real-time. It reclassifies the entire game type. That kind of alienation isn’t something you do in a game with a live active playerbase.
If changes like this are on the table, what can we expect next? Randomly taking all the servers offline and denying us any gameplay at all?
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I’ve never been actually mad about anything that blizzard does to their game. Most times I honestly understand it. But this just seems like Activision is trying to tank all their games so they can absorb them into Activision. Like the wc3 launch and this back to back. They just want to kill their properties it seems like and start from scratch.
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To add to this if they ban out a character and nothing changes then it’s safe to say that hero is fine. If the ban a hero and the entire meta shifts in a day or two then they know changes must be made.
This should make it more clear which characters are problems and which arent.
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I’m not convinced that the playerbase won’t do that here too. One could soft throw in comp under the pretense that their main is banned, then essentially smurf their way back up a week later. And this could happen regardless of if their main is actually banned or not, or if the player is even doing this intentionally, they may not even notice. I’m particularly worried about the latter at scale.
I hate this, OW2 is confirmed to be bringing many new heroes and maps for free! Yes the game is still updating and bringing new content. The release schedule has just changed.
People wanted something done, so Blizzard is answering. If it is the correct choice, we will have to wait and see.
At least these changes are on the table. I would rather Blizzard be open to experimenting and get stuff wrong sometimes, than be unwilling to change and die
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I’m not sure what the exact definition of a hero pool is. Could you enlighten me please?
I was good with bans but I like this system way better.
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I’m not gonna lie, as I was reading Jeff’s forum post, I didn’t think that his main focus was on the player-controlled aspect of hero bans. I thought he just wasn’t in favor of banning heroes presently. This one surprised me quite a bit, and frankly seemed a little logically inconsistent with his post.
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You still have all the game to enjoy in every mode besides competitive, if you’re really that worried about it
Yep! Pretty much. It’s just another reason to leave the game.
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