What happened to hero bans

[Kaedi-11739]

Hero Pools (as they were officially called) were stopped in the public matchmaking games for a variety of factors. Most notably lack of player engagement and the alledged diversity of hero balance changes made through the Experimental Card (feel free to laugh at that second part, I don’t blame you).

@Molly

Hello everyone,

We have a new update to share regarding Hero Pools. We’ve been listening to your feedback and constantly iterating on the feature behind the scenes. We initially implemented Hero Pools to address issues with stagnating metas and to keep match-ups exciting and fresh. However, we’ve found that the introduction of Experimental Card and increased hero balance updates has helped us work towards a healthy, changing meta in Competitive Play without needing to disable heroes.

Going forward, we’ve decided to make the following changes to Hero Pools starting immediately:

• Hero Pools will be removed indefinitely from Competitive Play, with no tentative date for re-implementation.
• Beginning June 13, the Overwatch League will utilize a single Hero Pool for the first two weeks of each tournament cycle, which consists of three weeks of qualifier matches and a tournament weekend featuring bracket play. Hero Pools will not be used for the week before each tournament or during tournament bracket play. Read more information here .

We appreciate your continued feedback and thank you all for your patience as we’ve iterated on Hero Pools.

In the 2021 Season of Overwatch League, the second and fourth tournament stages applied a fixed hero pool throughout the entire stage banning 1 tank, 1 support, and 2 damage roles. This hero pool rule did apply to some regional Overwatch Contenders tournaments, but did not apply to the live game.