Why don't we have pick and bans

[Aspect-11655]

After sinatraa left owl a day ago not to anyones surprise his reason might just be the fact that they have to scrim and prep for a whole different meta every week. 222 i believe is a overall net benefit to the game but has its problems of course but lets focus on the hero pool first. The real issue with hero pools is the fact that nobody cares about a change up in the meta. We just want to ban brig mei orisa and all the un-fun characters that nobody likes to play against. You can argue with those characters being fun or what not but generally most ranked players don’t like them because of their lack luster game play. Jeff stated that that was not the purpose, the banning of characters we don’t like. He wants to just shift up the meta. Pick and bans, though, do both of those things in ranked and even more. In a game where at least one masters is present the defending teams highest ranked player bans one character and then the next round that character stays banned and their highest ranked player bans another. I’m not sold on this but if you have other ideas please share. This bans un-fun characters, can change up the meta, and it also does not drastically shift play style from week to week. I like the idea of a meta because it is fun to learn a strat and get good at it and see it do what t is made to do with team work which is why a lot of players still play the game, that one match where team work is heavily prevalent and you pull of that strat. With stages for a big patch in between we wont have these fast patches that don’t really change anything. Like the patches are never big or meta shifting like we want because they are so fast. Just give us one emergency patch if the meta turns out to be terrible and a big patch every stage.

[Kaedi-11739]

Jeff Kaplan explains it best here:

@JeffreyKaplan

But just implementing hero bans does not mean the meta will move. Studying other games, the end result is usually a “ban meta”. The downside of a ban meta, is that players are often at odds with each other when someone on their team bans an “off-ban-meta” hero. The same frustrations that players experience with the meta exist in a ban meta. Hero bans are not a silver bullet solution to making the meta move. If the problem we are trying to solve is that the meta needs to change more, hero bans might actually make the problem worse, not better. We do a have a solution in mind – an actual system – that we’ll talk about (next week’s dev update) but it is not hero bans.

[Devils-1895]

I would go a step further and say that one of the things they seem to favor is the notion that if you want to play a hero you KNOW that you can play that hero in competitive rather than if I wanted to play Rein queuing for comp and getting banned 3 games in a row is not a positive experience.

[Aspect-11655]

Wouldn’t a ban meta be better because it is differing throughout the match, meaning there will be more than just 6 heroes picked