Competitive Season 21 for Overwatch has begun, and Blizzard has implemented the first round of the game’s new Hero Pool system, which temporarily bans four heroes from ranked matches.
The first characters to be removed from Overwatch’s competitive play are Orisa, Hanzo, Mei, and Baptiste, and players will have to do without the four heroes for approximately two weeks.
Principal Game Designer Scott Mercer introduced the idea of Hero Pools in an attempt to keep the game’s competitive matches exciting and unpredictable for players. “Every week when players log in to Overwatch, it should feel fresh and different,” stated Blizzard in a recent blog post. This means that each week the team will select one Overwatch tank, one support, and two damage heroes to remove from the roster for competitive play, never for more than two weeks at a time. For now, the specific length of time isn’t set in stone because Blizzard wants to gauge community response first.
The concept of the Overwatch Hero Pool came about as a result of feedback from players, who shared that the game didn’t change often enough and sometimes felt stale. Particularly in higher ranked matches, when the competition is tightest, it became clear that players tend to gravitate to the same heroes over and over, the ones that everybody considers to be the strongest. Blizzard first tried to mitigate this by more aggressively balancing heroes’ strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately decided that wasn’t enough.
Now, each week when players jump online to get some competitive matches in, the game will play and feel slightly different. The Hero Pool will force gamers to play Overwatch with heroes they’ve perhaps never tried before or have little experience with, hopefully increasing the diversity of the heroes encountered during matches as a result. Even long-time Overwatch players will have to adjust to using unfamiliar characters and face off against heroes they might not see that often.
For the Overwatch League, Hero Pools will behave a bit differently. Analysts will study data from the previous two weeks to learn which heroes were used the most, and any hero that has been played more than 10 percent of the time becomes eligible for rotation out of the roster the following week. The hero that ends up being banned will be selected at random, unlike the heroes removed from regular competitive play that are specifically chosen by the Overwatch team each week.
Overwatch released in 2016 and is available on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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Source: Blizzard
