Blizzard are altering up Overwatch‘s hero pool system again, except this time around they’re simply straight up eradicating it from common aggressive play. The system, which includes banning a number of characters every week, was initially applied to cease the meta from turning stale, and it’s seen just a few adjustments already in its brief life. Just final month I reported that they’d ditched hero pools for lower rank players, and now they’ve gone so far as to do away with them for everybody. Except the Overwatch League, that’s, which, let’s be trustworthy, is just about the one cause hero swimming pools had been invented within the first place.
Hero pools were introduced back in March as a manner of stopping the 2-2-2 meta from stagnating in aggressive matches. It was Overwatch’s reply to hero bans actually, besides gamers didn’t get to decide on the bans – the devs and Overwatch League analysts did based mostly on the recognition of every hero each week (often the bans were chosen by cats, Overwatch is a really severe esport). The system was by no means designed to be everlasting although, and it’s going away now for normal gamers as a result of it appears to have executed its job.
“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,” Blizzard say.
For people who don’t know, the Experimental Card is a form of take a look at server that sits amongst the game’s arcade modes. It’s a manner for the devs to check out sure adjustments to heroes that they themselves aren’t too certain about, and it’s extra accessible to gamers who aren’t ready to make use of the take a look at servers.
Despite these steadiness updates, hero swimming pools are nonetheless sticking round for the Overwatch League, nonetheless, albeit with just a few adjustments. From June 13th, hero swimming pools will final for 2 weeks earlier than rotating, then the 2 weeks after that may take a break from the swimming pools, permitting League gamers to choose whoever they need throughout event brackets.
While I don’t really consider the hero swimming pools and experimental stuff have truly fastened the meta, putting off the swimming pools for normal gamers (even within the highest ranks) nonetheless looks as if the very best concept. There’s a good bit of disparity between the heroes performed in aggressive vs the heroes used within the League, it doesn’t make sense to drive all gamers to abide by a system put in place particularly from OWL stats.
It’ll even be good to see some OWL matches with the hero pool restrictions utterly lifted – maybe the groups will simply fall again into the standard meta, nevertheless it additionally opens it up for a bit extra experimentation, and that’s at all times enjoyable to look at.
If you’re into the Overwatch League, the subsequent event, the Summer Showdown, kicks off this Saturday. All 20 OWL groups will participate in qualifiers during the last three weeks of June, with two last regional tournaments going down in the beginning of July (the North American bracket and the Asian bracket). Check out the schedule on their website.
