Blizzard makes Overwatch heroes randomly unplayable every week

Overwatch’s competitive mode will have a system where Blizzard makes a number of heroes unplayable every week. Players themselves cannot influence which heroes cannot be selected, as is the case in many other e-sports titles.

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan explained this change in a developers update. These so-called Hero Pools only come out for the Competitive Play mode, where it’s all about rising in rank. According to the developer, this introduction will improve the quality of the gameplay, the diversity of the heroes and the strategies during matches. The company hopes that the meta, the term used for the current game modes, tactics and heroes that work best at that time, will not stagnate too much and that players will also make different choices. This change will go live with update 1.45, expected to go live sometime in early February. Whether it will become a permanent addition is still unknown.

The Hero Pools will also become part of Overwatch’s professional esports league, where they will be available March 7, at the start of Season 21. The Overwatch League goes implement “a version of the Hero Pools,” according to Kaplan, indicating that it will differ slightly from the variant introduced through Competitive Play mode. In the Overwatch League, at least one new tank, one support, and two damage heroes are made unavailable every week. The playable heroes will be chosen at random from a group of eligible heroes, taking into account the playdates of the previous two weeks. Only heroes that are played regularly can be taken from the next Hero Pool. A hero will never be unplayable for two consecutive weeks. This system is not set for tournaments, playoffs or the Grand Finals. Incidentally, Blizzard recently announced that the Chinese Overwatch League games will be for February and March cancelled due to the Coronavirus.

In addition, Blizzard introduces a new option in the game’s main menu with patch 1.45: the Experimental card. The existing Quick Play, Arcade, and Competitive options are the main “playing cards” or game modes in Overwatch, with the occasional addition of this limited-time experimental mode, which Blizzard uses to test gameplay changes. The mode differs from the separate public test realm, which is mainly intended for finding bugs. This separate environment is not accessible to all players, nor is it accessible from the main menu of the game.