Hero bans have been a topic surrounding Overwatch as a game since its inception. As a game, this makes sense as Overwatch isn’t a traditional FPS game along the lines of Quake or Counter-Strike because of the role system. In that sense, it has some similarities to the MOBA genre, namely League of Legends or Dota2. As that is the case, many have argued for a kind of hero pick/ban system to be implemented into Overwatch as it would add diversity of strategy to the game. With 29 heroes currently in the pool, the addition of a ban phase may actually be viable at the given time. As that’s the case, I’ll break down why it could be advantageous to implement hero bans, how they could feasibly work, what the disadvantages are, and examples from other esports games as to why they strategic depth.

How the Ban System Would Work

Before we go into the whys and why nots for the ban system, I’ll explain how I think it would work. For now, Overwatch only has 29 heroes so the only viable method is to have one hero ban per team. After that it should scale up to more depending on how many heroes eventually get added to the game.

Why a Ban System is Beneficial

When we talk about esports games, a vast majority of games fall along two paradigms: strategic or tactical. These words are often misused, so I’ll define them both as to how I use them. Strategy is the overarching plan of how to win a game. It can be a simple as we want to win teamfights and currently GOATs is the best composition to do that on most maps, so we will play GOATs. Tactics is the execution and the minute details of the plan.

I’ll give a concrete example. Element Mystic played against Busan in the Korean Contenders Group stage. In that match, Element Mystic’s strategy against Busan was to break their GOATS composition by emphasizing Kim “Sp9rk1e” Yeong-han’s Doomfist. The actual tactic involved either had a Zarya-Doomfist combo where the Zarya player bubbled Doomfist, which allowed him to dive behind the enemy reinhardt and then disjoint a player (usually reinhardt) away from the rest of the team with an uppercut at which point Doomfist and the rest of EM could kill the isolated player with burst damage. The other tactic they liked to use had Doomfist play a lurking role and pick off a support and thus creating a 6v5.

So when we look at esports, games fall along a strategy/tactical scale. For instance, a game like CS:GO could be considered a primarily tactical game with strategic elements being secondary. On the other side of the scale, you have games like Dota2 and Overwatch, which emphasize the strategic aspect of the game while the tactical aspects of the game come secondary. There are also games like Brood War which can emphasize both sides of the equation.

Understanding what paradigm a specific esports falls under tells us where a games novelty value comes from. Novelty is the amount of new or diverse things we can encounter in any set of experiences and it is a critical element in any long standing esports. Some of the longest standing esports scenes include: Dota2, CS:GO, Starcraft, and Melee. All four have been around for a long time and the reason is because of the inherent novelty they continually create over time through the mechanics of their game. For now I’ll focus on CS:GO and Dota2 as they will be the most relevant for this conversation.

If we look at CS:GO, the amount of individual freedom and tactical innovation continues to march at a rapid pace. In CS:GO, team tactics can include things like executes, 4-1s, 3-2s, pick based plays, map control plays, feints, fakes, and more. Each of those tactics is then informed by the economy, the individual players, and the synergies they have with their teammates and how that interacts with the opponent. That is then magnified by the map pool. When you combine all of that together, you get an explosion of novel value that is based on the tactical pillars of the game. So even though the game is patched, what we call Counter-Strike hasn’t changed for a long time.

In the case of Dota2, the novelty comes from the strategic diversity of the game. The game has 115 Heroes, a multitude of items of which a vast majority have specific and unique attributes, economy, individual skills, and the team aspect. There is a vast amount of game understanding that is required to play Dota2 at the highest levels of competition and all of that is funneled into the drafting phase. The Dota2 drafting phase is a contest of strategy on the grandest scale possible. We get to see teams try to strategically attack each other while shoring up their own compositions before they even see the map.

The reason I’ve gone on this tangent is to explain that the longevity of these games comes from their ability to continually generate novelty. In the case of CS:GO, it’s from their tactics. In the case of Dota2, it’s from the strategy. So what about Overwatch then? I personally believe that it falls far closer to Dota2 than it does to CS:GO. While there are tactical elements in there, the strategic component, primarily understanding how compositions beat other compositions is the primary factor in Overwatch games.

Scott “Custa” Kennedy seems to agree with this assessment from his twitch stream:

https://clips.twitch.tv/DreamySlickPieNononoCat

While there is clearly a level of execution required from the teams and players involved, the strategic component seems to be the primary value that characterizes Overwatch games. For instance, in a CS:GO game you can call the wrong strategy or tactic, but still win out if the players and teamplay involved are better than the opponents. In an Overwatch game, I’ve never seen dive beat GOATS with any consistency in the GOATS era.

As Overwatch is a strategic game then, introducing a ban system would be beneficial for the longevity of the game, at least in terms of the professional scene. As Matt “flame” Rodriguez noted on his twitter,

“The fundamental problem with OW is the fact that no matter what patch it is there will always be a combination of 6 heroes that is deemed ‘broken’ or ‘optimal’ 1 hero ban per team per map would open up so many different compositions and make the game so enjoyable to watch again.”

As humans, we are biologically wired to seek novelty. This is confirmed when we look at the longest standing esports games: Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Dota2, and Melee. All of them have continually been able to create new novelty in their system and have thus created hardcore audiences. That is the case for why hero bans should be included into the game. It will increase the novelty of the game and that in turn will increase the longevity of the game.

The Disadvantages of a Hero Ban System

While I’m personally in favor of the hero ban system being implemented into the Overwatch professional scene, there are a few distinct disadvantages that should be addressed. Some have said that the same hero would be banned every game, but we can safely ignore this as all of esports history tells us that won’t be the case. I’ll even go over some specific examples from other esports games later to explain why.

The far more pressing issue will likely be ladder experience. Blizzard is a company that likes to cater towards the casual audience. So for the hero ban to be implemented into the Overwatch League, it would first need to be implemented into the ladder system. While I’m fine with that personally, I can see a bunch of problems come up from the side of Blizzard.

The ban section of the game could increase disputes in teams, which is something that Blizzard don’t seem to be a big fan of. That is easily solved though by making it a custom game, much like how Captain’s mode is in Dota2. The other far bigger problem is the illusion that Blizzard (and generally most game devs) try to sell to the casual audience. Namely that they are playing the same game as the pros.

We’ve seen this with Riot, Valve, and Blizzard. All three companies have consistently forced the competitive circuit to have games be as close to their ladder system as possible. It’s a marketing ploy as it adds extra incentive for people to play their games as they think they have the chance to be pro someday themselves or that they are at least playing the same game as their favorite players.

All of that is an illusion though as top competitive play in no way resembles casual play or even high level amatuer play regardless of game. However the illusion of it is what matters and I don’t know if implementing a ban system would necessarily break that illusion if it was only applied to the Overwatch League.

Examples from Other Esports Games

In this section, I’ll use two examples from other esports games to show how a ban system increases the strategic depth of a game. The two games I picked out were CS:GO and Dota2.

The first game I picked out was between Astralis and Na`Vi at BLAST Lisbon. For context, Astralis are the best team in the world in CS:GO and have created a dynastic period of dominance in 2018. One of the key pieces to their victory in the year was their ability to play every map, particularly Nuke. On Nuke they have an undefeated win streak of 27-0 on LAN. Astralis’ permaban is Cache.

In the case of Na`Vi, their map pool strengths is as follows:

Best Maps: Overpass, Train

Middle Maps: Mirage, Nuke, Dust2, Inferno

Permaban: Cache

Astralis have destroyed Na`Vi on Nuke every time they played it so in this instance, Na`Vi did something uncharacteristic of them. They decided to play the map veto smart. The map veto in CS:GO works as follows:

Team 1 Bans a Map

Team 2 Bans a Map

Team 1 Picks a Map

Team 2 Picks a Map

Team 1 Bans a Map

Team 2 Bans a Map

Leftover Map is the decider

In previous bouts, Na`Vi banned Cache instead of floating it to the second ban phase despite sharing the same permaban as Astralis. This time they decided to ban Nuke instead of Cache. Astralis then did a punish pick of Cache, which was surprising as they hadn’t played that map on LAN for around six months at that point. Astralis then went on to win Cache against Na`Vi, which in turn helps their mind games against future teams down the line as now all future teams that face Astralis now have to wonder if Astralis will punish them with a cache pick if it’s not one of their better maps.

Perhaps a more relevant example to show strategic depth is EG vs CDEC at The International 2015 Finals. At TI5, Leshrac was the alpha and omega of the hero picks. It was either banned or picked and if it was picked, the team that picked it usually won out.

In that tournament, EG and CDEC faced off twice. Once in the winner’s finals and once in the grand finals. In the first encounter, EG decided to ban Leshrac when they had the secondary ban phase as they assumed (as everyone else did at that tournament), that Huang “Shiki” Jiwei could probably play the hero. They were then defeated 2-0 in the winner’s finals. Once they came back from the loser’s side, they faced off against CDEC in the Finals and Peter “PPD” Dager decided to call CDEC’s bluff. In the entire bracket phase, Shiki hadn’t played Leshrac once and so when they had the second ban phase in the grand finals, they decided to let Leshrac through.

At this point, CDEC had one of two choices. They could either pick Leshrac for themself or they could let EG pick it. If they let EG pick it, Sumail “Suma1L” Hassan would have played it and destroyed them. So they picked it themselves and the world was witness to the most fraudulent mid laner to have ever made it the grand finals of The International. It was a genius move from drafter PPD as it gave EG a huge strategic edge that helped them close out the victory.

In Conclusion

Overwatch is a game that has plans to be one of the longer running games in the esports industry. As that is the case, then it needs to find a way to keep its longevity and the only way to do that is to increase the amount of strategic novelty that the game has at the highest levels of play. In that sense then, the hero ban system is one of the best possible answers to solve that problem.

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