Hero Analysis for the Future: No. 14

Season 10 was possibly the biggest shakeup to the meta we have experienced. Brigitte was introduced, Symmetra was removed, Hanzo was mega buffed, and Rialto joined competitive play, and several other heroes received minor changes. Therefore, I felt that this season was a good chance to take another look at top 500 trends in regions and see what we could see. I have done ‘Top 500 trends’ articles before, and I wanted to make sure that this one had a little more spice — so I added some network analysis as well as the usual summary stats.

Season 10 ran from May 1st through June 27th, and was one of the most volatile ranked seasons we have ever seen. So let’s start with a basic lens — which regions played which heroes the most! The below chart shows unsurprising results to say the least. For those of you who ventured into ranked during Season 10 the top 6 ‘most played’ heroes of Hanzo, Zarya, Reinhardt, Zenyatta, Widowmaker, and Mercy might seem familiar. Personally, at mid-diamond level if I got into a game and my team did not have this comp then we were accused of ‘soft throwing’.

Most Played hero is the hero on which a player had the most time played during the competitive season

The huge fall off between Mercy and Tracer in the above chart really highlights just how prevalent this set of heroes was in ranked play. To really drive this home, the players who mained Mercy, Zen, Rein, Zarya, Hanzo, or Widowmaker made up more than 80% of the Top 500 players in each region. Before we go all alarmist and say “holy crap this is crazy”, I wanted to look at previous seasons to get some context.

And so that’s what I did. For each region / season, I found the 6 heroes who were the most popular mains. I then calculated the number of players who had one of these 6 heroes as their most played, and divided it by the total number of top 500 players in that region, giving me the “Percentage of Players” number plotted below. The lesson I learned here is that while Season 10 is definitely on the worse end of ‘hero main diversity’ in the top 500, its not night and day worse than previous seasons. America in Season 6 seemed to be the least oppressive top 6 mains with only 63% of players maining a top 6 hero. For those curious about what those top 6 heroes were in each season / region, I put the raw data table at the end of the article!