There has been an undeniable increase in the number of prominent figures in the competitive Overwatch community supporting hero bans either through Twitter or Reddit in the past few days. What scares me about this trend is that many of these comments are being presented ‘as is’, with little to no information about how their vision of hero bans would actually be implemented. This also has the side effect of the majority of hero ban discussions happening in abstract, where it’s easy to make statements like ‘Hero bans would increase comp diversity’, ‘Balancing the game is impossible and we need hero bans’, etc. with little scrutiny.

Despite this, most of the feedback on hero bans is positive. I think it’s really dangerous to build a consensus on an idea when most of the discussion is one sided. Even if we as players, coaches or fans aren’t held accountable for our opinions, that is not the case for Blizzard, who are ultimately responsible for the implementation at the end of the day and will have to weigh up all of the facts before making a decision.

With that in mind I want to talk about some of my concerns that I haven’t yet seen discussed. I want to make it clear that I’m not explicitly against hero bans — I’m just not convinced that they are the best answer. I will try to avoid discussing issues with hero bans that refer to a specific implementation and focus more on the concept in terms of general impact.

Player Burnout

Players burning out during the league is a huge problem, and justifiably so. One of the main reasons for player burnout is that Overwatch is a unique game — the roles are to some extent flexible, and the needed skills in any given role vary from meta to meta. This makes it difficult for players to have a core set of skills that they can utilize across their career, requiring constant re-learning. There’s no guarantee that a player who is dependent on their aim, or their communication, or any other specific aspect of their gameplay will be able to rely on that skill across multiple metas. Fortunately, players have crucial time to work on self development between stages.

With hero bans, we introduce the potential for every player to play every hero on short notice. This will further reward excess practice hours in order to maintain deeper hero pools. Keeping in mind that just because heroes can be banned — that doesn’t necessarily mean the number of viable heroes significantly increases (sorry Symmetra). With this scheme it’s entirely possible that e.g. all of the viable hitscan heroes on any given patch could be banned, or your main tank player might be forced onto a damage dealer. This is not the case in other games that have successfully implemented hero bans, where there is both more overlap in skillset between heroes and more overlap between heroes in general.

Structuring Practice

To make matters worse, from a coaching perspective I can’t even begin to imagine how to structure practice around hero bans. In the league, teams usually prepare for matches about a week in advance. This process involves researching the opposing teams, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and implementing a generalized counter strategy that can be applied across multiple maps. The complexity that goes into each match in the league is the end result of this process.

This process goes completely out the window with hero bans because of the amount of variables involved both during the match and throughout practice. Assuming you can somehow predict what the other team is going to ban (and that’s a big assumption), you still have to account for the fact that every scrim opponent will be preparing for a different set of bans. This would make preparing advanced strategy a waste of time, as you would be very unlikely to be able to practice any given strategy under similar conditions before match day.

Hero Diversity

One of the biggest arguments in favour of the hero ban debate is that it would increase hero diversity. If the goal was increasing hero diversity (as a statistic), Blizzard could just enable random hero spawns in competitive play. It’s an extreme example, but the point here is that hero diversity must be increased without negatively impacting the gameplay as a whole and making the game less diverse in other ways. Following on from above, we’ve already established that strategic complexity could suffer in a hero ban scheme.

With that in mind, I will suggest two forms of diversity that are reduced by hero bans: Hero diversity by map, and playstyle diversity. I have seen multiple people suggest that because hero bans work in other games, that they should also work on Overwatch. In reality there are are countless differences between the games commonly being used as a reference — but I will focus on the biggest differences in order to make my point.

DOTA and LOL both have four times as many heroes as Overwatch, and heroes are unique to one player per game, unlike Overwatch where heroes are limited per team. The net result of bans in these games is that heroes that are extreme outliers in terms of power level are removed, forcing players to instead pick slightly weaker heroes that serve largely the same purpose. The gameplay is not fundamentally changed. There is no direct equivalent to this concept in Overwatch.

In Overwatch, banning just one hero has the potential to change the macro-game completely, simultaneously removing the only counter to a specific macro-strategy while also reducing the playability of another. Imagine a hypothetical where, on the current patch, Zenyatta is removed from the game. Ignoring the other ban for a second — this one ban would both remove the only viable counter to tank compositions, while also removing a core component in dive compositions (who rely on discord to outpace healing, as well as harmony to heal flankers without LOS).

The likely outcome in cases like this is that both teams just play the same composition. We see this behaviour in Overwatch players already — when faced with a composition that they don’t know how to deal with, the most common practice is to mirror. There just isn’t enough time mid-game to make a complex analysis of a composition, come up with a counter and play it on the spot. Even if hero bans increased overall diversity, they have the potential to significantly reduce diversity in each map and increase the frequency of mirroring (one of the biggest complaints about the current meta)

More importantly, if we think back to the issues created in practicing advanced strategy — it would be far easier in a hero ban system to focus on practicing generic playstyles that aren’t specifically dependent on any one hero. For example, focus on playing completely defensive shield based compositions, or death ball compositions. Some of the most engaging Overwatch gameplay is a result of complex compositions combined with sufficient practice time in order to truly understand the purpose of each hero in a strategy, and it would be hard to justify that sort of time investment when so many heroes in the game currently are one of a kind and practice time is already so limited.

Rookies and Specialists

Naturally, there’s no reason to assume that hero bans would affect everyone equally. Balancing the game so that experienced players have an advantage while still allowing the development of new talent is one of the biggest challenges the league faces today. Rookies joining the league are already at a significant disadvantage in terms of hero pool, compositional understanding and stage time.

This usually leads to a “bridging” process where you teach the player what they need to know meta by meta, with the hope that they can learn the specific slice of Overwatch they need to be relevant for each stage. However, in a hero ban system, players will potentially need to know every hero in their role, as well as some heroes from other roles. This system would disproportionately reward more experienced players and established teams, who are more likely to have large hero pools and experience in teamplay with different metas. I don’t work for an expansion team but I imagine they are not enthusiastic about the idea either.

Moreover, specialist players would become a liability. Specialist players are already a liability to the extent that every time they are subbed in, as there is an implicit understanding about what hero that player is going to play, as well as what compositions their primary hero fits into. The intended benefit of specialist players is that they are an outlier in performance on a specific hero, enough so to outweigh the disadvantage created by giving away critical information before the map starts. This benefit goes out the window when the player is literally unable to pick their best hero during the game.

All of the above disincentivizes teams from picking up new talent.

Spectator Experience

In my opinion some of the greatest experiences for spectators have been created by players who are outliers on one specific hero. Hero bans are a great way to guarantee that we see less of player-hero matchups such as Jjonak on Zenyatta, Carpe on Widow, Jake on Junkrat, etc. The league is about showcasing Overwatch at the highest level and hero bans are completely contrary to that ideal — in fact teams are incentivized to use bans to prevent as much showcasing as possible if it would happen at their expense.

Furthermore, Overwatch is already a difficult game to watch. Ignoring the logistics about hero bans from a technical point of view, adding hero bans to the game becomes much less of a quick fix when you consider that all of this information needs to be shown to the spectators. This is not a long term issue, however it does make adding hero bans to the league with a months notice fairly unlikely.

More importantly however, the spectator experience is largely assisted by the casters, especially for new viewers. Casters already routinely receive criticism for minor errors and misunderstandings, even with advance notice about which games they will be casting and sufficient preparation time. I wonder how the casters will hold up if they have to cast a different version of the game every day with no way to know which heroes will be banned. One of the primary goals of the league is to bring people who aren’t already avid esports fans into the league. Casters are a huge part of that transition that would be negatively impacted by hero bans.

Summary

Recently, the word ‘metagame’ has developed a negative connotation. The metagame is what allows us to add some structure to how we both practice and play the game, as well as what allows it to function as an esport in the eyes of the viewer. I am deeply concerned with the mentality that we should throw out all metagames because we are not happy with the current one. Moreover, I take issue with the sentiment that because there is a lack of trust in Blizzard to balance the game, we should instead trust teams to balance it. When it comes to game balance, the only people I trust less than Blizzard are the teams.

Especially when the proposed solution could damage the game in so many other ways, reducing the complexity, watchability and accessibility of the game across the board. All of this coming from the standpoint that balancing the game is somehow impossible/improbable. While the metagame has always been reduced to just a few compositions, acting like the current meta is somehow representative of all previous metas in terms of baseline diversity is intellectually dishonest. Keeping in mind we are talking about a meta that hasn’t even been truly played at an OWL level yet and has only been played on live for a total of 2 weeks.

That said, there is no denying that hero balance could be a lot better long term — that doesn’t mean we should pretend it’s a problem that has a simple solution (that goes for hero bans or any other quick fix). Many changes to the game design are most likely needed and there’s probably no chance we’ll get changes to that extent prior to the start of OWL Season 2, so I can empathize with the sudden demand for hero bans, however I feel that it’s the wrong answer at the wrong time. If we can instead focus on things that are actually worth changing and wouldn’t torpedo the game as an esport, here are my issues with the game currently (as it relates to hero diversity):

Hero swapping is completely discouraged by ultimate economy (according to recent OWL scrims, the odds for any one player to win the next fight after swapping heroes is 35%).

Power creep is completely out of control and is only getting worse. Too much focus on making heroes powerful in a specific niche has lead to compositions that require extraordinary coordination to deal with or have little counterplay.

Almost every hero added to the game has top tier mobility, disables and a high power level in a specific niche. Heroes from the original version of the game constantly need to be reworked to compete with new heroes.

Hero counters are effectively solitaire on an individual level. There is very little counterplay to being hero countered. Further increases need for banking ults and makes ranked play especially extremely frustrating.

The end result is that games almost always snowball unless you play heroes from the get-go that are extremely versatile and have no hard counters, making minimal swaps over the course of a round.

“This is a fucking FPS. I can’t believe it.” — Pine, 2018