Bans, that let each team select a few champions/heroes/characters/legends to be excluded from play on a match-to-match basis, have been a thing in competitive gaming for a while now, but Overwatch has no such system. Come Season 21, it still won’t.
Instead, Blizzard is introducing Hero Pools to Overwatch. It’s similar to bans, except Blizzard chooses what heroes you don’t get to play for a week. According to Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan, this is to “prevent players from stagnating on any one meta too long”.
The meta is whatever strategy has the most likelihood of succeeding. In Overwatch, this involves selecting specific heroes that work well together on a particular map. When one meta dominates for too long, the game can become monotonous to play and boring to watch. With Hero Pools, players will have to figure out new strategies, based on the available heroes, each week.
The Hero Pools system will only affect competitive matches; Quickplay and Arcade will continue to work as normal. Overwatch League will also be getting “a version of Hero Pools”, but we don’t know what that actually means, yet. Blizzard also wants you to know that all of this could change, depending on player feedback. If the response to Hero Pools is overwhelmingly negative, they might just replace it with a bans-per-match system.
Could happen, you don’t know.
Via PC Gamer.