Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
This weeks hero bans do not make sense. The system itself is deeply flawed.
Its primarily echo being banned, she isn't even playable in OWL so it makes zero sense to ban her. Did the devs not take into account OWL ?? Its basically a 3 hero ban for OWL this weekend.
Not only that, the hype around playing a fun high skill ceiling hero after just having a big tournament centred around her would be massive and would incite people to want to play her. But then she is banned for the entirety of the following week.
Could we also talk about how reaper, mei and torb are not even being eligible to be banned?? The way they have the hero pools set up is doing much less to impact the "meta" at OWL than ever before.
There are so many things that just dont add up, if its based around the highest level of play in ranked specifically with the expectation that people at gm/top 500 want to play meta but meta is basically decided by OWL at the end of the week which doesnt allow people in ranked to actually play meta. Besides people arent forced to play meta like the majority of OWL teams anyways, they want to play what they like and this just means that the heroes people want to play will get consistently banned over heros that are a necessity at the top tier competitive scene
Jeff Kaplan
when we moved to a combined hero pool system, we did so based on feedback from owl players and coaches. in our monthly discord chat, they vocalized that the number one issue they were facing was the inability to effectively practice in competitive play because the pools differed. on the development team, we also wanted to move away from human-curated pools to something that was driven by statistics. we felt like this would provide more transparency into why the picks were made each week and frankly, remove some of the negative emotion we saw when the picks would be announced. we evaluated using owl stats to determine the pools but there were some issues that put us in the direction we ultimately went. because of logistics with how the owl broadcast works, the owl schedule itself, the desire to have the picks read after the final game of the weekend and the amount of time between when the final match of the weekend happens and when the teams have requested to be able to start practicing, we made the decision to base the picks off of a more stable environment -- a segment of our high-end players from the live game.
if you remember our original design -- we had two separate pools -- one derived for owl and one derived for the playerbase at large. the value that was expressed to us directly from the players who participated in our dev/pro-player chat was that the pools be synced, over anything else. that was the top thing we as, as a development team, could do to make the game better for owl pros.
so we made the decision to unify the pools and we chose to have those pools derived by the playerbase because that would be the most impactful decision for the largest segment of ow players. there are also a lot of logistical reasons (in the short amount of time we had to implement a change, a system that was evergreen rather than one that would have to be re-implemented anytime owl goes on hiatus -- think about the times we live in right now -- made the most sense to us from a pragmatic standpoint).
largely the system is working. impactful heroes to both the base game and owl are getting rotated, for example moira and orisa this week. the absence of both will have an impact on owl and the live game. there are some moments that feel off to players. echo being banned was a possibility we were well aware of. we knew this would upset players because she was knew but we felt like sticking with the integrity of the system was important. and we knew owl viewers would be upset because echo wasn't being played.
and just because the system doesn't routinely ban mei each week doesn't really bother us -- because that's not what it was meant to do. mei's been rotated out already. and in terms of balance, characters like mei are getting a lot of attention. in addition to her recent nerfs more are coming on wednesday. her win rate is already down. remember, owl is traditionally slower at picking up balance trends because of their intense schedule, their scrimming behavior and delayed patching. hero pools isn't a solve to balance issues. and the hero pools is not intended to solve problems of "fun heroes vs. bad heroes".... those terms are so subjective that they don't really help the conversation.
we could easily go back to a system where owl pools are determined separately from the rest of the players of the game. but that's not what we were told that they wanted. all of the pros were invited to chat with us and the pros that showed up were unambiguous in their feedback requesting that the pools were synced.
for better or worse there are good lessons in game design here. game design is about trade-offs, not silver bullet solutions. and maybe, for once, we can be open that the owl meta is very different from the meta we see on the ladder.
i know i didn't come here with the magic answer. we're talking about possible solutions still. but i just wanted to shed light on how the situation evolved.