Every week,Overwatch’s Hero Pool system bans the four most played characters of the week prior. The purpose of the system is to keep the game’s competitive meta from getting stale.
But it seems theOverwatch Teamdidn’t quite take into account new character releases when designing the Hero Pool algorithm, as the latest pool just banned Echo, a character that at the time hadn’t even been out for a full week.
RELATED:Overwatch Trick Lets Echo Players Use Three Ultimate Attacks in a Row
Echo ended up on the wrong end of the banhammer right alongsideTracer, Orisa, and Moria. While the latter three make sense, Echo does not, as she’s the only one of the three potential damage heroes for this week’s pool that hasn’t seen play in the Overwatch League. The other two potential ban candidates — Tracer and Ashe — have.
And as a new character, Echo was always bound to have more playtime than most of the other characters in the game, especially sinceOverwatchhadn’t introduced a new hero in over eight months. People didn’t play her because she was meta. They played her because they wanted to see how she fit in with the rest of the cast.
Thus, Echo’s banning has theOverwatchcommunity feeling a little frustrated at the moment. They’ve asked the Overwatch Team to reconsider the ban and sited the several now-obvious flaws with theHero Poolsystem while doing so. Presently, no one knows how Echo truly functions in competitive play, and now — immediately after the character’s release — players have to wait an unnecessary week just to start testing her again.
However, a response fromOverwatchDirector Jeff Kaplan confirms that the team was well aware of what they were doing when they decided to banEcho. They understood that the decision would generate backlash, but they didn’t want to mess with the banning algorithm. Kaplan then followed up by telling fans that they had plenty of ways to use the character outside of competitive game modes.
As one can imagine, this response didn’t sit well with most. But judging from it, the Overwatch Team sadly doesn’t sound like it has any intention of overturning its decision. So fans will probably have to wait out the rest of the ban before they can play Echo again. Hopefully, though, the Overwatch Team learns from this and adjusts the algorithm accordingly forOverwatch 2. It would be a shame — if not downright detrimental — if another new character received a hit for no reason.
Overwatchis available now for Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
