Since the addition of the Hero Pool in Overwatch, many questions have been raised by players, especially about how the banned heroes were chosen.
In a Reddit post complaining about this week banned heroes, Jeff Kaplan — Blizzard Vice President and Overwatch Game Director — personally gave some details on the functioning and evolution of the Hero Pool. Initially, the first selections of banned heroes followed feedback from professional Overwatch League players and coaches.
The development team wished to move away from a choice made by humans and favor a choice based on statistics from the game. In a first attempt, banns were taken directly from the Overwatch League statistics, but an organizational problem arose: the professional players didn't have enough time to practice all the compositions. It was finally decided to base the choice of the Hero Pool on the statistics of ranked games of the best players in the game.
Initially, two existing Hero Pools were offered: one for the Overwatch League and the second for players on the live servers. Following consultations between the development team and professional players, the choice to unify these two Hero Pools seemed necessary to improve the game. The decision to take the statistics from the live servers also allows to positively impact a larger number of players while avoiding the absence of statistics at times when the competition isn't taking place.
In this way, impacting heroes can be rotated. Echo ban — despite her recent addition — was anticipated by the developers, the integrated choice of keeping a system without human intervention was preferred.
Finally, Kaplan adds that using the Hero Pool alone cannot solve the balancing, popularity and gameplay issues of some heroes. While the solution isn't ideal for all players, the implementation of the Hero Pool is intended to diversify the game as well as provide different metas between all the different players.
The weekly Hero Pool rotation used to be different for all players and for professionals until this week. From now on, the Hero Pool will be common to all players. At the same time, there will no longer be a Map Pool.
