In January, Blizzard announced that it would add a hero ban to Overwatch, but instead of letting players choose who to exclude on a match-by-match basis, they would be excluded by a "hero pool" chosen by Blizzard on a weekly basis. After several months, Blizzard decided that the hero pool was not working as expected and removed the hero pool from all matches with an average skill rating below master.

Today, Blizzard took an even bigger step and completely pulled out of the Hero Pool outside of the Overwatch League. Effective immediately, the hero pool will be removed from competitive play.

"We initially introduced the Hero Pool to address the stagnant meta and keep matchups exciting and fresh," explained Community Manager Molly Fender.

"However, with the introduction of experimental cards and more hero balance updates, we can now aim for a healthy and ever-changing meta in competitive play without invalidating our heroes.

The changes also affect Overwatch League play, which will use a two-week hero pool for the first two weeks of each tournament cycle and no longer use it for qualifying matches and the third week of tournament play; the last two weeks of the OWL regular season will also operate with one hero pool but the Hero Pool will not be implemented for the 2020 playoffs. More details on this and other OWL schedule changes during the year are up at overwatchleague.com.