In January, Blizzard announced the addition of a "hero pool" to competitive play in Overwatch. This is essentially a ban system, where instead of players choosing characters to exclude at the start of each match, Blizzard would choose characters on a weekly basis. Director Jeff Kaplan explained at the time that the idea was to "prevent players from stagnating in one meta for too long," and that, like everything else about "Overwatch," the system could be changed if it proved necessary.

Apparently that has happened. Heading into this weekend, Blizzard announced a major change to the hero pool system, which will now use data from Overwatch League matches instead of online competitive play to determine the weekly ban pool. According to designer Scott Mercer, Blizzard's data initially showed similarities in hero usage in high-level competitive and Overwatch League matches, but the changes made in the 1.47 update will now "use online hero picks and significant differences between the most-played hero configurations in Overwatch.

Blizzard is also considering making changes to the algorithm that determines the ban pool to reduce the likelihood of the same heroes being rotated every other week.

"Under the current algorithm, the more highly used heroes have a higher chance of being rotated, which exacerbates the likelihood of a hero being removed repeatedly. Also, a frequently played hero that the community really likes to see played is just as likely to be rotated as a frequently played hero that the community doesn't like," Mercer explained.

"The goal is to have a variance in available heroes from week to week. In other words, the community has told us about each week's hero pool, ranging from "The comps we see at OWL this week should be super interesting" to "ARGH! This week's pool is the worst!" to "I'm not sure what to expect. It all depends on which heroes you like to play and watch."

Perhaps the biggest change will be the removal of the hero pool altogether from all matches with an average skill rating below master (3500 SR).

"In competitive play in the lower skill tiers, we already see a great deal of diversity in hero formation.

However, it would require a client patch to make that happen, and the 1.48 patch is too far along in production to add right now. Therefore, Hero Pools in all competitive matches have been disabled: "For the majority of competitive players ranked below Diamond, a future without Hero Pools will come sooner," Mercer said.

Speaking of Mei, Blizzard is also working on a major update to the Overwatch communication wheel. Jeff Kaplan recently taped a phone to a box and told us all about it.

Thanks, RPS.