Overwatch should feel like a new game every week.
This is what Lead Designer Scott Mercer dreams of giving fans - and his dream will come true in Competitive Season 21. With the introduction of Hero Rotation, the Overwatch Dev team will be removing one Tank, one Medic, and two DPS Heroes from the competitive playlist each week. This decision is intended to speed up the metagame change and encourage players to use more diverse lineups in matches.
I wonder what motivated the introduction of the new mechanics? Mercer agreed to share how the rotation of heroes will change the usual game in the 21st season.
How did the idea of hero rotation come about?
Scott Mercer : “Players periodically note that the metagame doesn't change often enough. In general, the metagame is most pronounced at a high level of play, say, in the rank of “Master” or “Elite”. The stronger the players, the better they see why it is necessary to take the most winning heroes.
Even after the introduction of the mandatory 2-2-2 lineup, purposefully changing the metagame was not easy. To this end, we began to more radically change the balance of the heroes, but there is a chance that this will not be enough. The hero rotation is another step towards the ever-changing metagame that the community wants to see so much.
What will the hero rotation bring to the players?
Every week, players will have a new game in a sense. There will be more variety. We are primarily concerned with the feeling that the game is changing too slowly. Hero rotations and more drastic balance changes should bring a sense of constant evolution to Overwatch.
Many players prefer it when the game develops all the time. It's boring for them to constantly play with the same line-up, for the same heroes. As soon as the metagame seems too stable to them, they begin to lose interest in the game. We hope that the rotation of the heroes will make Overwatch more fun for both players and viewers.
How long can expelled heroes remain unavailable?
We do not plan to remove one hero from the game for a long time, so each of them will be excluded for no more than two weeks in a row. In addition, we are not going to remove from the game characters whose balance has just been significantly changed, because the players should have time to figure out how this affected the game.
Will the rotation of heroes in the Overwatch League be organized any differently?
In a regular multiplayer game, the development team selects heroes, but in a league, things will be a little different. Analysts will be guided by the statistics of the last two weeks of matches, and only those heroes who have been on the battlefield for more than 10% of the playing time can be excluded.
Let's say in the fifth week, one of the tanks that were used in more than 10% of the cases in the third and fourth weeks will be randomly excluded. Likewise, one Medic and two DPS will be eliminated.
It turns out that only the most popular heroes will be excluded. I doubt that someone like Torbjorn will ever be among the excluded - but who knows!
Why did you choose the rotation of heroes, and not the ability to prohibit the selection of certain characters to the enemy team?
In our opinion, this option is not very suitable for Overwatch. I would not want the players to look at the portraits of the heroes for five minutes before the start of the match and listen to arguments about which of them is needed and who is not. Nevertheless, we discussed this mechanic in order to understand what exactly it gives, and then asked ourselves: what are we striving for?
So, this mechanic gives additional dynamics to the game and helps to solve the issue of an established metagame - and this is exactly what we needed. During the discussion, an idea arose (initially, it seems, it was proposed by Jeff Kaplan) to temporarily withdraw individual characters from the game.
How to choose which heroes to exclude while maintaining the balance of the game at different ranks?
This is really a daunting task. If we compare low ranks with high and professional play, then there are a lot of differences. We will act according to the situation. Sometimes our choice will hardly affect the higher echelons, and sometimes vice versa. Hero rotation is not the only way to influence the metagame, but only one of the tools. We are ready to adapt to the circumstances.
Of course, there is a lot of uncertainty about the game balance. A promising concept and its implementation are completely different things. But we have room to maneuver: for example, if we need to exclude a little more or a little less heroes, we can move away from the "one tank, two DPS and one medic" format. The frequency of rotation is also not fixed once and for all. We're going to be looking for the right tactics with the community.
How exactly will players know that certain heroes are out of play for a week?
We will report this directly in the game. So if, say, you really like to play for An
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