HuK explains why Overwatch needs hero bans and how they’d work

Former professional StarCraft player-turned-President of Gaming at The Kraft Group, Chris ‘HuK’ Loranger, has weighed in on the idea of hero bans in Overwatch.

Hero bans have long been a popular idea floated around by the game’s community as a way to keep meta team compositions from dominating high ELO and pro play.

For instance, throughout stage one to three of Overwatch League season two, the vast majority of teams ran a composition called GOATS, which consisted of three tanks and three supports due to its high-sustainability against just about everything else in the game.

Taking to Twitter, Loranger presented ideas for how hero bans could work in both pro and ranked play.

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In pro play, HuK would want to see one team ban a single hero every map. The banned hero would not be able to be used by either team. Under this format, a maximum of five heroes would be banned – just in case a series went beyond five games.

While the ‘home’ team would get the first ban pick, the second could be determined either on a “back and forth” or “loser picks” basis.

According to the former Protoss player, this would add some much-needed strategy and variance to the game.

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In another version of the pro play ban system, each team could ban one hero for one player every map. He admitted, however, that this would be harder to implement and understand.

Finally, for ranked play, the Canadian suggested that each team got to ban one hero per map. This would be conducted either by vote, the player with the highest skill rating on each team selecting, or a random draw.

This drew some concern that such a system would prevent fans from being able to see their favorite player use their favorite hero – something HuK dismissed. “Why should fans not be able to see their favorite player in basketball or football do as well because they are double covered all game?” he replied.

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“Great players can play more than one hero at a very high level, even if it’s their signature hero,” he added.

Some big names seemed to like Loranger’s idea. Philadelphia Fusion president Tucker Roberts simply replied “this” to HuK’s post, indicating his approval.

It will be interesting to see if bans come to Overwatch in some capacity within the next year. It was, after all, during the 2019 Overwatch League season that role queue was introduced and flipped the game on its head.