Blizzard has announced that hero pools will be leaving Overwatch when the next regular update goes live on June 13th. Hero pools were introduced earlier in 2020 but have been a controversial addition with the available heroes for any ranked match being limited to a predetermined group of characters. While they will be disappearing for good from Competitive Play, the feature will remain in place in the OW League for the first two weeks of each new tournament cycle with a single pool for players to choose from.
“We have a new update to share regarding Hero Pools. We’ve been listening to your feedback and constantly iterating on the feature behind the scenes. We initially implemented Hero Pools to address issues with stagnating metas and to keep match-ups exciting and fresh. However, we’ve found that the introduction of Experimental Card and increased hero balance updates have helped us work towards a healthy, changing meta in Competitive Play without needing to disable heroes.”
Check out the full announcement and the community’s reaction by visiting the Overwatch official forums.