Mei Finally Gets The Ban Hammer In Overwatch League

The show must go on for the Overwatch League community as the new season returned this week to continue the tournament. All players and organization members are either competing or working from home as most countries implemented total lockdown due to COVID-19. Despite the new arrangements, all matches are not exempted from picks and bans during Sunday nights. However, this will not stop us from giving you the latest Overwatch Bitcoin betting odds, and several occurrences that happened over the weekend could change the course of action this week.

Mei, arguably the most popular and strongest hero in the game, has been banned in a pro tournament for the first time. The climatologist had an average pick rate of 98% on a week-to-week basis every OWL season. As a strong pick, she’s a favorite. However, Mei’s capabilities can lead to unbalanced gameplay. For this reason, she has been the source of frustration in the Overwatch community since the inaugural season. So, fans and players around the world have been pleading with Blizzard Entertainment since the beginning to ban Mei once in a while. Surprisingly, their wishes have been randomly—or even accidentally granted by Blizzard.

For the time being, all Sunday picks and bans are being handled by OWL casters through a lottery-type system. There’s a bingo ball machine that randomly determines the banned players for the upcoming week. However, one caster ditched the bingo ball machine this week and tried another system instead. The host tasked to cover the Sunday night picks and bans was Salome “Soe” Gschwind’s pet cat, Nori.

Soe presented Nori a set of cards carrying the names of heroes in OWL. Nori, unaware of the repercussions, picked the card with Mei’s name in it. The unusual and unexpected event shocked everyone streaming Soe’s live video.

Along with Mei, heroes McCree, Brigitte, and Wrecking Ball (Hammond) are also banned for this week’s set of matches–you can watch the top players battle it out on the BetOverwatch Live Streams page. Players were also not happy with the entire set of banned hero pools for the upcoming week as most of the choices are strong, damage heroes. With the exception of Mei, the results are not surprising since most heroes who are expected to play in the next set of matches are included in Blizzard’s to-be-banned list.