Overwatch 2’s upcoming Season 17 is just a few hours away, and Blizzard is already cooking up new content, including a new map, Battle Pass, D.Va Mythic Skin, new Stadium heroes, and most importantly, map bans.
What is map voting?
Overwatch 2’s new Map Voting system gives players more control in choosing their preferred matchups. Following the addition of Hero Bans in Season 16, Blizzard is expanding the game’s strategic depth with this new feature.
How does map voting in Overwatch 2 work?
At the start of a match, players are brought to the Map Ban screen, where they must choose one map from a set of three options. The maps not selected will be banned for that match. These three maps are pre-selected by the game’s algorithm to ensure a fair balance.
To proceed, all ten players in the lobby vote from the same pool of three maps. Players can see how many votes each map receives, and the final map is determined by the game’s roll-through feature.
This works like a roulette: it cycles through the three selected maps, and wherever it stops determines the map for the match. For example, if King’s Row gets 1 vote, Suravasa gets 7 votes, and Blizzard World gets 2, the roulette will spin and linger longer on maps with more votes, boosting their chances of being selected.
It’s a fairly straightforward system, and Blizzard has done a good job making map banning simple and accessible. The most exciting part is that players have been asking for this feature since the original Overwatch, and it’s finally here.
With map banning now in place, players have more freedom to influence their matches and increase their chances of winning.
When is Overwatch 2 Season 17 coming out?
Season 17 launches on June 24 across all platforms, bringing with it the new map banning feature, reworked maps, and hero balance updates.
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