[Update #2]: Overwatch 2 will be dropping the Assault game mode as a whole!

[Update]: Overwatch's next experimental update will be looking to reduce the power of Crowd Control effects across the board.

While having a small, pre-set amount of maps available per each competitive season was a nice idea in theory, in reality it just made Overwatch a bit stale. After all, there's only so many times you can rotate between Horizon Lunar Colony and Hanamura before you start going a little bit loopy. As such, I am quite pleased to announce that Blizzard will be retiring the concept of Map Pools this April 14th!

The good news doesn't end there, however, as Blizzard has also announced that they will be removing two of the most unpopular maps from Competitive Play: Paris and Horizon Lunar Colony. You'll still be able to play them in the Arcade modes or through Quick Play, but until they get some much-needed reworks, both maps will thankfully be unavailable in ranked.

On the other hand, Hero Pools have proven themselves to be quite useful, and will remain in both the Overwatch League and standard Competitive Play. However, instead of having the hero bans curated by Blizzard, the new system will randomly choose 1 tank, 1 support and 2 DPS heroes based on play rates from high-level competitive matches. Since heroes can't be banned two weeks in a row, this should hopefully lead to a constantly shifting meta and give plenty of different team compositions their time to shine.

You can read a little bit more about these upcoming changes, as well as follow further developer updates, over at the official website.