No, you won’t get banned in Overwatch for playing just one hero

Recently there’s been a lot of discussion in the Overwatch community about “one-tricking.” We’ve all heard rumors of players who instalock Mercy and glide all the way up the ladder, or those nightmare instalock Widowmakers who refuse to swap even though they couldn’t snipe the broadside of a barn. There’s certainly something to be said for gaining comfort and familiarity with a hero by playing them all but exclusively, but this can be aggravating when your favorite doesn’t fit in with the rest of your team.

This was brought to a head when a one-trick Torbjorn was banned over the weekend. He claims the reason he was banned was the mere presence of his favorite off-meta Swede tilting the rest of his team off the map. That is, anyone who wants to play their favorite off-meta hero is in danger of losing their account. Of course, Reddit exploded. People love their attacking Symmetras and defensive Hanzos. The idea that playing these unexpected, perhaps ineffective choices should be met with bans is pretty off-putting even if you’re a more flexible player.

It’s lucky then, that once again it appears that it’s actually how the player behaved in these circumstances that warranted the ban rather than the actual off-meta pick. In a video posted by some of his pick-up teammates (warning: language), the player in question apparently threw a bit of a tantrum when his team picked Torbjorn out from under him. Instead of opting for a different hero, he decided to sit in the spawn and not choose a hero. “I can’t pick,” he said in the video, “I only see Torbjorn.”

In response, the Overwatch CM team said they’re investigating the details of this specific ban, but also took this opportunity to remind the players of Blizzard’s two central pillars of gaming — “Play Nice, Play Fair.” This means, obviously, not sitting in base when somebody picks your favorite hero. They’ve also said in the past “playing a certain hero isn’t against the rules.” They did say however, that re-evaluating your choices and working with your team is likely beneficial to your success in Overwatch, even if it isn’t necessarily worth a ban.