With the latest update for Overwatch, you might notice something in Quick Play: you can’t stack heroes any more. Don’t be alarmed if you love playing double Winstons, want to go all same heroes sometimes and wanted everyone to just play Sombra for a week or two. The original quick play rules are now in Arcade Mode’s No Limits.
Why the change? First you need to understand the competitive aspect of Overwatch. On release the game’s super fun as it is, but to support higher levels of play it becomes a nightmare to balance. When all you see in pro teams is just 5 Tracers and a Lucio zipping around the control point in Overtime for 5 minutes straight it was boring to watch. With Overwatch e-sports growing rapidly, and even Blizzard wants to create its own league with some big ambitions to it, the need to have a one-hero limit becomes apparent. You can now balance heroes without worrying if it’s OP or not when the hero is stacked (this is why Winston’s bubble shield is 600 HP strong instead of 1000HP strong back in beta), more variety of heroes viable for play and more interesting matches to spectate as a result.
So what does it have to with quick play? You see, since Competitive mode runs a one-hero limit, sometimes people just want to test out strategies and play other heroes with a competitive-mode like setting, but without risking losing skill points if they lose. Imagine a six-man party wants to warm-up with a few quick play matches, but they keep running into other six-man parties that all play troll comps like all Bastions or all Winstons. Yes, competitive players may not be really that many compared to the majority who just don’t care about this and just want to play Overwatch because it’s fun, but again, e-sports money is big.
The good news is the original quick play mode is still in the game via Arcade Mode’s No Limits. The bad thing is: why bury it in Arcade Mode? Arcade Mode will be curated and all those big pinned modes might be rotated away for something fresh, but why not make quick play as it is but introduce a casual game mode running competitive rules? Putting No Limits inside another menu takes a few more button press/clicks which might make some people may not bother with it.
So, head’s up. This is something cool for competitive players to have, but the rest still have No Limits. So go there if you want the pure randomness of a possible hero-stacked comp from the enemy.