The Battle Pass Effect: How Overwatch 2’s Hero Unlock System is Impacting Competitive Play

To counter what the opposing side is running in Overwatch 2, gamers are quitting games early to acquire meta heroes they haven’t unlocked yet.

When Blizzard first revealed that Overwatch 2 characters would only be accessible to Battle Pass subscribers when released, there was a lot of uproars because many believed it would compromise the fairness of competition.

Kiriko and Ramattra have already been locked away by the Battle Pass, but this problem could grow if other heroes join them, and it seems to have already impacted rankings. Support specialist ML7 was playing Circuit Royal during a recent Twitch stream when his tank teammate Ramattra wasn’t unlocked for usage against the opposing team’s Sigma. He was experiencing difficulties.

A Player in Overwatch 2 quits to buy Ramattra and rejoin the game

ML7’s team had trouble breaking through the opponent’s resistance during the attack since their Widowmaker and Sojourn DPS quickly dispatched any push. Not to mention that they were becoming MTD wholly.

The squad was having trouble, and eventually, the tank player made a significant modification on defense even though their dive successfully got the payload near the second checkpoint.

“On this account, Ramattra is not unlocked. If not, we could play the Ramattra competition,” the tank said. Wait, I’ll purchase him. Ramattra was now unlocked and prepared to use when the player left the game and returned shortly after.

ML7 was absolutely perplexed by what he was witnessing and couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but he was pleased that the team now had a Ramattra to punch through their opponents, and they almost managed to win. Sadly, the streamer lost the battle because the hole was too big to get out of, but as he pointed out, they might have had a better chance if they had Ramattra from the start.

Though players won’t have to worry about this in Season 3 as it will be the first not to include a new Overwatch 2 character, it will be fascinating to observe if these hero roster difficulties worsen throughout Overwatch 2’s existence.