Overwatch: Blizzard is working on changes for Mystery Heroes, but it wants to hear your take on some of them

By Sherif Saed

Playing Overwatch’s Mystery Heroes mode can be great fun, but it’ll be even better after Blizzard implements some of the improvements it’s been working on.

Overwatch‘s Arcade is full of user-created game modes, as well as official ones from Blizzard.

Among these is one in particular that’s very popular, called Mystery Heroes. The setup is simple: you get assigned a hero at random every time, forcing you to learn and adapt. That said, the mode can stand to be improved, and the game’s community raised a few valid points about this on the official forums.

Game director Jeff Kaplan saw the thread and decided to chime in, confirming that although fixes and improvements for Mystery Heroes are in the works, it’s not at the top of the studio’s priority list right now.

“We have a number of Mystery Heroes fixes on our to-do list. We’re very eager to get to them but it just hasn’t bubbled to the top of our priority list yet,” said Kaplan.

“We definitely want to get rid of suiciding to force a hero switch. We will also remove the “Assemble Heroes” wait time as there is no reason for it in this mode. We have some other improvements in mind as well,” he added, referring to a couple of the players’ pet peeves with it.

One change suggested is for Blizzard to add some form of smart team composition algorithm that doesn’t just pick heroes at random, but instead attempts to create balanced teams so stacking is less of an issue. This proved controversial, as part of the mode’s charm is the chaos that ensues from the wrong team compositions.

“I know that it frustrates me when the other team ends up with 5 D.Va’s. I also get frustrated when the enemy team has a balanced team comp and my team comp is less balanced. But perhaps that is part of the charm of the mode?” Kaplan said, soliciting more feedback from the community about this particular point.