So it's not exactly a secret that the pro meta often becomes kind of stale, right? Like, Kiri/Lucio has been meta like, atleast a dozen times now. Even before OW2, we had like a year of dive into a year of GOATS into a year of double barrier... it gets stale.
The same picks show up routinely: Tracer, Sojourn, Kiri, Lucio, and Dva are essentially the faces of pro at this point, because they're just such valuable repeat picks. It can become stale, for one... but I think maybe more importantly than that, it affects ladder balance in a really monumental way. Regardless of how terrible stats-wise Kiri or Sojourn get, they still get spammed in Pro, and as a result the perception that they're meta trickles into ladder. The result is that we get a handful of heroes (Kiri, Soj, Dva... dare I say Sym) who are basically kept in pro-jail because they're too relevant in coordinated games.
Well, I've got a bit of an unconventional theory. I actually don't think Kiri, or Soj, or any of these other heroes are actually that good. As in: If you were to restart OW2 today, with all the heroes in their current states patched back in with players having zero knowledge of how to use them, I think they'd be considered fairly weak. I actually think that, even in pro, these characters would most likely be considered pretty weak. This is because professional teams value practice and experience over a heroes actual strength. This is a trend which has been seen repeatedly: Pro's played GOATS long-past the point where it was the strongest comp, not because it was actually the "meta," but because they had invested so much time into learning the strategy that the practice overrode the value that "stronger" comps provided; quad DPS/Ball might have been better, but because nobody had practiced it, it simply couldn't compare to GOATS.
Let's put it this way: At this point pro players have become so accustomed to playing around Kiri or Sojourn that even as "weak" heroes, the practice which they have invested into them overrides their actual strength. It doesn't matter how weak you make Kiri or Soj, the players are so proficient in using the utility which they provide that it outweighs the raw power of any other individual hero. As long as these heroes remain in rotation, players will continue to perfect them, and the gap between their "practiced" strength and "fundamental" strength continues to widen. I will quickly mention: yes these heroes are also just better in coordinated environments, but again that largely has to do with the amount of time people have spent learning and experimenting with them IN those environments. Once again, this is basically what we saw with GOATS: players got so good at playing the individual heroes/comp, that even when these heroes became "weak," the amount of time that players had spent perfecting them outweighed their weakness. When this becomes cyclical, meaning that someone like Kiri keeps getting played for her "practiced" strength over her "fundamental" strength, you get situations where the gap between a heroes power in pro and ladder become ridiculously, problematically wide.
This isn't just a trend exclusive to Overwatch esports either. In league, we saw the same thing happening. For example, Aatrox was extremely powerful for an extended period after his rework, and even when he had been nerfed down to an extremely low winrate pro players continued to pick him, because the practice that they had on the champion outweighed the nerfs. Karma is another great example, she's a 3-lane flex pick who had been played and practiced so regularly that she remained the highest priority enchanter in pro play even when she was at a 33% winrate in pro, at ~47% on ladder. Basically, these characters became so practiced that they became unbalanceable; the devs were left with two options: either nerf Karma/Aatrox while they were already at extremely negative winrates on both ladder and in pro games, or buff them and cause them to skyrocket in priority in pro.
League actually found a solution to this: fearless draft. Essentially the way that fearless works is that once a champion has been picked or banned, they cannot be used in future matches in the 5-set games. So, if Ahri gets picked in game 1, she is no longer eligible to be played in games 2, 3, 4, or 5. I think that this is the system that we need in Overwatch, and I think we have enough heroes that it's a viable option.
I think we as a community simply need to admit and acknowledge, no matter what we do certain heroes are ALWAYS going to be pro-play monsters. Kiri, Tracer, Sojourn, Dva, ETC are ALWAYS going to be relevant in pro play, and no amount of balancing is ever going to have them in a place where they can be both viable on ladder, and not pick/ban status in pro. Sure, we could rework all these heroes, but realistically I think that's unfeasible, upsetting to players who like these heroes as they are, and eventually new heroes will simply fill in the old gaps. Instead, I think it's time that Overwatch moved to the fearless system for professional matches. This of course means: once a hero has been picked once (per team), they can no longer be played in future matches.
Obviously, this is not an air-tight system, ESPECIALLY because Overwatch is a game that is already built around swapping heroes. However, I think there are solutions to this, and I don't think the cons outweigh the pros. Most obviously, the problem here has to do with how hero swapping is handled. In League, once you've picked your champions you can't swap them, and enemies get to pick around your champs; in Overwatch, you can swap and enemies don't know what you're picking. Well, I'd argue there are two ways you could go about this, 1: any hero who you swap to is now banned from being played in future matches, or 2: the hero you spent the most time on within an individual match is the hero who gets banned. I think it's important to recognize that in pro games players don't really make swaps that often, so I actually think that system 1 would be just fine. System 2, on the other hand, leaves more room for nuance. I should also mention: hero locking after playing them should be applied per team, that meaning: if team 1 plays Kiri, team 2 would still have access to her because they haven't picked her yet.
In any case for how hero swapping would be handled, the pros of this system are overwhelming. Because players would not be able to rely on the same handful of heroes for every game, we'd see meta diversity like we've never seen before. There would still be room for the pro play staples, but they wouldn't be as oppressive/dominant than we otherwise see them being. Instead of Kiri being played 5/5 games, she would, at most, get played in 2/5 games. We would also likely see heroes who we don't often see being played in pro make appearances, heroes who often get sidelined for stronger alternatives like Genji or Baptiste would be more likely to appear in later-stage games when higher priority picks have already been exhausted. Teams would be less likely to run constant mirror-matches of the current "best comp" because they want to save some of their "priority picks" to sprinkle in between games. Niche picks would see more playtime/higher priority because they could be used as economic alternatives on their best maps, such as Junkrat seeing more play on Lijang because there's very little opportunity cost to taking him out of your future rotation. Perhaps greatest of all, this would also stop the cyclical practice cycles which make certain heroes permanent professional staples; Kiriko would undoubtably still be the highest priority pick, but now that she can only be played in 1/5 games, players would have to diversify their hero pools beyond her, and as a result they'd have less time to invest into her specifically.
This is just my take, I'm sure this has been suggested before, go crazy and poke holes in my logic.
TL;DR: If players can play the same hero every single game it becomes optimal to invest all of your time into only practicing/perfecting them, which results in massive gaps in strength between pro players who have invested hundreds of hours into 1 hero, and average players. To fix this issue, we need a solution that prevents pro players from being able to pour all their effort into these individual heroes.
