Overwatch 2’s map pool system will be removed, according to a recent article on the Blizzard website. The system will no longer be present starting Season 4, after which players will be able to play with a wider variety of maps in any given game.

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The original reason for the map pool system in Overwatch 2, according to director Aaron Keller, was to allow the team to focus on a few maps at a time, but players generally didn’t receive this well. There also weren’t enough maps to actually warrant a map pool system in the first place, which is why the system is being scrapped. 

Here’s the full quote from the Blizzard article:

We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low. Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. 

Still, that doesn’t mean that the map pool system is gone for good. The article mentions that it may return when more maps are added.

There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have a lot more maps in the game. If we were to bring them back, they would probably rotate at a faster rate, potentially every week. If you hate this idea, set a reminder for 2 years from now and let us know!

With the announcement that map pools were going to be removed, Keller also revealed that the system did not favor one particular map over another, but the system wasn’t entirely “random” either, as it would prevent you from getting the same map and mode for a duration.

We have been looking into this based off of player reports and there is a detail of the matchmaking system that does elevate Push maps a bit. The matchmaker tries to avoid people playing the same map as well as the same game mode over a short period of time. Since Push has fewer maps than other game modes this could cause those maps to come up more frequently than game modes with more maps.

The article closed with a mention that Blizzard has changed the challenges that players grind for during events. Instead of being centered around the event game mode, more challenges will “let you play the way you prefer” but will keep event game modes alive. 

Source: Blizzard