Blizzard is apparently taking an axe to yet another PvE-esque mode in Overwatch 2 as it winds down Hero Mastery Gauntlet for good at the end of Season 10, a little less than a month away.
“As we prepare for Season 11, we’ve taken the time to evaluate a variety of game modes based on how much they are being played,” Blizzard announced on the forums. “Hero Mastery Gauntlet was intended to bring the high score-chasing excitement of Hero Mastery missions into a multiplayer format. Unfortunately, it hasn’t resonated with players in the ways that we hoped. With this in mind, we have decided to discontinue Hero Mastery Gauntlet as a permanent mode, and it will not be available to play starting in Season 11. Players have until the end of Season 10 to complete the Lifetime Challenges for Hero Mastery Gauntlet and compete on the mode’s Top 500 leaderboards. […] Individual Hero Mastery Solo Courses will continue to be available, and there will be more Hero Mastery Solo Courses coming in upcoming seasons.”
Now, Reddit and the forums are pretty salty about the move, arguing that Blizzard is giving up on the mode without actually investing creativity into it, suggesting that Blizzard’s frequent canning of modes wounds player trust in the game, and complaining that half-measures were never going to make up for the cancelation of the proper once-promised PvE.
However, as MOP’s Carlo points out, queues for this particular were extremely slow, suggesting there wasn’t much uptake for the mode. “I can tell you 2-3 weeks into it, I couldn’t find a game – as in, a queue didnt pop, even 10 minutes in,” he lamented. And there are just as many people on the forums grumpy that the mode was boring; the top two replies to the bluepost are “I don’t want a PvE but a story mode” and “Gauntlet was the worst mode I have ever played” – which really just sums up the impossibility of the situation Blizzard chose to put itself in when it comes to OW2.
