Jeff Kaplan, the vice president of Blizzard Entertainment and director of Overwatch, stated in the Winter Wonderland Developer Update that Mei’s Yeti Hunt will have a role select…
He said “when you queue up, you’ll have the opportunity to pick ‘I prefer to play as Mei’ or ‘I prefer to play as the Yeti’ obviously the way the numbers work out not everybody can always be the Yeti, so sometimes when you say ‘I prefer to play as the Yeti’ and end up as Mei, but if you stay in long enough you’ll eventually get to play as Winston.”
Are Blizzard secretly using Mei’s Yeti Hunt as a beta trial for an upcoming role select in competitive matchmaking?
Blizzard have gone on the record saying that they’d prefer not to include a role select as it limits the flexibility of matchmaking by forcing players into their selected roles, but it is possible that they are considering a revision of this stance on a role select system.
A large portion of Overwatch competitive games are lost in the loading screen when multiple class mains are grouped together, for example four Mercy mains put together in one team. If a role select was implemented into Overwatch’s competitive, toxicity will drastically decrease as players can play their mains more often, without having to worry about unbalanced team comps. It would allow for fairer, more balanced and extremely competitive games as players are able to play at their best with their main heroes.
If the Mei’s Yeti Hunt game mode is a trial for a role select system, it is likely that it won’t enter the game until Season 9 as there are already drastic changes scheduled for Season 8.
The Winter Wonderland event will start on December 12th 2017.