Overwatch's ban phase looks like everyone jabbing at portraits for a few seconds. It's actually a tiny election with weighted ballots, a draft order, a quota and, since June, a surprise fifth seat decided by both teams.
Short answer: each player ranks three heroes, and those rankings are worth seven, five and three votes. Each team then gets two bans in a set order, no role can lose more than two heroes to those bans, and a fifth Lobby Ban can land if both teams want the same hero gone. So a hero you barely cared about can vanish, and the one you were desperate to remove can walk straight through.
The vote is weighted, and the order matters
Blizzard laid out the original rules in an April 2025 Director's Take, days before bans arrived with Season 16. Teams don't take turns. Everyone votes at once, you can't see the enemy team, and match text chat is off. Your team chat still works, so this is a planning window, just a quick one.
The weights do more than you'd think. One first-place vote (seven) beats two third-place votes (six). Your top pick is louder than two teammates' afterthoughts.
Then comes the reveal, which Blizzard says the system works through instantly:
- The team with the most votes on a single hero becomes the "first" team, and that hero is guaranteed to go. If both teams tie, the first team is picked at random.
- The other team, the "second" team, bans its top two heroes. If either one is already gone, its third pick steps in.
- The first team's second pick goes last, with the same swap.
That's first team, second team twice, first team again, which matches what the Season 3 patch notes call a snake draft. It means a team with one loud favorite gets the first ban, but the other side answers immediately with two.
Ties have a nice wrinkle. When two heroes have the same votes, the one backed by more players wins. A hero on 14 votes from four people (5, 3, 3, 3) beats a hero on 14 from two people (7, 7). Consensus beats two very determined friends. If that's somehow tied too, it's random.
The quota is why your vote disappeared
Here's the rule behind most "wait, why is that hero still here?" moments. Only two heroes per role can be banned. If two tanks are already out and your team's next choice is a third tank, those votes get ignored, and your team's next most-voted hero in a different role goes instead.
So you can pour your whole ballot into a tank and watch a damage hero you ranked third disappear. That isn't a bug. It's the quota doing its job.
Players noticed. PC Gamer reported in April that Blizzard associate game director Alec Dawson said the system sometimes doesn't "feel like it works in your lobby", such as when a hero with plenty of votes runs into the role limit or gets narrowly edged out. His floated fix was a fifth ban, called a Lobby Ban.
The Lobby Ban plays by different rules
That idea shipped with Season 3 on June 16. The notes, as reproduced by Dexerto, spell it out: Lobby Bans are a fifth slot that can break the two-hero role limit, and they add together votes from both teams. A hero gets Lobby Banned if both teams gave it at least one vote and it reached 10 total votes.
Do the math and the bar is lower than it sounds. The notes' own example is one first-place vote and one third-place vote. Seven from your team plus three from theirs, and that hero's gone. Neither team needs to have made it a priority. It's two strangers on opposite sides quietly agreeing.
The patch's developer comments give the reasoning: Lobby Bans should ban heroes both teams would rather not face, and give players "a better reason than ever to vote". That second part matters, because Blizzard's original rules let you pass by pressing Ready and leave the choice to your allies. The Lobby Ban is the developers' pitch for not doing that.
The same update reversed something from 2025. Blizzard originally said picking a Preferred Hero didn't protect it at all. Now your Preferred Hero, the top spot on the new Roster, adds three negative votes, enough to cancel one player's third-place vote. It's a shield, not a wall. The developers say it stops most cases of one teammate banning your pick alone, assuming you also vote for at least two other heroes. Two teammates can still outvote you.
What this means when the timer starts
Some of this is opinion, so here's where the rules end. The mechanics above are Blizzard's. The advice below is ours. Check your team's Roster first, so you don't vote out the hero your tank wants to play. Spend your first-place vote on the hero you really want gone, because it's the vote that can make your team the first team. And use all three picks: if your top choice hits the quota, your lower votes are what's left.
There are gaps worth knowing. The notes don't say what happens if two heroes both qualify for the Lobby Ban, or how negative votes count toward its total. Blizzard has also been tuning this system since 2025, so treat the numbers here as the rules as of the Season 3 notes and check the next patch before you build a strategy on them.
So: it's a vote, a draft and a quota, plus one wildcard both teams share. The portraits were never that simple.
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