Overwatch Season 2 makes big change to map voting

Monitoring makes some improvements to the map voting system in Season 2, including new and reworked competitive map forgiveness, majority rules voting, and a random pick. These are just some of the improvements Monitoring is developing its base systems as part of its 2026 relaunch.

In 2026, Blizzard took some big turns with its hero shooter, including a rebranding back to simply calling it Monitoringa refreshed user interface and 10 new heroes released during the year-long Reign of Talon story. The risk paid off, with Monitorings comeback breaks records on Steam, Twitch and other platforms.

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Overwatch Season 2 map voting changes explained

Now, Monitoring is getting ready to roll out its second season, and with it comes some big improvements to the Map Voting system. Featured in a Director's Take blog by Monitoring Game Director Aaron Keller, these upgrades to the Map Voting system are coming in Reign of Talon Season 2 on April 14th.

Losing games on new or reworked maps in Competitive will result in a minor penalty to rank progress.
If an overwhelming majority of players vote for a map, that map will automatically win the vote.
A “Random Map” button gives players the chance to vote for a randomly selected map in addition to the three offered.
Icons on each map card indicate whether a team is playing offense or defense.
Back-end map recent tweaks to make maps that get some votes not as buried as those that don't, meaning a player's favorite maps appear more often.

While all of these changes are beneficial for fans, the new and reworked map forgiveness in Competitive is especially timely. Each season of Reign of Talon is meant to have at least one new or reworked map. With Antarctic Peninsula updates in Season 2, Japan Night is planned for Monitoring Season 3, and Island and Atlantic Arcology sometime after, this feature in particular will see a lot of use.

overwatch reign of talon season 2 post match accolades ui

The Monitoring The Director's Take blog also introduced some social system improvements. For starters, the post-match awards system replaces the existing recommendations in Season 2. After a match, fans will be taken to a 3D landing page to vote for an MVP from either team and can even participate in post-match banter in voice chat with the other team. This new system is reminiscent of the popular voting cards from before Overwatch 2 era and should give players more opportunities to be recognized for big plays.

Who is that character?

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Some upgrades are coming to the Hero Ban system Monitoringalso. While nothing is set in stone, Blizzard is exploring ways to expand sharing of hero preference information during the voting phase and is even considering a fifth Lobby Ban slot, chosen via votes from both teams and independent of role limits. These changes are early in development, will likely come much later in 2026, and are subject to change, but fans can expect the Hero Bans system for competitive play to receive improvements sometime this year.