Overwatch 2 bug locks many heroes for some players as Bastion and Torbjörn are removed

Overwatch 2’s troubled launch continues: On Monday, Blizzard had to take the game offline for emergency maintenance after a plan to remove Bastion and Torbjörn from rotation had the unintended side-effect of locking a whole swath of characters — around a third of the roster — for some players.

According to a tweet from the official Overwatch account and a known issues tracker on the official forums, Bastion was completely disabled in the game, and Torbjörn disabled in competitive play, at 3 p.m. PDT. “Both of these heroes are experiencing bugs that heavily impact gameplay, and we’ll share an update on them soon,” Blizzard said. According to reports from players, a bug with Bastion’s ultimate ability was allowing players to spam artillery at their opponents, while Torbjörn’s Overload ability could be triggered for double its usual duration depending on the timing of the button press.

But soon, large numbers of players were reporting that a substantial portion of their rosters of unlocked heroes were suddenly locked. For Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez, 12 of 34 characters became unavailable.

At 7 p.m. PDT, Blizzard acknowledged the problem on its issue tracker, and blamed a server-side bug. “The team is aware of a new issue that prevents players from accessing all their owned heroes,” the developer said. “This is caused by an issue with our servers that tracks player progression. We are working to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible.”

Soon after, Overwatch 2 was taken fully offline for an hour. When it came back online, the issue appeared to be fixed for some, but not all, players, according to Kotaku.

Overwatch 2 has had a very difficult first week. At launch, the huge influx of new players, plus what Blizzard called a “mass DDoS” attack, caused server issues that rendered the game unplayable for many players. Connection issues have persisted, despite server maintenance, while Blizzard has been forced to roll back the controversial requirement for a phone number to be attached to a Battle.net account for a majority of players. Another bug caused players to accidentally buy items from the in-game shop because the game was still registering key strokes while they were chatting with friends.