Blizzard pulls Mei from Overwatch 2, won’t return for two weeks

Overwatch 2 is losing another hero, this time for about two weeks. Blizzard Entertainment tweeted Monday that it’s taking Overwatch 2 hero Mei offline due to a bug with her Ice Wall ability. If all goes well, Mei will return to the game in a patch on Nov. 15. As a Mei main, I am devastated. An out of order sign? Not the sort of weapon charm I was hoping for.

“We are temporarily disabling Mei to address a bug with her Ice Wall ability that allows heroes to reach unintended locations,” Blizzard tweeted from its customer service account. “We are working to address these issues as quickly as possible and aim to bring Mei back in our next upcoming patch which is set for November 15.”

The bug let Mei propel herself outside map boundaries. You can see the bug in action on Overwatch 2’s Busan map, via a clip posted to Reddit. In it, a Kiriko player uses the Swift Step ability to teleport to Mei. Later, the players use the exploit to transport Symmetra out of the map, too — effectively allowing them invincibility and easy targets, because no one else can see where they are.

While this is Mei’s first time sitting things out, these kinds of suspensions are not unheard of for Overwatch 2 during its rocky launch last month. Heroes Bastion and Torbjörn were removed from the game after they unintentionally locked players out of nearly one-third of the game’s roster, as well as other bugs. These two were removed from the game on Oct. 10, and were fully added back in just last week.

Overwatch 2’s launch has been rough. On launch day, the game faced massive queues due to an influx of players, followed by what Blizzard called a “mass DDoS” attack which made the game largely unplayable for a significant amount of players. Soon after, another controversial bug reportedly lead to Overwatch 2 players accidentally buying character skins with in-game currency. This was apparently caused by the game logging key strokes while players were focused on chatting in the Hero Gallery. That’s all on top of controversy surrounding its battle pass and monetization.

Overwatch 2’s Halloween event is live now with co-op missions. Thankfully, Mei’s not involved there.

Update (Nov. 15): Blizzard announced Tuesday, the day the mid-season balance patch for Overwatch 2 was expected to go live and currently disabled hero Mei was set to return to the roster, that the update has been indefinitely delayed. An Overwatch community manager posted the following notice on Blizzard’s official forums:

Today’s patch is delayed as we work to resolve a critical issue. We’ll provide an update here and set the patch live as soon as the problem is addressed.

This includes the upcoming balance changes, bug fixes, including those that affect Mei, and core content updates we have planned for this patch. This delay also impacts the delivery of Overwatch League Viewership Incentives & Perks from the Postseason matches during the period between Oct 30 - Nov 4, along with the rotation of cosmetics in the Overwatch League shop.