The hamster's grapple hook was "too powerful" for the beta.
The Overwatch hero known as Wrecking Ball is finally living up to his name. A recently discovered bug in the Overwatch 2 beta was allowing the tank hero (a hamster named Hammond who rides around in a robotic hamster ball) to overload servers and crash the client of every player except his own.
As you can see from a clip of the bug shared by streamer supertf, crashing a server with Wrecking Ball was so easy that it could be done by accident. Apparently, all you have to do is aim at the ground and spam the hero's grapple hook while midair.
To prevent widespread use of the bug, Blizzard has disabled Wrecking Ball in the Overwatch 2 beta until it's fixed.
"Wrecking Ball’s powers are a bit too strong on the Beta server," the official Overwatch Twitter said yesterday.
It's a peculiar glitch. It's not obvious just by looking what's pushing the servers or player clients over the limit—maybe the ability is bugged and making more "grapple to this point" requests than a server can handle? Maybe all the sparks produced on the ground have something to do with it? Your guess is as good as mine.
Interestingly, the grapple bug will also have an impact on the Overwatch League when it returns later this week. Blizzard has planned since last year to host the new season of OWL on Overwatch 2, and it sounds like the Wrecking Ball bug is also present in the build pros will be playing. As such, he'll be locked during this week of competition. Head of OWL Sean Miller promised to "get our furry friend [back] in by next week."
I know we said no hero pools for 2022... but this time is different! Turns out Wrecking Ball's powers are a bit too strong for OWL servers too, so we'll be disabling him for this weekend, but should get our furry friend in by next week ???? https://t.co/PhKYELIHbUMay 3, 2022
Overwatch 2 is proving to be a true beta. Last week, Blizzard also fixed a bug that had been causing Mercy's ultimate to fail despite looking like it's working.
Thanks, Forbes
