According to tweets from the Blizzard customer service account, Mei’s ice wall ability has allowed the character to force her way outside of the boundaries of various maps. This has allowed players using the character to exploit the bug to create invincible characters that can deal tons of damage, heal their allies, and never take damage from incoming fire.
The issue is a pretty big one, and not the first time that we’ve seen characters locked on the roster in Overwatch 2. Blizzard removed both Bastion and Torbjörn earlier this year, right around Overwatch 2’s launch.
It isn’t unheard of in other multiplayer games, either, as balancing issues like this can always pop up when updates are introduced. It’s also possible that this issue has been there all along and nobody had discovered it.
No matter how long it has been in the game, the recent exploitation of the bug has led to Blizzard disabling Mei until the developers can put together a fix for the ice wall exploit. Currently, Blizzard says it hopes to have a fix ready for the character when the next big update rolls out on November 15, 2022. That’s a good two weeks away at this point, though, so players will need to make due without Mei on their roster for a while.
Luckily, there are other characters for players to check out in Overwatch 2. The game added another damage-dealing character at release, and players can unlock both Sojourn and Junker Queen, a new tank character, using Newsweek’s handy guide. Additionally, players who level their battle pass can unlock a new healer character named Kiriko, which has quickly become a community favorite, as well.
While Mei is disabled for a short time, the iconic ice-wielding character will no doubt make quite the comeback when this bug is resolved. Hopefully, this is the last time we see Mei finding herself in Overwatch jail, as well. She managed to make it almost eight years in the original game without ever having an exploitable issue, so hopefully, this is the last, at least for a while.
