4. MEI’S SNOWBALL OFFENSIVE
To celebrate the holiday season, the Winter Wonderland seasonal event ran from Dec 13 to Jan 3 with tons of festive cosmetic goodies.
The brawl that came along with it was Mei’s Snowball Offensive, with a brand new arena map called Ecopoint: Antarctica, the place where Mei worked as a climatologist before she was cryogenically frozen.
In the brawl, piles of snow were scattered around the map. Players used them to craft snowballs, which could be shot at the enemy team using Mei’s Endothermic Blaster. Only one snowball could be held at a time, and the match consisted of two teams of six.
This brawl, although slow-paced at times due to the one snowball limit, was fun in that patience and precision were highly rewarded. Running around and being reckless with your snowball would leave you vulnerable as you risk standing out in the open as you wait for your gun to reload at a snow pile.
Since every character was Mei, her unique tool-kit with ice-wall and cyro-freeze allowed players to do fake-outs and immediately retaliate with their own offensive attack. And there was nothing more satisfying then shooting a risky shot off into the distance and hearing that satisfying *clink* as you land a snowball right on an enemy.
The brawl was fun up until a glitch was discovered that allowed Mei to hide up in the rafters of the map’s two starting locations, making her impossible to hit but still able to shoot and damage others. This even transferred over to the 3v3 mode on the same Antarctica map, with players insta-locking Mei and breaking the map so it was impossible to hit her. As soon as you realized someone on the enemy team was using this cheating strategy, you might as well quit or come to the conclusion you were either going to lose, or draw in the match.
The glitch was later patched out with penalties for those who abused it, but not until after the end of the seasonal event. At least it’s not a problem anymore for those who still enjoy paying around in 3v3.
