Lol. After all these years they’re thinking of rolling back the 5v5 changes. To quote someone from Reddit:
PVE was dropped, heroes are free again, and now 6v6 is back. Blizzard spent the last couple of years turning overwatch 2 back into Overwatch 1.
Edit: See also the developer’s blog post about this, which goes into great detail explaining their decisions over the year and how we got here. Really worth a read if you are (or were) an OW player.
You have to buy the battlepass to use the newest characters. And the cosmetics used to be free.
They monetized competitive gameplay elements and cosmetics that were supposed to come with the $60 I spent. Both of these are microtransactions.
They actually changed that a while back, new heroes aren’t in the battlepass any more, everyone gets them for free. I don’t know how that works with the “new player experience” where you needed to win games to unlock the base heroes on a new account though.
Starting Season 10, all new heroes will be immediately unlocked when they launch. All existing heroes will also be unlocked for players. This means that heroes will no longer need to be unlocked through the Battle Pass to be playable in all game modes.
New players will still need to complete the first-time user experience to unlock heroes as they learn the ropes. Once the heroes from the original Overwatch roster have been unlocked, all Overwatch 2 heroes will also become available.
So unless there was another change, new players still need to play/win games in order to unlock the full roster.