Overwatch 2 Yanks Tracer From Stadium’s Hero Pool After Just 48 Hours Over Game-Breaking Time-Jumping Exploit

Officials say the cavalry is en route, but on the ground the horizon still looks empty.

Overwatch 2 finally let Tracer into its new Stadium mode, and within 48 hours she was so busted she got benched. Not for being too strong in the usual way, but because she basically found a time-traveling money printer and turned herself into a tiny, unkillable tank. Yes, buildcrafting in Overwatch. And yes, it broke immediately.

Quick refresher: what is Stadium?

Stadium is a seven-round gauntlet built around saving and spending currency between rounds. You buy stat boosts, slap on ability modifiers, and tinker your way into some very silly builds. It is, against all odds, pretty fun. But it also has its own balance rules, which is why Blizzard has been slow-rolling hero additions. Months after the mode launched, Tracer finally joined the roster.

Why Tracer got the boot

Two days later, Blizzard pulled her from Stadium. They didn’t spell out the reason, but it’s not hard to connect the dots. Clips started circulating on Twitter on September 18, 2025, showing a simple exploit loop:

• Buy upgrades, sell them to get your currency back, then hit Recall to rewind time and keep the upgrades anyway. Repeat.

Because Recall resets Tracer to an earlier state, the build would lock in the stat buffs while restoring the cash you just spent. That means infinite scaling for free. In a mode designed around budgeting and gradual power creep, that is... less than ideal.

How broken did it get?

Some Tracer builds ballooned to nearly 2,000 HP — roughly four times tank territory — on a hero with one of the smallest hitboxes and the twitchiest movement in the game. Combine that with her mobility and Recall, and you’re basically shooting at a hummingbird wearing a riot shield. Funny in a time-paradox kind of way, infuriating if you’re on the other side.

So what now?

Tracer is temporarily disabled in Stadium while Blizzard sorts it out. Given Stadium is balanced separately from the rest of Overwatch 2 and heroes get added to it cautiously, expect a fix before she returns. Until then, the most famous face in Overwatch is sitting out the mode she accidentally broke by doing what she does best: messing with time.