The sniper Ana, the latest hero addition for Blizzard's team-centric multiplayer shooter Overwatch, contains the capacity to boot players from the game entirely.

With Overwatch's support sniper Ana recently making her way onto PS4 and Xbox One after having been debuted on PC platforms, fans of Blizzard's incredibly successful first-person shooter have found her sleep dart to be a helpful tactic to keep enemy forces at bay by knocking them out for a limited amount of time. Interestingly enough, the YouTuber known as Youmuus has discovered an even more potent usage of Ana's tranquilizer that can essentially put a player out of commission permanently for an entire match.

In order for Overwatch fans to pull this off, a squad will need three separate players to take up the mantle of Ana. Basically, by surrounding an adversary with a group of Ana avatars, the characters will need to consistently hit the enemy with sleep darts until the opposing player's server registers them as being inactive long enough to have them booted from the game.

As seen in the Youmuus' video below, a small squadron of Ana triplets circle around Bastion and systematically shut down Overwatch's robot hero by blasting him with a sleep dart in intervals of 5 seconds a piece. Eventually, the targeted player disappears from the map altogether, as they have been kicked from the match for being AFK for about a minute.

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Of course, as many Overwatch fans will be quick to point out, this trick won't work at all in the game's ranked Competitive Play. As it happens, after monitoring many of the game's servers and listening to plenty of user feedback, Blizzard developers found out that lots of matches within the mode had an overabundance of players on one team using the same hero. With that being the case, the studio implemented a character limit for Competitive Play, making way for diversity on teams to further support the game's promotion of varied teamwork to win.

Youmuus also notes that some of Overwatch's heroes may be able to avoid being kicked from the game by three Anas through retaliation, as characters like Reinhardt can dash during the process, resetting the disconnection timer. Not to mention, even during the game's normal modes, a lot of players may find it difficult to pull the feat off successfully without being interrupted by other heroes on the opponent's team.

In any event, should Overwatch players get out of hand with this particular Ana exploit by overusing it, Blizzard developers will more than likely patch it with a future update. After all, the studio's team has been quite diligent since the title's launch when it comes to keeping the game as fair and balanced as possible. However, the company has yet to address the problem of players losing levels, skins, and more due to a bug on PS4, which should definitely take precedence over the Ana sleep dart exploit.

Overwatch is out now and is available for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Source: Youmuus – YouTube (via VentureBeat)