Ash Was Removed as a Playable Character From 'Brawl Stars' and No One Knows When He'll Be Back

Among the many console-based hero shooter games that have come out over the last decade or so, some free-to-play options like Brawl Stars have also been available.

Brawl Stars is a MOBA hero shooter title in which players can select a team of fighters face off against each other in a variety of game modes, almost all of which have you shoot your way through a top-down map to gain advantages on your opponents. Since its launch back in 2018, the game has introduced over 80 playable Brawlers.

Like many free-to-play titles of this nature, Brawl Stars features a consistent schedule of updates and patches to address certain issues and add new content to the game to expand its lifespan. Of course, this schedule invites can invite a whole host of unexpected new issues that devs will inevitably have to address. In extreme cases, characters may even be removed from the roster. The playable Ash is one such victim of these glitches, but why is he temporarily unavailable? Let's break it down.

Ash was added to the Brawl Stars lineup back in August 2021. Players know him as a tank character with high amounts of health and a Rage Bar that grants him access to more attack damage the more it fills up. By now, he's become a fixture on the character select screen with many players still considering him a decent character, if not somewhat imbalanced for the current meta.

Unfortunately, neither his meta nor his mechanics particularly have anything to do with his temporary removal from the game. In late May 2024, more than three years after his initial release, Ash was rendered unplayable in Brawl Stars. Though he still appears on the character select screen, players currently aren't able to choose him as part of their teams as of this writing.

The Brawl Stars dev team at Supercell have addressed the matter directly. In a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter), they explained the issue in full.

"We have temporarily disabled Ash from being played in the Duels game mode due to an issue where he would crash the game," they stated in an official tweet.

They continued, "Ash has been disabled in all game modes until we fix this issue. We're sorry to all the trash can lovers out there. He will be back soon!"

Players corroborated these instances, reporting that starting matches against players using Ash and another character, Larry and Lawrie, would indeed cause crashes.

This quickly prompted Supercell to remove him from play until they could determine the cause and address it.

Even for a live service game like Brawl Stars, removing a character from the roster is a largely extreme measure to resort to when having to address ongoing glitches. Unfortunately, games have suffered this before. In a larger-scale example, Overwatch 2 had to disable several characters during its 2022 launch for similar reasons to that of Brawl Stars.

It is currently unknown as to when Ash will be added back to the game. Brawl Stars is available on iOS and Android devices.