I haven’t really been commenting much on the Overwatch League (OWL) because I believe in Blizzard Esports’s vision for the Overwatch pro scene. However, yesterday I saw something that made me realize this train has truly gone off the rails.

There was a post on the Competitive Overwatch subreddit (which is actually a pretty good discussion forum unlike many subreddits) explaining that Envision, one of the teams in the Top 8 of NA Contenders, is playing with Jaru for the Quarterfinals.

The problem? Jaru has already competed in NA Contenders with a different team. I thought it might just be an oversight, but in just 15 minutes of checking, I was able to find 3 separate occurrences of players playing for two different teams in Contenders.

This would ordinarily be an enormous breach of protocol. It is completely unheard of in esports, or any professional competition, for players to swap teams in the middle of a tournament, or (in the case of seasons) in the middle of Playoffs.

Imagine if SKT lost in Worlds (hard to imagine I know), and another team could just pick up Faker and add him to their roster.

Ok, so it’s pretty bad for sure, but surely it’s not against Blizzard’s rules… oh God no…

For those who can’t see the above screencap, the official ruleset for Overwatch Contenders, Section 3.1 states:

“The Tournament is a regionally based, online, competition, where teams play the PC version of Overwatch that are comprised of up to nine (9) Overwatch players, each of whom must be an Eligible Participant, and each of which sign up for the Tournament as part of a team (“Team(s)”). None of the Team members may be associated with more than one Team in this Tournament.”

(Emphasis is mine, not Blizzard’s)

Just within 15 minutes of searching, I could find three examples of this rule being broken and allowed by Blizzard:

Destro : Previously played for Cyclowns, currently playing for Movistar Riders

: Previously played for Cyclowns, currently playing for Movistar Riders Davin : Previously played for Cyclowns, currently playing for Rest in Pyjamas (ex-NIP)

: Previously played for Cyclowns, currently playing for Rest in Pyjamas (ex-NIP) Jaru: Previously played for Toronto Esports, currently playing for EnVision eSports

Allowing for these types of exceptions to the rules, basically invalidates the whole ruleset, and the tournament’s competitive integrity with it. Let’s also not pretend there was no other recourse. As the rule says, each team could have three (3) subs.

I’ve thought a lot about it, and I don’t know how this could happen. Is it just a mistake? Is it bad leadership? Is it too many PMs working on the same project? This type of inconsistent enforcement, combined with the sub-optimal streaming schedule, and organizational instability, has made the professional Overwatch scene a bad place to be for its players for the past six months.

And Contenders specifically has been a blemish on what is supposed to be a great start for OWL.

I mean… don’t just take my word for it:

That is one of the best western players on one of the best western teams, calling the Overwatch pro scene a “shithole.” Yikes. And this type of sentiment is not isolated in the pro scene.

While there is hope one day over the horizon when OWL comes to fruition, what are all these professional players supposed to do in the meantime? There are huge and amazing plans being worked on, but for the next 0–12 months until Overwatch League starts, players are foundering.

What (If Anything) Did Blizzard Do Wrong?

How did we get here? Where things go wrong?

Blizzard announced the Overwatch League in November 2016, and at this point it looks like the league won’t start until 2018. That is a very long wait. Pro players are putting their entire livelihoods into something that they know very little about, without any guarantee that their hard work will pay off.

After all, their current teams might not get franchised, and then they might not get signed anyway. It’s a rough spot to be in.

Let’s also not forget that Overwatch is not exactly a popular spectator sport. Most tournaments are hard pressed to get more than 20–30k viewers — this is an order of magnitude smaller than Riot Games’ LCS in its initial seasons, where broadcasts regularly hit 200,000 concurrent viewers.

So even if OWL is everything that Blizzard hopes it will be, there’s no telling if the audience will be there.

‘League of Legends’ World Championship Final (cc Riot Games)

At the same time, Blizzard is banking on regionalism to increase the popularity of the game, but intracontinental regionalism is something that has never really existed in esports. Fan bases rally around brands of a specific team, or specific players; not specific cities.

There is regionalism that exists in esports, but it’s mostly continental, i.e. North America, South America, Europe, Korea, China, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Africa. The reason for this is because these are typically the regions that developers lock for qualifiers into international events. You get a chance to root for your regions best player(s) against other regions, which instills a certain regional pride.

So while there may be a Los Angeles Dignitas in the Overwatch League, it means a lot less since LA is meaningless as far as identity in the esports world. There is no LA championship, or LA local scene, or a list of best players in LA to compete for.

The only hope for this to work, is if there are arenas or stadiums in all these cities, and somehow non-endemic players will then care more about the game because of it. More on this later.

This brings us to…

What Blizzard Should Have Done Instead

If Blizzard’s goal was to create a sense of Intraregionalism, then they should have gone from bottom-up, not from top-down. Make people care about their localities, and have players compete on their home turf. This way players from local scenes have a champion to root for as they make their way up the regional and international level.

One way to do this would be to have local championships or local tournament circuits. For example, a Southern California Regional Championship to run in parallel with Northern California, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Mountain Region, etc. For Europe it’s even simpler, you can break it down by country, or by sub-region if you like (Western Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe).

We’ve already seen great success with this model in collegiate championships in Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends. People naturally feel affinity towards their Alma Mater, and even without context of the game or players, viewers will naturally root for their school.

What school you graduated from is something that never changes. That isn’t always the case with cities. There isn’t the same feeling of identity. By building up a sense of family in local scenes, and making players and fans invested in them, you create that fandom.

You can even take it a step further and include things like junior circuits for players under 18, and integrate that into collegiate as well. Meanwhile, as you are running these events, you are planning Overwatch League, reaching out to key potential owners and investors and securing them.

AND THEN you announce OWL and start it 3–6 months later. By that point you’ve created a sense of regionalism, you’ve maintained your scene and given it time to thrive naturally, you’ve given structure to players, and you’ve created job security for everyone in the esports sector.

Assuming you started running this circuit (or a similar one) in 2016, you could maintain the exact same timeline for Overwatch League that you have now, and it wouldn’t have changed anything — except people would feel better about its arrival.

This is how I would have approached it.

This is coincidentally similar to how Riot Games approached the LCS. First they let the tournament scene sort itself out with events like MLG, IPL, IEM, Dreamhack, etc organizing marquee tournaments with Riot support. Then they gave it some structure in 2012 with the Regional Championships and World Championship. And then finally came the LCS in 2013. We know what happened from there.

The thing is, Riot didn’t start with the LCS in 2011, and I don’t think that would have been super successful. They also announced the LCS just a matter of months before it began, and Riot continued supporting third party tournament organizers up until (and in some cases after) the LCS began. Intel Extreme Masters League of Legends events continued all the way until 2016.

Riot made a road map for success for this model. Of course, Riot is not Blizzard, and the two companies have done things very differently for a long time. That is, until now.

Until Overwatch League, Blizzard’s esports model has been more akin to Soccer, Tennis, or Golf — the same type of tournament circuits Valve runs for DOTA2 — and that model has been extremely successful so far. So it’s understandably disappointing that their first foyer into franchising and the American sports model has been off to a rough start.

How Does Blizzard Repair The Damage Before OWL Begins?

Team EnvyUs after winning MLG Las Vegas

I am not all doom and gloom. I believe Blizzard can repair the damage in their scene.

They should be working with third party tournament organizers to put Overwatch tournaments at their events. They should have another circuit similar to Contenders, but with an element of intraregionalism. They should definitely go further to enforce their own rules. And they should definitely be more transparent with players on the process.

What are next steps? What is the road map? What is the timeline? What can players do to help?

Players are a vital part of the plan, and while you can just pick another six players from the Top 500 ladder if most of the current pros bail (as is becoming a trend), the quality of the product, and the fan support, will both be inferior.

I implore Blizzard, and all developers, to not forget the most important aspect of your plans for esports — your players who give up their lives to play your awesome games.

Please take care of them, and they’ll take care of you.