For the 10 people who will manage to read through this entire thing, I have saved the juiciest bit for last. In Stage 1, every team played every map five times — which is fair given that some teams will be better at some maps than others. However, in both Stages 2 and 3, this was not the case. In Stage 2, 9 different teams had an uneven breakdown of at least one map type. For example, in Stage 2 the Fusion played Lijiang only 4 times and Nepal 6 times. In Stage 3 this difference exists less largely with only 2 teams (the Houston Outlaws & Seoul Dynasty). What is even more strange is that even when you sum across teams there is not even parity. In Stage 2 each map in the set was played 60 times, but in Stage 3 Ilios & Junkertown are only played 58 times whereas Nepal & Route 66 are played 62 times.

Before anyone says “wait a second Beezy I’m sure Blizzard has this balanced out over the course of the regular season and Stage 4 will make every map played evenly by every team” — you should know that it is mathematically impossible for this to happen without a major structural change to the League. At the end of Stage 3 Route: 66, Junkertown, and Watchpoint: Gibraltar will all have at least one team with unequal play time. Since all three of these maps are pure escort — there is no way for Blizzard to reconcile these differences all in one stage unless they change the structure of the league to allow for more than 2 maps of each type in the pool. It is somewhat concerning that in all three stages Blizzard managed to end up with 3 different scenarios of map counts — Stage 1 had pure equality, Stage 2 had inequality in teams, and Stage 3 had inequality for both teams and the maps themselves.

So what is the takeaway of all of this? Many of the stats I presented in this article were averages that probably seemed low impact (for example Boston on average having to prepare an additional half map than their opponents) — but I think we should be cautious before dismissing them. As it stands now the Overwatch League has a three-way tie for fourth place (not including map score) — and both the Stage 1 and Stage 2 playoff races came down to very small differences in Map Score. A single map, let alone a whole match, going a different way could drastically change the results for different teams. As stated above, in Stage 2 the Fusion played more Nepal than Lijiang, and that matters since we had a much higher win rate on Lijiang than Nepal. Not to mention there is definitely a momentum impact of losing a big game — players can tilt or run-good and winning one crucial match at the start can be more important than losing an unfavorable match-up towards the end.

That is not to say that I think Blizzard did a necessarily poor job of creating the schedule — multi-parameter optimization is almost always unsolvable and therefore fairly complicated to get right. With what I assume are many different outcomes to control for (Home vs Away, Map Equity, Back to Back limiting, Non-repeat match-ups within stage) — having only 40 matches, or 10 within a stage, to create an averaged out fairness is probably impossible. And of course, not all things in life are fair — I’m sure none of the established sports leagues or other Esports leagues have schedules that are 100% fair and equal, but those leagues still function very well. I do have a few ideas on how to improve this issue though — from very simple ones such as re-optimizing with out giving a fuck about time zones (which they miss hard on anyway and is a more or less impossible goal), to more complicated ones such as instating a ‘Map-Ban’ system rather than the predetermined maps.