
The Overwatch League starts tomorrow night, but fans still have a lot of questions about various aspects of the league.

To get those questions answered, Mail Esports spoke to Nate Nanzer, the commissioner of the Overwatch League.

He was able to talk about everything from streaming and distribution rights, to how fans will be rewarded for watching the matches, to how new patches will work, and the potential of a fully fledged Fantasy Overwatch League.

The Overwatch League's first ever season kicks off on January 10, and fans are intrigued about how successful it will be

Overwatch League commissioner Nate Nanzer spoke to Mail Esports about all the questions the audience wants to know

Last year Nanzer took to Reddit to answer some AMA questions about the league. At the time, he wasn't able to comment on certain subjects, but now with the regular season on our doorstep, he was able to spill the beans.

Overwatch League team skins and rewards for watching

'We definitely want people to be rewarded for engaging with the Overwatch League,' said Nanzer. 'We've got a lot of cool ideas, the most obvious of which is earning tokens and team skins.

'More will come to light pretty quickly after the league launches, but what's available out of the gate isn't necessarily what the system will be in three months or six months time. This is definitely one of those areas where we'd love to hear feedback from the fans.'

Each team has their own coloured home skins for the heroes, you can buy them using an in game currency for actual money

The Overwatch League team skins are proving to be a popular topic of conversation at the moment, and we can reveal that they will go live alongside the start of the league on Wednesday, January 10.

Everyone who plays will get to choose one for free, but any subsequent skins you want will have to be purchased with real money.

'The skins will cost 100 tokens each,' said Nanzer, 'and the tokens are purchasable in bundles. It works pretty similar to most other games where there are tokens. The more you buy, the biggest discount you get, so the price of the skins can very there.'

Some people will be picking skins based on aesthetics, while others will be buying them to support the pro teams through a league-wide revenue sharing system.

'The way it works is all of the global revenues we generate at the league level, whether it's media rights, sponsorship, merchandise sales, or virtual merchandise, all of that goes into a pool which is shared with the teams.'

The Twitch stream

The Overwatch League preseason was only streamed on the MLG platform, and that didn't do much to encourage esports fans who use Twitch and YouTube as their go-to video sources.

Blizzard have kept their partnership with Twitch very quiet, or it was only just agreed, but either way, the fans will be happy

Today the league announced that they have signed a two year exclusive third party digital provider partnership with Twitch. All regular season, playoff, and championship matches will be streamed on Twitch worldwide, except from in China. There will be English, Korean, and French streams.

The OWL and Twitch are working on rewards for fans, such as custom Cheering and OWL Cheermotes, but also including some content that will be available for a limited time.

Overwatch League Fantasy

Another hot topic right now is OWL Fantasy. There are unofficial games and leagues starting to pop up, but nothing from Blizzard just yet. There are plans in place, but don't expect anything big just yet.

'A full on fantasy league is not something that will happen for Season 1,' confirmed Nanzer. 'It's something we definitely want to do, hopefully starting in Season 2.

'What we could see later in Season 1 would be things like... maybe you pick your favourite player on a match day, and if that player does something great, you earn something. Fantasy sports take a lot of different forms these days, it's not just a strict rotisserie league like it used to be 25 years ago. You have daily contests, even match by match contests.

There won't be a fully fledged Overwatch fantasy league in the first season, but there are upcoming plans around the idea

'We're going to play around with some different things. Right now we're focusing on what statistics really matter. We're about to get a ton of data on really high level play, and really understand the stats that are the most meaningful and most correlated with success. There's obvious stuff, but for fantasy to be really cool it needs to be deeper than just KDA.

'We want to fine tune that before launching a robust fantasy product.'

Mid-season patches

When the Overwatch League starts, the pros will be playing the same version of the game that everyone else is right now.

But the game is updated all the time, and some patches can completely change the landscape of the competitive meta. Top tier heroes might fall by the wayside, while underutilised picks may come to the forefront.

For professional players who need to be at the top of their game, fundamentally changing the way the game works in the middle of a season could be disastrous. For example, just about every team has a Mercy on it right now, but who knows if that will be the case if the current changes to her on the PTR make it to live?

Mercy and Junkrat have had changes made to them on the PTR, but it's going to be many weeks before we see them in action

'We're not going to go straight from PTR to the league,' said Nanzer. 'Once we find out how good changes are on the PTR, we'll patch them into the live game, but then we'll probably still have a bit of delay before they get to the league. We want to make sure pro players don't have any surprises.'

The Overwatch League season is split into four stages of six weeks, with breaks between each stage.

'One of the benefits of having the stage structure is that they're a very natural point for us to do any patches. Once a stage starts, it's unlikely there will be any new patches.'

So, we can expect to still be seeing a lot of Mercy and Junkrat for the first stage of the season. Nanzer says the only way something would be changes is if they find something game breaking.

A new caster duo, more analysts, and extra video content

Fans were pretty pleased with what they saw in the Overwatch League preseason matches back in December. The stage looks great, and the analyst and caster desks were professional.

As MLG CEO Pete Vlastelica told us last week, Blizzard has been expanding the broadcast team even since then.

'We've got a lot of additional talent on the roster, especially the analyst desk,' said Nanzer. 'Our third casting pair beyond Montecristo [Christopher Mykkles] and DoA [Erik Lonnquist], and MrX [Matt Morello] and Uber [Mitch Leslie], will be Hexagrams [Robert Kirkbride] and Semmler [Auguste Massonnat].'

A new casting duo has been announced for the Overwatch League, as well as a number of new faces for the analyst desk

On the analyst desk will be Brennon 'Bren' Hook and Josh 'Sideshow' Wilkinson from the UK. Plus, Alberto 'Crumbz' Rengifo, a former League of Legends player and caster, has left Korea's LCK and will be joining the Overwatch League broadcast team. There's also Soe Gschwind and Chris Puckett. Last but not least on the analyst desk is Jonathan 'Reinforce' Larsson, a former pro Overwatch player for Rogue and Misfits.

Instead of rotating the caster pairings to the analyst desk like it worked in preseason, there will now be dedicated full time analysts.

A lot of the talent is recognisable from Overwatch and other esports, for example Crumbz used to be a LoL player and analyst

In addition to the match broadcasts, there will be weekly preview and wrap up shows, which will be launched 'when they're ready. I'm hopeful they'll both start pretty quickly once the league gets going. I think those will be really nice bookends to each match week.'

'There'll be a lot of interstitial content that we'll use around the live broadcast as well, interviews with players, things like that,' said Nanzer.

More cities in Season 2

There are 12 teams in the Overwatch League right now, and although it's a global league, it's heavily based in North America. Nine of the 12 teams are in the USA, with only the London Spitfire, Seoul Dynasty, and Shanghai Dragons based elsewhere.

This is something Nate Nanzer wants to change for the next season.

'We're going to start focus on Season 2 expansion, including team sales, pretty quickly after we launch,' he said. 'Europe is definitely going to be a big focus for us in those conversations. We really want to add additional teams in Europe for next season.'

Who's going to win?

'From spending a lot of time talking to the players about how the scrims are going, it's going to be a really competitive league,' said Nanzer. 'I'd say one game that people are looking forward to as a preview of what could be the top teams in the league is the third game on Wednesday between the Dallas Fuel and Seoul Dynasty. They have a lot of history together from playing in Korea.'

It's tough to call right now, but there are certainly a few teams at the top of the ranking list based on their roster and performance in the preseason.

Seoul Dynasty are at the top of many people's lists to win the first season of the Overwatch League, but it will be competitive

'I grew up in San Diego so and we don't have a team, so I've got 12 favourite teams,' said Nanzer. 'Every single team in the league has a super interesting story, really likable players, and I'd encourage fans to tune in and check us out.

'Wednesday isn't the finish line, it's the starting line. Check it out, give us a chance, and let us know your feedback. We're constantly listening to the community posting on Reddit, Twitter, and the forums. We'd love to hear from fans about what they think is working, and how they think we can improve.'

For now, most of our questions have been answered. The only one remaining is how well the Overwatch League will do. It'll certainly be easier to track viwers numbers now the matches will be streamed on Twitch, and the audience for the first few matches could be a big indicator of the future success.

The first match begins tomorrow, January 10, at 7pm ET (12am GMT). If you need to know more, check out our Ultimate Guide to the Overwatch League.