Overwatch World Cup Australia - Why Blank Esports?

WARNING: Wall of text. Pepper your angus m8s -



Hi guys, I wanted to 'put pen to paper' briefly to talk about the AUS committee's decision to send the entire Blank roster.



First and foremost; I acknowledge that there were other candidates on the list that could justifiably done a better job than I, given my relative lack of proximity to the AU scene. I would be lying if I said I was an expert, but I was and am determined to do justice to those that voted for me by immersing myself in this process. Naturally, I still leaned a lot on Jackson (HeyKatie) and Jason (SereNity) for their expertise. Recognizing that my role was not to be a scene expert on this team, but to leverage my experience with player and team management (Mindfreak and Legacy Esports) was very important for me.



The very first issue that I took up with the committee was whether or not sending the entirety of the Blank roster to the WC cup was an oversimplification of the entire process. Yes, they had been performing admirably in Taiwan against stoic competition, but had not competed domestically for a while. We felt that to simply make a decision to send this team would be to deny the many talented players and teams in the Australian scene the recognition they deserved. I wasn't okay with this, nor were the others.



There was one problem. We ideally wanted to use Blank (at the very least) as a foundation for this roster. There are a lot of talented individuals on the team with a lot of experience, and they dominated the OCE scene before departing for Taiwan. Again, the problem is that they were all living in a house in Taiwan playing in the OPC. Their scrim schedule was very tight and they were all naturally very focused on playing as a unit. Take this in hand with the fact that given their remoteness from mainland Australia, playing or practicing with other Aussies would have been very difficult due to ping, mostly. (Remember, even within the same country you can get up to 100ms connecting to a Sydney server from Perth, thanks Turnbull.)



This put us in a fairly compromising position. We couldn't really form a mix team with Blank players and other individuals from teams such as Athletico, 4Legs, Masterminds, Plot1, Scylla etc because the Blank team were so busy with their scrims and the server regions were too far apart, and Blank weren't due to return from Taiwan for another six weeks at the time.



So - we would either take the entirety of Blank (and have their rigorous scrim schedule double as AUS WC team practice), or none of them - and form a team from the remaining AU players. Even still, we still weren't convinced that we weren't oversimplifying the issue. We wanted to see how the Australian scene had grown comparatively during Blank's absence. Logistically, having a team in Taiwan and teams in Australia play against each other (even on a relatively equidistant server) is very difficult, but we resolved to at least organize some matches between Blank and some of Australia's top teams as determined by the ESL ANZ finals the weekend prior.



Put simply, Blank demonstrated that they were still a cut above. I know that server conditions were not ideal playing over such long distances, but it was the best that we could do with the time available, and I had resolved to give other Aussie teams at least a chance to show their skills - this was the best way that we could do it under the constraints that we had. From here on out, it was a fairly simple decision. We had a team whose last months of practice could give us an edge over more mixed all-star rosters from other countries, and Blank's coach/analyst was already on the committee, meaning that he would still be able to operate in his usual capacity during the WC groups. This combination of fortuitous factors was too good to pass up.



A brief mention on the topic of Custa - a lot of people have (correctly) pointed out that Scott is an incredible support player and would make a perfect fit for a national all-star team. However, logistics would still have been an issue in his case, whether he had stayed in Canada like he is, or returned home to Australia. It is always hard to assess whether a potential 'skill boost' (again, contentious) of bringing in a player like Scott to the team would outweigh the potential loss of synergy (even though he is a phenomenal communicator) within the team; we decided to leave the Blank roster as it was. Scott wasn't the only standout player that we considered, but it will be Blank playing in Sydney for our shot at Anaheim. It is worth mentioning further on this note that Gunba, who plays the same roles as Custa on the team, is currently ranked 29th in Asia and is the highest rated played on BLK. He well and truly pulls his weight.



Last year it was Korea in our group, this year its Sweden, and Finland/Spain in the other Sydney group. It never gets any easier for us but Aussies like nothing more than an underdog and we are going hell-for-leather this year.



Make sure to give the @BlankOCE boys and my fellow committee members a follow - Aussies, we hope to have your support!



@BLK_Rqt - @BLK_Aetar - @BLK_Trill - @BLK_Gunba - @BLK_kiki - @BLK_ieatuup



@BLK_SereNity - @heyimnotkatie





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