At its core, The Overwatch League is a interesting and a out-of-the-box concept — instead of standard model of esports leagues, with regional circuits featuring a promotion and relegation system, leading to the inter-regional season finals, OWL have decided to follow the concept of major North American sports leagues like MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL, and feature a franchised and geolocated league, with home and away games being played all around the world and all teams being guaranteed their place after buying out their spots from Overwatch’s game developer and OWL organiser in Activision Blizzard.

But while Overwatch League have managed to build a sustainable fanbase, it also features a lot of problems that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Note : the following is my subjective opinion on what I believe are the issues of Overwatch League / Esports , based on my experience from watching and being interested with competitive Overwatch since the Spring of 2017. It’s okay if you disagree with my points, and I would love to hear your point of view, but bear in mind that this is how I understand these issues.

Home and Away system

Let’s start with what is one of the League’s biggest selling points — franchises playing matches in their home markets from 2020 season onwards. This will be the first time any major esports league will implement a home-and-away system, and with that comes a few potential issues :

- It is still unclear how exactly this system will work — Will we have group of teams travelling together to play against each other in one of their home markets, similar to this season’s Homestand Weekends, or will each team travel separately for their games like in traditional sports league like NHL, MLB or Bundesliga.

- Travelling itself provides questions — Will the players be affected with jet lagging and adapting to a different time zones throughout the season, and how hard will it impact them if it happens ? How much time will players have for the adaptation between the games, and where will they train during away games ?

That said, OWL geolocalization have a huge potential to succeed long-term, as most of OWL teams have managed to build a fanbase, both in their franchise cities and outside of them, proved by the success of Dallas Homestand Weekend and lesser events like fan meetings or off-season games in home markets.

League’s Scheduling and Format

One of the most criticised parts in the format of the ongoing 2019 OWL season is the scheduling for the Regular Season, exactly due to it hugely affecting each Stage and Stage Playoff played throughout the year.

In my opinion, this problem lies in the duration of the single stages — each team play 7 games throughout it, making each of them important in the context of qualifying to the 500,000 USD Stage Playoffs, and due to 20-team league there’s no chance in hell to balance each of the teams schedules.

On top of that, the Stage tiebreakers may be unresolvable with League’s current tiebreaking system if teams didn’t played each other, as it was proved during Stage 1, that featured two ties in the top eight and in both of them a tiebreaker match ( or a coin flip in Toronto/Philly situation ) had to be played on a short-notice.

And while I believe that stage format needs to be tweaked in the future, I think Blizzard deserve a praise for shifting a season-long schedule towards a more intra-divisional play ( throughout Season 2 teams play twice against each of their divisional rivals, and once against other teams in the league ) — in my opinion, this should help the teams in the building of regional rivalries ( for ex. LA Valiant vs Gladiators, Dallas v Houston, NY v Philadelphia, Shanghai v Hangzhou ) and minimize the cost and issues of travelling once the League will shift to home-and-away system.

The last, more personal affair with OWL format is for the system for the Postseason — In my opinion having 12 out of 20 playing teams qualify to the Season Playoffs will lead to mediocre teams being part of it ( at the time of writing, 9th through 12th place teams all are on a 6–6 record ).

Path To Pro — a rocky road to the OWL

While OWL is the crown jewel of Blizzard Esports right now, it is also a main part of Overwatch Path To Pro — a tiered-structure with a goal of providing players with a path to rise on the competitive Overwatch League and ultimately lead the best players to the OWL stage. Unfortunately, in the opinion of at least a part of the community, the Path To Pro have a lot of flaws in their system :

- Eight-team Contenders — For 2019 Contenders seasons, Blizzard had lowered the amount of teams participating from twelve to eight for all the regions except China and split North America into East and West regions. While these changes do provide the teams participating with a longer season, and the top teams in the regions will receive bigger prize money than in 2018 seasons, this comes with a cost of up=and-coming teams and players being denied of a spot in Contenders, and ( at least on paper ) making a path to Contenders itself harder for them.

- A lack of third-party tournaments — Aside from NetEase Esports X Tournament, featuring top teams of Contenders China and invited teams from Contenders Korea, local LANs like Gamers Assembly and minor online tournaments, there is no tournaments to play for the Path To Pro, which leads to…

- Unstable rosters — For the teams unsigned to OWL Academy Teams or organisation, it’s usually either a successful run from Open Division to Contenders or a failure leading either to roster shuffle or to team disbandment. And even making it to Contenders doesn’t guarantee a stable situation, as proved by Contenders Europe Season 1 unsigned teams in One.Point, Shu’s Money Crew EU and Young and Beautiful, that during the season made a total of 11 roster changes.

- Lack of LAN events — From Contenders 2018 Season 3 onwards, Blizzard decided to minimize the amount of LAN play in Contenders, first cutting the Season 3 LAN finals for North America and Europe, then making all Contenders matches online, with exception being inter-regional events ( Showdowns and The Gauntlet ) and some of the playoff games in Korea, Pacific and Australia, which takes away opportunity for players to get used to the LAN experience.

Lack of support — Blizzard barely promote Contenders, even during the broadcast of OWL, promoted their in-game event at the same time of Contenders 2018 Season 3 playoffs, majority of OWL audience doesn’t care and watch Contenders, third-party tournament organisers don’t want to organise tournaments that are doomed to lose money and organisations don’t bother to pick up teams due to lack of viewership — it feels like a wrong circle with no end of it in sight.

The other problems

Player burnouts — This is a issue that keeps returning like a boomerang ever since Season 1 of OWL. The mix of a long and intense Regular Season, short breaks between each phase of the season and other issues have affected players, and were a part in the retirements of players like Brandon “Seagull” Larned and Ted “silkthread” Wang. And while both OWL and teams have been adapting in order to minimize burnouts, during the 2019 season we already saw the retirements of Do-hyung “Stellar” Lee, Hyeon “EFFECT” Hwang and Daniel “dafran” Francesca, which can point out that this isn’t enough to minimize the burnout effects for now.

League merchandise — To be honest, while I was at first disappointed that Blizzard Gear OWL merchandise was pretty much a copy-and-paste design, the quality and pricing of 2018 Blizz and IntotheAm merchandise was really good, and later in the year teams were able to open their own stores, allowing for more design freedom.

Enter Fanatics deal, allowing them to take over OWL merchandise, and even though Blizzard Head of Esports Licensing said that teams will have be able to produce their own merchandise, all teams have closed their team shops by the end of 2018, possibly due to that deal.

Unfortunately what fans got is a unacceptable quality of jerseys, logos on hoodie peeling off, misspelling , no EU store until May at best, and a questionable offer ( 8 USD for a single team button pin or 25 USD for a generic black shirt with your favourite team logo comes to my mind ).

Word censorship, banning of Pepe emote and OK hand sign — In that case, I think Blizzard is just trying to avoid any potential negative PR that could’ve damage the League’s and game’s brand and due to that they decide to make decisions like this. And while this makes them look terrible in the eyes of fans, it feels like business is first for them in this situations.

Overwatch World Cup — Ah, the Overwatch World Cup. The place for national superteams to battle each other for their pride and glory, the place where many players had a opportunity to show the world their talent, and the place for the talent to provide us with so much entertaining moments, year after year. And while it’ll return for their fourth edition later in the year, any team that won’t be ranked as one of the top 10 nations based on previous years World Cups have to pay for their travel and most of hotel expenses to participate in Anaheim, which in my opinion will impact heavily on number and/or skill level of the teams.

FeelsEUMan — Europe have been mentioned a few times already — their region’s Contenders have lost a season-ending LAN ( sadly, Contenders 2018 Season 1 Finals was a amazing event to watch in-person ), teams and players that aren’t signed with top EU teams ( British Hurricane, Paris Academy, Angry Titans and Team Gigantti ) are going through reshuffling pretty much every season, if not throughout it, and EU fans have to wait for localised OWL merchandise store. It is also a region with the worst time schedule when it comes to the League games ( but this is mostly due to the matches being played in Los Angeles, and Blizzard did made a OWL 2019 season scheduling more EU friendly ) — with all of that happening, European OW scene is struggling to have a long-term stability.

To round this up, I think it is a bit concerning that there is so many more or less important problems and questions visible on the Overwatch Esports scene, and in my opinion Blizzard Esports should take a look at them as soon as possible in order to improve the long-term stability of the proscene.