Now that Sideshow is out of the country reliving his Team Fortress 2 glory days I can finally reclaim my series. Picked Over! The highly opinionated digest of Overwatch esports content.

Here's what I enjoyed in the last seven days...

Interview with EnVy INTERNETHULK

By VampAurora

Can't go wrong with an INTERNETHULK interview, especially with VampAurora asking the questions (check out his Thorin interview too). Germany's silver fox drops in a nice little anecdote about taking risks, stepping outside of your comfort zone and the genesis of EnVyUs:

I built this team with a Reddit post. That's how I got to know chips and cocco because they were in a three man kind of group and the third person of them contacted me so we started playing but I ended up still playing with cocco and chips.

And I made a post on Reddit "looking for team" and back then I was even a player who was really high rated in Starcraft and League of Legends. All those players that are kinda known would look down on Reddit, they said "you'll never find good players on Reddit" and even casual players they would laugh at Reddit like "what the fuck I'm not gonna search on Reddit!"

So I was like kind of known and I was really good at Overwatch already. I was like I'll go out of my comfort zone, thinking "hey if this doesn't work out someone may laugh at me for doing this post, but whatever I don't care... but maybe I'm lucky" and guess what? I found cocco and chips and now I'm playing in EnVyUs with cocco and chips so it all worked out.

OverSight Episode 4: Is that a Fanfic or Am I Talking About Farming? (feat. dummy)

InsightOnEsports with Thorin and Monte

Despite coming in at a whopping 2 hours 18 minutes this episode is still well worth investing your time in. Running the gamut from the trials and tribulations of NRG, rival teams, the meta, map selection to Korea, APEX Season 2 and much, much more. Here's a titbit from when Thorin asks dummy why people love to see NRG fail:

"It just comes with having Seagull. You're gonna get a lot more fans - I got way, way, way more support than I ever had when I was on Team Liquid - but at the same you're just gonna get all those haters as well and you know if someone has that big of a presence in the scene you're just gonna have way more haters...

Yeah on Liquid, no one knew I existed honestly - other than pros obviously - but now I can just click on Reddit and they're talking about how shit I am at Ana! Because if Seagull is losing I must be absolutely shit at Ana, right?"

Overdrive Interviews - Zappis

By Jason Kaplan

Jason Kaplan has returned to his Overdrive interview series over the holidays. In this episode NiP's zappis shares his thoughts current state of European competition, impressions from scrimming the upcoming PTR changes, the role of their coach, Seita, and more. On the subject of Korean teams and how NiP might fair if they had been invited to OGN's APEX Season 2 he has some fighting words to offer...

"Yeah for sure. I think we would go to playoffs like... I can't say like easily, but I would be really confident that we would go through to playoffs at least. We have been showing up in Europe, you guys haven't seen it, but in our scrims and everything we feel like our team is really strong at the moment. I would love to show it up!"

Overwatch Hero Tier List and Meta Report: A Hint of Pharah

Overbuff - by CaptainPlanet

Not just another wholesome meta report from CaptainPlanet, but with the added spice of speculation from Rise Nation's Phaz. Speaking on his PTR scrim experiences, he peers in to his crystal ball to predict what the incoming Tuesday patch might mean for top level competition. Here's the filthy Lucio main on whether or not there will be a new dominant composition next patch:

"Not really, I don’t think you’ll see that. Like I said, the meta will be team based and you’ll see some mirror, but it will be based off teams. The [PTR] meta isn’t ‘THESE 8 CHARACTERS, BUT MAINLY THESE 6’. The meta is everything…even Torb. I think every character besides Junkrat/Bastion (I’ve seen a team run Mercy over Lucio all scrim so I don’t know about her) will be ran and probably to great success. It will be like previous metas, you’ll see Genji meta with Beyblade mixed with Hanzo/Zarya wombos, maybe mix in some quad tank in there with some Tracer/Genji dive. Nerfing Ana’s healing and making Dva less played will open the doors for everything."

Proper Usage Of Statistics

By Harsha

A cautionary tale from our very own Harsha Bandi about the questionable swordsmanship on display by ESPN and Yahoo Esports when wielding that most powerful of weapons - statistics.

"Well, this ESPN article, what they talk about instead is that they see that there is a statistic that says ults per minute on Winston's Lab and they see that D. Va is a kind of an anomaly, in that she has 0.8, which is higher than Sombra who is at 0.53, Tracer who is at 0.53 and Ana who is at 0.46. So, right off the bat something should seem off to you... you know... because this doesn't make sense..."

"The caster bullying in the twitch OW community is ridiculous."

r/Competitiveoverwatch by u/_modo

Bonus round! After NGE's Winter Premiere casters take a beating on Twitch chat and some other threads this fairly innocuous post appears, chastising the community. Interestingly though it draws comment from some big names in Overwatch casting including ZP, Doa, MisterX, flame and even FishStix. Plenty of insight on offer as to how your favourite casters view their craft, their fans, their peers, themselves and life in general.

Finally, I'll leave you with yet another tasty tweet from Winston's Lab, this time comparing hero compositions between APEX Season 2 and the Winter Premiere. Just be careful how you use them, you don't want to make Harsha mad...