PogChamp

Sephy is Brad, when we wrote our first article about the Shock I believe we discussed what we would use for his name since Sephy is his alias. I think we chose to go with Sephy to stay consistent with referring to everyone by their usernames, although I've seen players refer to him by both Sephy and Brad.

If we track the regular season of one open division we'd have to track the regular season for all of them, and that's just too many matches, unstreamed matches at that, to realistically cover. Poi98 did weekly threads covering the last season of EU and NA open, so if you're passionate about Japan's open division you could do that, I wouldn't mind reading!

noob

what an interesting way to look at their logo

I was waiting to see if more coaching staff would be announced so I could cover it all in one article. Obviously, I was wrong and LegitRc was the only coach announced, so I just wound up being late to get to this.

They bought the roster and the roster became Cloud9 Kongdoo. The Kongdoo organization still owns the name "Kongdoo Panthera" and was free to rename a roster to that name.

i'm your friend pixelfish

All OWL matches, including preseason ones, will be LAN.

emoji support was a mistake

sideshow is telling the truth, i searched through articles to prove him wrong and failed to find a pun

I think it's likely they will play in the next one. Last time they had a Mercy nerf they made APAC play on it immediately. I imagine they'll do the same here for the same reason of Mercy making the game less fun to play and watch.

NA and EU are in the dark until they release information on the next season of Contendera. They missed a good opportunity to do so at Blizzcon.

Despite the "everyone is a free agent" thing, orgs still have buyouts for their players. Orgs that thought they were getting into OWL until late, such as Rogue and eUnited, likely demanded high buyouts for their players until they released them, which is likely why certain no-brainer pickups are not in OWL.

They are probably just announcing the players that the Overwatch League website revealed.

Also this Tweet is a cry for help

i'm pretty sure it didn't matter whether or not they made the final
the mvp was destined to fail the moment they decided to allow voting before the first match of the tournament was even played

I believe the match times show up on the website based on your current timezone. I could be wrong about this.

Sorry there are no clips for the first two maps, I was struggling to get Twitch's clipping tool to cooperate until map 3.

you're hired

There are a lot of good things about it, but still could definitely use improvements. They made the barriers more transparent, which does a ton in helping with some of the clutter in fights, especially in a Winston meta where they are constantly fighting in and out and around a bubble.

There are a lot of instances where they could use more saturation or darker colors, like Zenyatta ults are near impossible to see. I agree the switch on healer colors is strange and difficult to follow. If they keep them consistent for home and away maybe we can get used to it, maybe not.

I think in general it could be better, but I believe this is a good starting point. As they continue to receive feedback and work on this, hopefully some of the issues with it will be resolved.

Adam and FCTFCTN have both declared they will not be in OWL Season 1.

https://twitter.com/FaZeFCTFCTN/status/926464339422224384
https://twitter.com/C9_Adam/status/926470767558062080

I agree it sounds better but I'm sure they wanted a name that included both Miami and Orlando, since their franchise is for both cities.

don't tell sideshow that he doesn't follow our rules

[flag=us]

could u guys please be a little slower with these threads i was trying to beat the forums for once

The old one with the horse was one of my favorites! The current Pistons logo is just too plain for my liking, however.

a logo that actually manages to be worse than the detroit pistons logo :puke:

I can't wait to watch my favorite Overwatch player play under the in-game alias of yuki! :)

Tachyon will try to stream it

LW Blue has actually been linked to the NYC spot. GC Busan was picked up by C9 for the London spot, and I'm pretty sure they're adding the entire roster. C9KD (minus wakawaka and Void), GC Busan, and two other Korean players will make up the 12-man roster. Runaway hasn't been picked up by an OWL org yet, and I don't think any of their players have. I imagine the plan for Runner and his players are to hold out until they can all join an OWL team together.

Yeah, unfortunately we won't really know how any of these teams hold up in the future since they will all be slightly different versions of themselves in OWL (for those that made it). APAC is really our last chance to gauge them.

I'd argue that GC Busan are doing the exact opposite of crumbling, they've only improved since we've first seen them. They lost to Afreeca Freecs Red and LuxuryWatch Red in Challengers, and lost to LW Red again in their APEX match. After that, they're only loss was to RunAway in the playoffs, only to beat RunAway in the grand final. In the last couple of months, they've defeated two of your top five teams (and presumably three of your top six), including your number one twice. A team that's just a flash in the pan doesn't go on a run like that, if those teams were actually better than them than it the challenge of the schedule would have worn them down and they would have fizzled out by now.

Additionally, the showmatch LH used to showcase the Seoul Dynasty roster proves that they are as dominant as you say they are. MY made a full 5-map set, and didn't prepare for the roster of Seoul at all. Of course, the Dynasty were playing with new players, so they obviously weren't at full strength either.

Regardless, I think the top five or six are closer than you think, and GC Busan are the best of all of them. Luckily for us, the debate between MY, RunAway, and Busan will be settled before long given that all three are in APAC.

Whoru is under 18 and won't be able to participate in OWL until its second season.

While I disagree with the decision to put two teams in Los Angeles, it's not a valid argument to say it's not in other major sports and doesn't work. The NBA has two teams in New York and two teams in Los Angeles, with the LA teams sharing the same stadium. The NFL has two teams in New York that share a stadium plus two Los Angeles teams. The MLB has two teams in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, all of which play in different stadiums and play in exciting rivalry games. The NHL has two New York teams, as well. In the English Premier League, I know there are several teams based in and around London, and two of the most popular teams share Manchester.

For a truly global league beginning with only 12 teams, I agree it doesn't make sense. However the idea that it's confusing for a spectator and is rarely done isn't true, and in fact has been proven to work out just fine.

Congrats Lunatic-Hai #2, you've been promoted to the top 10 of the world rankings!

According to the bracket page, KARMA dropped out sometime between last night and this morning. Everyone seeded below them was moved up and Toronto was given a bye in the first round. This means 6 RINAS and Rockets won't play each other until the semis, assuming they make it out of their first matchups okay.

i won't let you down

I'm pretty sure Mistakes also left because he felt the team had "reached its peak."

@maid

easiest headline of my life

quote from their press release

SF Shock parent organization NRG Esports has competed at the highest level of Overwatch
competition since the games inception.

sorry nrg but i am pretty sure the game's inception was several months before august of 2016

There is some optimism to be had for players that won't be making OWL this season. It seems apparent that there are teams interested in being a part of OWL in future seasons (namely Rogue since they explicitly stated their intentions to be a part of the second season) that will likely want to build Contenders team to try and get a jumpstart on roster building. There is always a chance Vallutaja, 123 (who stated on Twitter that they are still looking for an org), or any other org-less player or team could end up on Rogue or some other endemic hoping to squat their Contenders spot and begin building for next season of OWL.

No, it should only stop Graviton Surge if she hacks Zarya while she is in the process of firing it out of her gun. Zarya gets it off near instantly, so it's hard to imagine that this will happen very often.

better at predictions than me

I don't remember exactly what Striker plays, but I'm pretty sure it's DPS. Geguri was the offtank of the team this past APEX season. I remember not being all that impressed with the ROX DPS players, and there are definitely better options both in and outside of Korea for OWL teams when talking about any player on the old ROX roster.

Many years back I was playing a game of Civ V with a friend, and before the game started I was trying to think of the dumbest sounding insults I could call him. At one point, I said "YOU'RE A SCRUBASAURUS REX" and afterwards thought "I actually like the sound of that."

Never changed it because I wanted to stick to one alias, otherwise it would probably be different by now.

i always thought your name was a reference to awesomenauts

Now this is a tournament that has my name written all over it!

As far as we know, the rosters for this tournament are locked, meaning this will be BGH's old roster playing against KEEP's old roster, unless the rules are changed before match time.

you only need to win $250 to hit $10000 in total winnings enigma time to take back the flex spot from coolmatt at LAN
https://www.over.gg/player/2/enigma