I hadn’t seen anyone note it on Tumblr but then again I might have missed it so… if I did ignore this
elk currently plays for Fusion Uni- the overwatch contenders team. he tweeted that he had an interesting phone call, then retweeted it again a few hours later. so hey, maybe he’s getting picked up?
“Beyond map structure and season length, Contenders is also the testing ground for new ways to play. New patches and heroes are often rolled out on Contenders servers before they hit the League. If you want to get an idea of how a new hero will work or what the new meta will be after a patch, watch Contenders. Wrecking Ball saw his first Competitive game in Contenders and that GOATS team composition everyone hates started in Contenders too.”
For those of you that are still unsure about Contenders, please give this a read! It does a breakdown of what it is, how it works vs how Overwatch League does, patch differences, and tells the stories of a few of those teams including Last Night’s Leftovers, British Hurricane, Runaway, and Kongdoo Panthera.
ok so im gonna Ramble a bit but im just thinking abt some recent tweets and leeks ive seen in discord abt the owl format for season 2 and its just…weird….
like first of all, theres a bunch of rumours of there being at Least 8 new teams, which means the total will get up to 20. which i feel like is a lot just bc r there really enough players to fill up all these teams and still keep the skill level of owl Truly Tier 1? who knows. and the other rumour is that the total games is gonna be 28 instead of 40, and theres gonna be 2 stages instead of 4. idk what the time period for this would be but im just gonna assume for the moment that its still the same 6-7 months as season 1.
with all of that in mind i just feel like…it might feel cramped? or rushed? ik in traditional sports not every team plays each other [EDIT: ok only league i can think of where this is true is mlb (im p sure nhl, nba, and nfl all have everyone play each other) but baseball is a good enough example] but i feel like such a condensed schedule might leave out too many matchups…..and i understand burnout was a thing in s1 and a less rigorous schedule IS a good idea, but i think this particular plan would work out better if there were still only 12 teams, or at least less than the rumoured 20!
i feel like…extending the length of owl to 9-10 months, and keeping the 40 total games but changing it to 2 stages could be a better solution? you could fit in a break after every 5 matches or so, and then a bit longer break after the 1st stage (so 20 games into the season) 🤔
ALSO kinda related, extending owl Could mean a clash with smth like world cup (and cotendies kind of? but theres less player overlap with that so itd be easier to fix i think) but honestly i think world cup could be shortened….ik players that r in owl and wc would obviously appreciate a bigger gap between the two, but im some1 that wants wc to show off more unknown talent so i feel like owl players could just…step aside…the tier 2 scene is in dire need of some help (and esp if a bunch of them r gonna get shlurped up for season 2) and i think letting world cup be more for showing of contendies players would be easier. maybe. idk im not mister nathaniel nanzer so im dumb abt this stuff and this probably is barely coherent…
i feel like expanding the timeline of owl would really crush tier 2 even more though, depending on what timeslots it takes up. like it already caused a lot of difficulty because tournaments arent allowed to stream at the same time as OWL and if owls on nobody is going to watch contenders or anything else bc they arent being told to invest as much as theyve been told with owl
amping the number of teams up just seems wonky if its 20, like at that point you’re right tier 2 will just be merging with tier 1 because there won’t be any other option. it feels like this is just on a path for owl to become the supreme dog more than it already is even though there is a lot of interest from people in creating more interest for tier 2… i dont know looking at this it literally looks like a shitshow aghjskgjasklgkasg i actually have no idea what theyre doing
lmao remember when avast was joking during the gillette stadium tour and huk was like “wow what would we even do without you here to keep the atmosphere up” and avast was like “thanks mr. president remember that during signing period” …………huk didn’t remember that
i understand the sentiment behind posts going around that are like “teams shouldn’t sign players and then never play them”, but this is just….how sports work. teams sign players as subs for starters in case they can’t play, a player is consistently outperformed by someone else, etc, and often they just don’t end up in the starting roster ever. and while that’s sad, it’s not really the org’s fault. theres definitely been some bad handling of benched players (see: valiant sister team, players who never participate in scrims), but sometimes a player is just more helpful behind the scenes than onstage and that’s unavoidable.
PkCaramel 