The Overwatch League is revamping its game schedule next month with The Vancouver Titans now officially joining the NA region.
Esports is in a state of change and restructure at the moment, with MSI being canceled for League of Legends and its Summer Split moved to June. The Overwatch League is now bringing forth its own set changes as a new tournament structure will be introduced for May.
We’ve almost reached the midpoint of the 2020 Overwatch League season, and today we’re announcing a complete May schedule with all 20 teams in action, and the introduction of new single-elimination regional tournaments"
Surprise, surprise, it's almost tournament time! Take a look at the format for the #OWL2020 May Tournament! pic.twitter.com/V7gmr1UM9z
— Overwatch League (@overwatchleague) April 27, 2020
How does it all work?
In a post by Blizzard Entertainment, within the first three weeks of May, all teams will play qualifier matches with team records, map scores, and standard tiebreakers to determine the seeding of the two regional tournaments for North America on May 22-24 and for Asia on May 23-24.
Naturally, there is a prize pool for teams to work toward and depending on the placement each team finishes on, here is what they get:
- Tournament champions – $40,000
- Second-place teams – $20,000
- Third- and fourth-place teams – $5,000
- Each tournament win per team – $5,000 (in addition to placement prizes)
Who is competing?
What do the brackets look like?
No Hero Pools here
Incredibly, Hero Pools will not be live for this entire event as Blizzard Entertainment outlines set shared rules for both North American and Asian regions:
Shared tournament rules:
- Hero Pools suspended for all tournament matches—all heroes will be available.
- Matches are first-to-three map wins until the finals, which will be first-to-four maps.
- Higher-seeded teams pick the first map.
- The losing team of each map picks the next map in the series.
- In case of draws, the team that picked the previous map picks again.
This change from Blizzard is a welcome one as fans and professional players were under increased amounts of stress every week due to the introduced changes to keep the meta fresh for the competitive and professional scene.
As this is a brand new format change it's still unclear whether this will be a regularly scheduled event, but rest assured fans of Overwatch you'll be getting more content coming up soon. For a more extensive breakdown of the times, be sure to check out the official post from Blizzard Entertainment.
