#Overwatch League 2018

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

okay so i used to follow the overwatch league up to the 2020 season and ive been missing it a lil and decided to watch some old (ancient) matches from 2018, (which is just about the only old owl matches you can still find with any sort of ease)

then got bored and since the owl has been going continuously since then, i watched a lil from the 2022 season

and like. yeah i expected changes i know theyve been adding heroes to overwatch and changing the rules and overwatch 2 is a thing now??? i lost track of it a long time ago tbh ive not been following this for like 3 years

anyway okay different arena different stage - it’s only 5 people per team now huh?? oh Carpe is still there its nice to see a familiar face. what the casters tearing into him now cus hes been there too long??? okay uber and mr x literally the same casters as we saw in the inaugural season. lay off the good man Carpe fucking rocks okay hes a great player and i literally dont know anyone else in this whole match. only 1 tank now per team which is sad i loved watching the flex tank players. new heroes that im not familar with i was expecting that

but you know what really threw me, and made me unable to watch anymore?????

lijiang tower!!! it’s not even night time anymore!! what the hell is this??

okay im done now i think it may be time to never check out the owl ever again sadly

[valcksys]

shocked we haven’t posted abt this yet but the overwatch league (our special interest for 5 years) just concluded its final season and it sucks ass because it’s like wait I don’t want you to end yet?? what abt next season where we get to see new rookies come in and new storylines from the teams and even continuing existing storylines and that feeling you get when you see a player kill 5 or when you see a support save their team and carry a game or even just the stupid banter between the players in between rounds

we’ve grown up with OWL and it’s been a part of our lives since we were TWELVE. now we’re about to be an adult going off to college. It’s been an integral part of our childhood and it’s odd that it’s just GONE now. it’s brought us infinite comfort no matter what shitty, traumatizing bullshit we’ve had to deal with. gave us something to look forward to on the weekend. “if i die, i wont get to see what happens on OWL this weekend” was hilariously something that kept us going more than anything else.

Ig I can’t say anything more than I am INCREDIBLY. INCREDIBLY thankful for the overwatch league and the community around it. I would not be here anymore if it wasn’t for my friends I met from it, and the comforts it’s brought me in my darkest days.

[puckpocketed]

do the baseball girlies (gn) remember when Saebyeolbe threw the first pitch at a NY Mets game on July 25th 2018. in a way i’m still there .

[overwatch-1eague]

2018 (Inaugural Season)

Stage 1 Playoffs

Final: London Spitfire vs New York Excelsior

[looptroupe]

There’s something really sad about the Overwatch League Shop officially closing.

That said, there’s something greatly satisfying about finally being able to get my grubby hands on some of those 2018 Florida Mayhem McDonalds cashier skins.

Hi Widowmaker. Can I get a medium Big Mac meal please

[txttletale]

i'll actually in a limited capacity defend the overwatch league's regional teams gimmick but the execution was bad. having regional teams could have been hype. like--during astralis' 2018-2019 csgo run, danish esports fans went fucking insane for them. and like of course they did. there's inherently something exciting about having a team you can in some way 'identify' with. and geography does create natural sports rivalries and pre-writes your stories.

there were two glaring bad problems in the dumb way blizzard did this though. one is forcing teams to come up with brand new branding. this was a horrible idea. it forced well-established esports organizations with strong fanbases across different games like cloud9 and optic to try and build new brands up from scratch. they realized this with their call of duty leage where they let teams play as 'atlanta faze' and 'optic texas' but yknow. kind of too little too late

the other one (and this is also the glaring fatal flaw in the overwatch league's entire silly, silly business plan) is the idea of a global league. now if you don't know much about esports you might think 'wait whats wrong with that. its gaming you can do it online players can be anywhere'. however that's not true! first of all, esports--well esports doesn't make money, esports when managed correctly is essentially a loss leader for the game it's an esport for--but esports makes a lot of its money on live events. yeah, people go to see esports games:

much more importantly, ping is a huge factor in esports. the higher the level you're playing at, especially in a game like overwatch that's full of twitchy hitscan aiming, the more a 10ms latency difference can make or break a game. you need to be running in-person events in order to have a competitive esports league and to make a good chunk of your revenue.

and that means that a global esports league runs into the exact same problem a global normal sports league would run into and the reason why that doesn't exist, which is travel logistics. the overwatch league has a london team, a san francisco team, and a chengdu team. these cities are very far away from each other [citation needed] and although overwatch league people will often blame covid for ruining their plans, i honestly think it actually saved them by preventing the horrible idea they had for how the league would work from actually happening. imagine all the problems that travel causes in a league like the NBA--jet lag, exhaustion, the obvious budgetary expenditure. now imagine that the travel itinerary also includes flights across the atlantic and/or pacific.

that's not even all! the thing about esports is that, because practicing for ten hours a day doesn't physically destroy your body like it would for regular sports, esports players and teams... do that. if you spend seventeen hours on a plane from paris to hangzhou for a match that's seventeen hours where you're not practicing. when you arrive, you can't just stay at a hotel--you need to be able to practice in the days leading up to the match too, especially because it's esports, which means the game can change. if you miss some practice as a sports team, you're gonna be rusty--if you miss some practice as an esports team, the rules of the game might have literally changed since your last practice session.

the result of this, by the way, is that the london and paris teams have never been actually based in europe--and that right now the dallas team is based in korea. it is very silly. every other multinational esport ever invented has created regional leagues--league of legends has a league for korea, china, europe, north america, pacific, vietnam, brazil, japan, and latin america. but blizzard entertainment are god's special little gamers and they weren't going to let something like 'the ocean' get in the way of their global league dream.

and ultimately this means that the entire local team concept was pointless. most of the teams aren't locally based. and even if they were -- the madcap way they play against each other mean that those city affiliations don't matter. when manchester united play liverpool f.c., even if you are not a big football fan, if you're from manchester you presumably have an opinion of liverpool and liverpudlians, and vice versa. there is an emotional hook to latch on to. if manchester united were to play khon khaen united, you would probably say 'where the fuck is khon khaen'. for the localisation to work, the overwatch league's london team needed a manchester or glasgow or dublin or amsterdam or brussels team (etc.) to play against. if you're invested in the esport itself and the players, you can get invested in a philadelphia-london or chengdu-houston rivalry--but the localisation aspect of it isn't doing the work it should there.

tldr: the overwatch league was a bad idea ever since the moment it was announced. people are too harsh on the team localization idea but the way it was executed was hot garbage and it's no wonder this entire venture failed badly

[ladymariayuri]

hey guys just found this really awesome overwatch screenshot from 2018 on my laptop that i thought was really funny for several reasons

the person in second place was an overwatch league player who was infamous for being good at widow

i was a 16 year old girl playing on a toaster laptop past my bedtime

the fact i unironically played a sniper character with this crosshair

[majorbaby]

DIEM REJOINED SHD?????????!?!?!?!?!!?!

OWL is still going strong?

[lenaperseveranceoxton]

By the end of Season 11, Blizzard put an Overwatch League bundle in the shop only to swiftly replace it with an Ultrawatch bundle, and I'm almost certain it was because there were sprays included in the bundle that were formerly from Twitch Drops in 2018.

I didn't check the item shop when it reset because none of my blorbos were going to get anything of interest and all that, so I was crushed when I heard that I possibly missed my chance to get the sprays I missed in 2018. Specifically, I wanted the "Watchparty: Gibraltar" spray.

That disappointment was replaced by relief when I discovered that it was the ONE spray missing from the Overwatch League bundle...

...but I had to stop and think for a moment. Why was it the one spray that didn't return? Then, of course, I remembered lesbians are icky in any context that isn't NSFW (/s). Needless to say, I was disappointed that, once again, Blizzard was not giving Emily any sort of attention despite how much they paraded the Reflections comic around for brownie points back in 2016.

Afterward, I checked the Hero Gallery just to admire the spray again. You know, like Wolverine with that picture of Cyclops and Jean Grey. Well, imagine my shock when it was entirely missing from the Hero Gallery by default! (Don't mind me as I expose how much/how little I watched Overwatch League in the screenshots below.)

I know for a fact that it wasn't always like this, but after that item shop reset all those weeks ago, you can only view the spray in the Hero Gallery by using the "Overwatch League" category filter and scrolling all the way to the bottom now.

What a kick in the teeth, man. I'm sorry, Emily Oxton (née Overwatch). I still love you.

[rtgame]

so the overwatch league is (probably) over forever now and like... man im feeling a lot about it

like yes, overwatch bad, blizzard sucks, but the league played such an important part of my life for years. i used to go out to watch the games in person in 2018 and 2019 with my friends, like all of us would fly out to LA and meet up and go to these games and like, in retrospect those were the best moments of my life. the community was dedicated + ive gotten to speak to some of the casters and players and they absolutely loved the league; several of them have been with it from 2017 to now. the fact that it's all over just because it doesn't make a profit is.... extremely depressing

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

sorry i cant get over poko. theyre playing florida and the opposing d.va throws in the mech and gets nothing and poko is like "hah. amateur. watch this" throws his self destruct gets a 3k. i miss him everyday

[yanderes-galore]

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[camelliagwerm]

tragic no one will appreciate just how funny a certain concept is to me and one of my friends because it requires a "you had to be there" element and the "you had to be there" element is being deep in the overwatch league scene in like 2018

[overwatch-1eague]

2018 (Inaugural Season)

Stage 1 Playoffs

Semifinal: London Spitfire vs Houston Outlaws

[atelierpenny]

what types of video games do you think you're the best and worst at playing?

I think I am not particularly outstanding at any genre of video games but I suppose there's a few. In middle and early high school I was an Okay smash player but I stopped playing that game cuz of all the stuff surrounding the scene making me feel unsafe. I would probably get smoked by today's kids although I hear my characters are annoying top tiers in ult

Real answer is probably card games? I was a very consistent hearthstone arena player from like launch until 2017-2018 or so, to the point where I'd boost my friends accounts regularly to get everyone packs in arena (or get them to legend if I was really bored) when the f2p progression in that game was really shit. I don't really have a card game I'm passionate about anymore (until my wife inevitably gets me into MTG again) so that skill has been more used in like, the deckbuilding-y strategy games of late. I beat spire and a few other popular deckbuilders on my first run ever and I have pre patch Completionist+ in balatro

Worst genre is probably modern first person shooters I spose. I play splat3 a decent bit (mostly backlines although I don't play pencil). I was diamond in overwatch circa like, 2016-2018 tho I suppose that doesn't mean too much. Modern shooters are something I'm just ass at positioning/movement in outside of splats, and a lot of the more simulation shooters don't agree w me bc I am epileptic and I cannot play games where the muzzleflash is too large and bright. I am also in a strange spot w most mobas where I've been told by my brothers who each have thousands of hours in league that I was a natural at it but I was so fuckin bored by the match length of mobas that I would probably be the worst at those just by that alone. Comparitively I also blow ass at mahjong but it's really fun to play like a donkey in that game so I play it a good amount anyway

[diverbots]

Well i manifested it by accident it seems because a few months ago i was mad at the fact there was a lore drought for overwatch literally since like 2018 (when i left) and when i got back into overwatch there was not a single drop of new lore So i was like Hellooo why didn't overwatch come out with their own series like league did with arcane? And now here we are ... not sure if it'll hold up to arcane's cuntressness but i'm grateful either way

LMAO thank you for manifesting. And yeah I want to give it some hope that it'll hold up to Arcane (And like. I'm so sorry but they had so much potential in experimenting with art styles with Genesis like 😭) but I'll hold back till it releases.