Top North American sides Fnatic and compLexity have qualified for the Overwatch Championship at DreamHack Winter, finalising the four open spots to the main tournament. The North American online qualifier for DreamHack Winter promised two direct tickets to the $50,000 tournament; European teams NiP and Misfits had already earned their spots to Sweden, and now the two North American teams join them after winning the double-elimination online qualifier.
Fnatic earned their spot by storming through the upper bracket of the qualifier. The multi-national roster, widely regarded as the second best North American team, took 2-0 wins over Method and Tempo Storm to get to the Upper Bracket Final, where they beat compLexity 3-1 for the first North American spot at DreamHack Winter.
compLexity’s run was slightly more tricky, and saw them defeat Liquid 2-0 and the new Cloud9 2-1 before losing to Fnatic. That loss dropped them down to the lower bracket, where they had to overcome FaZe in a close 3-2 series to earn the second NA spot at the Overwatch Championship.
Overwatch Championship will be a major feature at the huge Swedish LAN. Image credit: DreamHack
DreamHack will host an eight team closed tournament as a feature event of its large Swedish LAN, with half of the teams already decided through online qualifiers. The other four teams will be decided by an open BYOC qualifier at the LAN, the day before the main tournament. This means that along with NiP, Fnatic, Misfits, and compLexity, four other places are open for teams who attend the LAN BYOC and are confident of qualifying.
The teams from the West currently participating in Asia were notably absent from the qualifiers and will not be able to attend this competition, as Rogue, EnVyUs, REUNITED, and NRG are busy in OGN at the same time.
It seems likely that the field will be very open in the BYOC qualifier, as teams who had deep runs in the online qualifier such as Luminosity and Dignitas reportedly have no current plans to attend. In that case DreamHack Winter may allow some tier two teams the opportunity to showcase their talents alongside the big teams from each region, but only the top four will receive a piece of the $50,000 pie. Whether any of the BYOC qualifying teams from Europe will be able to challenge the top four remains to be seen.
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