It's comforting that ESL are able to easily admit their mistakes and correct them whenever the Overwatch community raises a concern. A sigh of relief was audible from across the Atlantic when the news was just posted that ESL are correcting their random seeds for the Atlantic Showdown Final Qualifier.

ESL stated:

Our draw for the Overwatch Atlantic Showdown Regional Final brackets was met with a lot of criticism yesterday when it became clear that most of the North American top teams were seeded into the same half of the bracket. After thorough consideration we have decided to alter the tournament brackets for both Europe and North America in the following way:

We continue to value teams who qualified first the highest (qualifier 1 = seeds 1-4, qualifier 2 = seeds 5-8 and so on) In an effort to remove random chance the teams are then seeded based on their initial seeding in the qualifier they came from. That seeding was based on a combination of past results and their performance in previous qualifiers.

We decided to make this change in favour of the spirit of competition. While we like the idea of giving new teams a chance to prove themselves in our qualifiers and earning a high seed we also want to reward consistently great performing teams. We believe we are reaching this goal with this revisited seeding.

The new European bracket along with the new North American bracket can be found below, with some short thoughts about how this has affected the competition.

European Final 16

The amendments to the European bracket put WEUNITED and SG-1 on the opposite side of the bracket to face Creation eSports. The winner will take on REUNITED as before.

On the other side of the bracket, this now sets up ANOX with a more difficult run as they drop from #1 to #4 seed, and must carve their way through Rogue and Misfits for their spot.

North American Final 16

The North American bracket has seen a huge reshuffle. No longer is there a bracket of death: EnVyUs, TSM, and Northern Gaming are in the top bracket while in the bottom bracket Luminosity fight against Fnatic and Cloud9. The bottom bracket has the better of the tier two teams, but every team now has a much more even shot at qualifying.

In the top bracket TSM will face Northern Gaming early on, with the winner going on to battle EnVyUs, assuming no huge upset occurs.

In the bottom bracket, Luminosity must battle through Splyce, Fnatic, then Cloud9 to fight in the Upper Bracket Semi-final.

Once again it will come down to the lower bracket to decide who makes it through in their second lives, but this time ESL have stopped one team drowning in their attempt to cross the Atlantic Showdown.