Contenders and Open Division details announced

first

We'll finally get ANZ and SA Major tournaments :D

This could be a great start for OWL

Man, I'm just excited for more pro OW!

Sounds good! :)

Let's go, Blizzard notice SA!

Great for South America and Australia to have their own Contenders scenes, will be good to see growth in those regions that are normally not offered as much. Promotion/relegation is also great, keep the cream of the crop at the top.

Still pretty concerning for tier 2/3 teams if three rounds of Contenders is all that's open to them each year. There's an enormous drop from Contenders to Open Division if open is still paying blizzbucks for winning. Individual cups or tournaments would go a long way to making it worthwhile for players and orgs to have non-OWL teams, or at least making the offseason tournaments have an open or Contenders-inclusive entry system. It's a long time to wait til March and even longer if you have to get in via Open.

Unfortunately the announcement is missing prizepools as well as crucial info about APEX/OPC/OWPS. If those are made to be online tournaments I can't imagine the uproar from the Asian scene. Would work fine in NA/EU to have it all online - possibly make it better as it reduces org costs - but the players in Asia are attracted to OW by LAN play, I don't think they'll wait til OWL expands into their region. Could really kill the game's appeal in Korea and China if they reduce it to Contenders S1 levels imo. I don't personally see the benefit of standardising the systems across the regions rather than having some diversity of branding, format, character, etc. but it certainly adds long-term security.

Pretty much exactly what I wanted. It makes sense. The question of 3rd party events still stands tho

Also show Africa some love, they cared enough to have a South African overwatch "LAN" playing on crazy ping, they could at least have an open division

I'm interested in competing in Open. I can't ever see myself going pro (years of my life already invested in my education), but playing against real teams is way more fun than ranked.

Now I can make a open division team!

Current roster:

Flex DPS: Pixelfish
DPS: ???
Tank: Involv3r
Flex tank: ???
Support: Darkcvc
Support: ???
SUB: KuroiRyuu

cant play on xbox

Hyped for the future of contenders, and thankfully it will start early enough in the OWL season for teams to get a decent scope into the talent pool. But the better news, contenders means the return of the prediction games!

Sounds good, but Oceania (including Australia) can be merged with SouthAsia i think :thinking:

Hype for all the OW we will get in 2018 !

It's gonna be hard to follow everything and every games with all the 7 regions and 3 season + 2 contenders trials + OWL 4 days a week from january to june.

and you guys think about open division ? will they limit them to the 7 regions as well because there is actually 11 open division regions ..

So happy my SA bois are finally getting to compete, they have some stars just waiting to shine!

Official Team Seven (Korean Overwatch team in APEX Challengers) twitter says all the Contenders Korea matches will be offline. A lot of people here in Korea wanted Contenders Korea to be an offline tournament just like its precedent. Korea is a small-sized country and therefore there will be no big problems to have all the matches offline.

so bascially now its official, ow is dead outside blizzards competition

with all these new regions being added, what the hell will it take for a contenders series in Africa. Are we going to just ignore them because they aren't as good. Didn't an article was made here about some South African tounament?

I'm probably alone in this but I'm not sure on the name "contenders" to me that's what you call a league where you have the ability to be promoted to the higher league yet the higher league is OWL and that won't happen here unless you fork out 20M$ which is then not a promotion but a buy-in, I can see the name making sense since it means "a person or group competing with others to achieve something" but at the same time all you're achieving is winning that one tournament, I much prefer the open division name since it doesn't make it sound like you're contending for something bigger. I can't recall the term contenders being used in e-sports before OW came a long.

Probably doesn't make sense, but if I put 6 teams together and called it the contenders I would assume that implies they are working towards something even bigger.

I wished Blizzard would work towards a LAN outside of OWL where the top 2 of each contenders season meet on LAN and compete for something bigger, maybe at Blizzcon? not sure if everyone agrees but I'd much rather see this scenario than a gimmick world cup every year at least then these "contenders" have something to strive for other than winning their respective leagues which gives them nothing other than some money.

glad this game is a blizzard game otherwise it would be long dead when it comes to competitive competition
dreamhack,pgl,esl,eleague,pitleague all dont care about OW and now most of their bigger tournaments are fully blizzard owned

finally open div will have lower requirements than contenders LuL

We hear a lot about OWL mid season signing.

Will a player can start with a Contenders team then get called up to an OWL team during a Contenders season already started ?
I hope the transfer window will be between Contender seasons ( probably during Contenders Trials) because if not we could easily , have a team beasting the begining of S1 , loose 2 players who gets promoted to OWL then the same Contender team finished in the bottom 4 at the end of the same season ...

If the transfer can only be between season, it makes perfect sense to get 'multiple-season' of the Contenders by year.

What do you guys think about that ?