Three Contenders finals to be played at World Cup events

tamagao

July 22, 2018

The grand finals of Contenders North America, Contenders Pacific and Contenders Europe will be played at their corresponding region's World Cup group stage. For North America, that will be in Los Angeles, Pacific will play in Bangkok, Thailand and Europe will play in Paris.

Contenders North America, Pacific, and Europe are coming to the Overwatch World Cup! 🌏

👉: https://t.co/P6fP3GInES pic.twitter.com/XFoAS9zMv5
— Overwatch Path to Pro (@owpathtopro) July 19, 2018

Each region will play just their grand finals match on LAN, a change from last season. In both North America and Europe, the semifinals and finals were played on LAN, as well as a showmatch between the winners of the two regions. In the Pacific region, every match of the tournament was on LAN. Group stage matches have been played online this season as a result of teams struggling to afford the upkeep of housing a roster in Taiwan for an entire month.

The date for each region's finals match has already been set. Contenders North America will play September 7, Contenders Pacific will play September 14 and Contenders Europe will play September 21. The finals will be played after each qualifier's last Friday World Cup match.

Tickets to see each World Cup stage also apply to the respective region's Contenders finals. Tickets for just the Contenders matches are not being sold separately at this time.

Details about finals for Contenders China, Contenders Korea and Contenders South America will be released sometime soon, according to Blizzard.

Comments:

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#1

wentaway

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So it's good that Contenders might get more LAN exposition, but why did it have to happen at the same time of the World Cup, in the same locations and why reducing the teams/region only to 2 (oinly the actual finals)?
https://twitter.com/owpathtopro/status/1019980923054387200

No matter the way I look at it, doesn't sound right to me...

EDIT: also why no LAN for SA Contenders or AUS?

#9

Hater

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Contenders AU's is at lan, rod laver arena Melbourne

#13

wentaway

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Well that's great! So it's just our SA friends "left out"? :(

#2

wentaway

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A couple of examples:

If by chance Eagle Gaming qualifies for the finals, is Nico supposed to play in the same day both with his national team and his Contenders one (there's gonna be matches for both teams on thw 21st of September)?

Is not much different for NA, Zacharee, let's say Fusion University makes it to the finals, he'd have to play both for team USA and his Contenders team.

Not ideal also for other players who, despite having couple of weeks in-between, will have to play both in NA and in EU (Onigod is an example for Angry Titans)

#3

Frozello

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I think EU, NA and Pacific Finals on World Cup event has couple obvious reasons why Contenders Final. Not saying ideal, but still.

1) World Cup Qualifiers will likely get much higher viewership than single Contenders LAN Finals so maybe it's for trying to market Contenders for wider audience.

2) Well suppose that, if there would be Contenders Finals at the same time than World Cup Qualifier... I think we all can guess, which gets more viewers.

3) Not having semifinals on LAN is a bit of a letdown though. This is probably just a special snowflake Contenders Season since there's only World Cup Qualifiers once a year.

#4

wentaway

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I agree, there are for sure positive aspects to it, but for each positive one I find more negative ones.

Yes you increase the spectators for Contenders matches, but only for 2 teams (instead of 4, which were imo already way too few)

Considering 80-90% of OW tournaments are owned by Blizzard, why couldn't they slot the Contenders finals at a different time? Yes would require some long-term planning, but ehi if you care about the PathToPro...

#5

Frozello

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Probably Blizzard will agree with some conflicts in timeline and try to fix/change some of them for next year, but will be interesting to see how they try to build up OWL Season 2 along with Contenders + World Cup into ecosystem for 2019.

For future I could see that Contenders Finals or even whole Playoffs could be played on European OWL teams arenas or something like that, when OWL actually have home and away games.

#6

paolodicandio

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cuz it saves money and blizzard dont care about T2 Events :D

#7

Emaxmagnus

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whatajoke

#8

Raisin

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Wait what if a contenders player is on a World Cup team?

#10

ideekae

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yo enigma got the thread merge thing together, comments from yesterday's forum post even though the post was from today
nEATo

#12

wentaway

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Our lord Enigma, thanks for merging them mate!

#14

Mert

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I pressed the merge button so I'm gonna take all the credit there (thanks enigma)

#11

Pixelfish

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Yeah what happens if you’re on a contenders and WC team? That’s a lot.

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