Details for 2019 World Cup revealed

Blizzard has announced the return of the Overwatch World Cup with changes in store for the 2019 edition. Most notably, all competition will take place in the final week before Blizzcon and the qualification process for teams has changed.

The #2019OWWC is a go!

Get the latest details here: https://t.co/aGhMjLjMkb pic.twitter.com/NWnzq7Xd6Q
— Overwatch League (@overwatchleague) April 25, 2019

Teams will be ranked by their previous World Cup performances, in which points will be given to teams based on their placement in the previous years. A team is given one point for a Round of 32 performance and 10 points for a World Cup title.

In order to favor recency, the amount of points received will also depend on when the team made their placements. Teams receive 100% of their points for 2018 finishes, 50% from their 2017 performances and just 25% of points from their results in 2016.

The World Cup will begin with Preliminary Rounds held before the start of Blizzcon. The five highest ranked teams from Blizzard's point system will automatically make it into the next round, the Group Stage, and will be joined by five teams from the Preliminary Rounds. The Group Stage takes place Friday, November 1. The top six teams from the Group Stage will enter a single-elimination on Saturday, November 2.

The 10 highest ranked teams (based on Blizzard's points system) confirmed to compete in this year's World Cup will receive full financial support from Blizzard. Any other nation is welcome to compete in the World Cup but will receive some support for their hotels but will not receive any support from Blizzard for travel.

Fans will now get to vote for their nation's general manager, a contrast to last year's competition where Blizzard selected each country's GM. The GM and staff for each team will have a more restrictive player pool to choose from: the minimum age for World Cup competitors has been raised to 18. National committees will go through a three phase process that begins with committee nominations and ends with player tryouts.

The Preliminary Rounds will be broadcast online. Multiple Group Stage matches will occur at once.

Fans can find out more information from Blizzard's World Cup news post.

OWL Schedule is biggest reason why World Cup schedule is like this. I highly suspect that for 2020 we might be having OWL teams getting a chance to host World Cup qualifiers in their own venues, if they fit them into yearly schedule differently than for this year. I mean we have France/UK, Korea, China and USA/Canada as locations so it doesn't sound unrealistic for future, but might be too soon.

Personally I think best move would be Tournament with Top-16 teams (at this year), but question is how do you determinate, which teams are Top-16? Taking Top-100 accounts for each country based of SR is not really going to get us 16 best teams. It's kinda given China, Korea and USA being at top-3, if we rank countries based of SR of Top-100 accounts, but that's not necessary Top-3 for Tournament. Neither would Sweden be rank 4 in reality like they have been couple last years for group draws.

I think only flaw with old system with 4 qualifiers in different parts of world was that certain countries got unlucky, because Korea, China and USA were kind of favored in the group draw so whichever countries from Europe avoided all 3 of them got pretty lucky and last year that was France and UK. Since qualifiers were basically split into groups based on region, but EU having so many countries not all of them could been in same qualifier at France. I can't really blame how they made the system for previous years since you want to have a lot of people in your LAN events and streams. Having USA/Canada in NA and largest EU countries in France qualifier, China in Bangkok qualifier. Korea was playing in Seoul too. That did sure help a lot with interest for people to watch streams or attend LAN surely, but didn't really make groups "even".

Although I think we did see 2017 (32 teams) and 2018 (24 teams) that at most 20 teams might be at competitive level even, if they would not win any matches, but might win some maps. I'm waiting to see though, what happens, if only about 15-20 teams will attend. Would Blizzard offer to pay those extra 5-10 teams travels?