I'm seeing a 4-0 here. London seems to have figure out their best DPS duo, and it's absolutely terrifying. Both Profit and Birdring can play Tracer, with the latter being one of the best in the world and the former being able to do so at a very high level himself.

Like SFS I believe London's weakness lies in their supports, but I have to give them the edge in both the tank and the DPS departments. Basically this comes down to a game of how long can Babybay survive before either Birdring or Profit get to him, while Danteh is being kept at under wraps by the other one.

I don't see this match being close, but I absolutely hope that SFS is able to make this competitive, somehow.

These are the Remiska posts I come to over.gg for.

I'm curious, lists like these are wholly subjective since we don't have a universal way of factually ranking players in a game that somewhat limits their individual impact.

So if this isn't your list, which community members is it from and how were their opinions weighted? I ask because this will largely be an opinion piece and I'd very much love this to not turn into some kind of flame war because people don't agree that A player is better than B player for X reason(s).

Otherwise nice post, looks well structured to me.

Well, I'm a self admitted Seoul fanboi, but doing my best to put aside my bias I think they have more to prove to really establish themselves as top contenders.

The question is...will they get to beat the Team SK speed runs during the OWWC Group Phase?

Jokes aside though, my heart freaking breaks for these kids. SHD management better get their shit together and help shape this team into one that can at least compete.

Good on them, hopefully they continue the trend they had started in the last round of APEX Challengers!

I think that's possible, but given that KR teams are very good at learning from previous matches they've had I'm not quite convinced of the likelihood of them losing much.

I say this mainly because I think the best chance you have of beating them is early on as they have less game tape on you. Hopefully the rest of the field is able to improve at a quicker past than the Koreans if they want to slow down their domination of the league.

I don't particularly care for Semmler, I haven't warmed up to him though that could change over time.

However, feel free to watch and actually make your own opinion based on what you've actually experienced. I don't understand how you can base your own opinion on 2nd hand accounts but it makes you sound even more ignorant than usual, and that's saying something.

Tweet:
https://twitter.com/Team_Kungarna/status/955122585448022016

Lineup:
⚔️ @Ezirelol
⚔️ @OhJosiah
🛡 @ChayneOW
🛡 @harbleuOW
💉 @Jer_OW
💉 @HaKuMeiOW

👑 @KING_mykL
📋 @katemctiriss
📋 @Dqnny_OW

Mykl officially stepping down as a player to become a team owner, interesting.

Interestingly enough he seems to still be actively banting on twitter. Whether that's good or bad depends on how much press he/his team/blizzard want him to have at all right now.

Personally I think he'd do well to just get away from the game entirely for a little while for his own well being and come back stronger and, hopefully, somewhat more mature...or at least being able to better handle the environment that OWL puts these guys in.

Comments aside, it seems to me like he needs a clean break from this.

This pun deserves a frag.

I wouldn't call either of those two heroes great, or at least not OWL level of great, so I can see why they'd want to keep him to maps where he is likely to be able to run his strongest heroes.

Houston outplayed Dallas pretty hard on this one. I will say this though, even though the casters were praising Jake for his Genji I can't say he was hard carrying on it, just doing his job and cleaning up fight with Dragon Blade. His Pharah was also a bit underwhelming but it's pretty clear that his presence alone is a plus for the team so as long as he's not feeding I don't see a reason not to have him in.

As for Dallas they seem to have the same issue that Misfits previously. I wonder if having Seagull grind Genji so he can be at a level where they can actively use him with EFFECT and probably xQc and run dive when appropriate.

I mentioned this is my prediction but cutting down EFFECT's impact on the game was key here imo. If he can't get into your backline the rest of the team is much less threatening and I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like they need a few comfort comps/strats that they can reliably run.

Lastly though I can still see why Houston was able to handle Dallas so easily and imo that still pertains to their lack of a strong dive comp that they can run. To me, the next step for Houston is to get a win against a team that can dive them effectively so we can see if they are able to hang with the top teams. Seoul, London, LAV and to some extent NYXL should all tell us more about how they deal with having to play on the back foot instead of just playing with a tactical lead.

My expectations for Houston have risen, and even though I think they should make the playoffs, I'm still not sure if they're contenders for the top.

Linkzr is the better Tracer on that team imo, so if he can flex when needed they can keep Jake in for his calls and Junkrat.

This is likely to be a 4-0 Seoul win, but looking at how they handled Florida and all the experimentation they were doing Boston could sneak a map win in there.

Another crazy match as day 2 this week is fully stacked. Come right out to say that I think LAV win 3-2. I say this with a total lack of confidence in my prediction given how strong both teams have looked but I feel like LAV seem to have better team play at the moment.

Honestly though this could go either way and as long as it's not a blowout I'd be happy with any result.

Really excited for this one. I'm not a huge fan of either teams but if I had to pick a side based on the players i like the most it would have to be Dallas.

That being said I think Houston has a very real chance of winning this since they seem to be better against teams that can't dive well. I think this might actually come down to how...effective EFFECT is...YYYEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

But jokes aside, if EFFECT is able to hard carry Dallas I'm not sure Houston has someone that can really deal with him like LAV had.

In the end I think this will be another huge 5 set match and that Dallas will win 3-2.

Maybe, but I'm not sure they would. It would mean Grim never getting any play time at all. And they seemed committed to helping their players grow. Is be all for it though.

Likewise, though I think Seoul will also be one of the team the benefits the most if Mercy does drop out of the Pro meta.

Alright so here's my current power list with tiers. Note that teams are somewhat interchangeable within the tiers but this is how I feel like they measure up from the little games that have been played.

A Tier (Top 4)

1. SEO
2. LDN
3. LAV
4. NYXL

B Tier (Playoff Contenders)

5. DAL
6. PHL
7. LAG
8. HOU
9. BOS
10. SFS

C Tier (Look Weaker)

11. FLA
12. SHD

A Tier:
The only "surprise", we'll call it that for now, in this group is LAV. They looked really good after the first week and it's obviously too early to tell if that's going to continue being a thing but otherwise they could be the non fully Korean team to challenge our overlords. NYXL is a little bit of a questions mark but again this week should help give more insight on where they possibly stand in this. Depending on how strong of a performance these squads have I could see this becoming a top three...or remaining a top 4.

B Tier:
So I copped out, mainly because there aren't enough games played for me to really know what to make of most of the B Tier teams but I think the picture should be much clearer once this first stage is over.
Notable wild cards are Philly that looked good against a team that couldn't dive but I'm worried that we might end up seeing more of what happened against London where a team with better dive and coordination just picked them, and their lack of an effective backup strat, apart.
Boston is in somewhat of a similar position looking good when ahead but really struggling to find solutions when outmatched. Just by the nature of how strong teams look relative to each other this tier will probably see a lot of movement with some teams possibly dropping to join the bottom two. A bit less likely, imo, is also the possibility that a team either joins the top 4 teams to make it a top 5, by being so much better than the rest of the field while competing with the 4 above them, or that they replace a team that's fallen from their early start.

C Tier:
Florida and Shanghai are the only teams I feel are in real deep trouble right now and that are considerably weaker than the rest. Changes will be needed to fix these teams.

Seoul has arguably the easiest week of anyone so they're likely to pad their lead in the public opinion's standing as well as actually take the top spot in OWL standings. Either way i'm looking forward to seeing what teams are able to bring out this week and if teams overall can come closer to each other.

The only question about IDDQD that's I'd have is if he'd be able to keep Carpe in check while Babybay and SDB compete on who can frag out the most.

If he fails to do so we could see Carpe farming Babybay while SDB farms everyone else.

Yeah, I mean hindsight is 20/20 and I understand that back then having more than 6 wasn't really a viable option but I think it's obvious that they need more manpower to be at least somewhat meta proof.

Knoxx is basically another iteration of Cwooosh imo. Both of them are really only strong on Winston, or at least they haven't shown much prowess on Rectangle Man.

They need a strong Rein that can swap to Winston if needed. I'm still of the opinion that reinforce was a good candidate for being the main Rein player, with Cwooosh leading the charge on Winston. Only difference being that they wouldn't be completely screwed on map where Rein is very strong for a couple of points since Reinforce's Winston wasn't great, but it was still serviceable.

I think they need themselves at least 1 MT, 1 OT, 1 Support (maybe 2 if Zebbo moves to coach along side Mineral) and 1 or 2 DPS for added flexibility without naming possible additions.

Not really a free agent but times like these is when I feel dropping reinforce was a mistake. His Rein was good, imo, and his Winston was getting better. The timing of how everything happened is partly to blame for this but he could have added some flexibility and game style options to the team to contrast Cwooosh.

Really happy for him that he'll be on the desk, but I also think he could have been successful in the tea format that OWL is shaping up to prefer.

Not sure about that, LH was a big name but with all the current top squads leaving for OWL that leaves more space for the ones that are currently up and coming. If anything KR is likely to continue to be where the best players are developed in OW.

I don't see Tseini as being a better Genji than any of the ones in the league right now, his Pharah could be argued as comparable but I'm not convinced it's at a significantly higher level than what we've seen.

Possibly, but 1-2 weeks isn't enough to draw solid conclusions. Personally I'd say we probably need to, at the very least, wait until the end of the first phase to be able to properly evaluate teams based on results.

Some conclusions can probably be made before then but sample size does matter in longer format events.

Most of the Genji players are also Pharah players so I'm not sure about that one. I don't think he'd be grabbing a full time DPS spot but could fit in as a flex

It would but apparently they're trialing in NA, and AFAIK LH/Seoul are two separate entities since moving to LA, but please correct me if i'm wrong on that.

God King of Korean Overwatch, TISrobin311 just tweeted this out:
https://twitter.com/tisrobin311/status/953646248199770113

Here's his initial comment:

"Lunatic Hai Dohyeon has quit the team. Not due to his lack of skill but multiple factors including his anxiety of staying overseas for a long period of time without any acquaintances to care for him if he were to be picked for OWL. He wants to undergo a period of introspection."

The thread suggests that LH might indeed be disbanding and that their players are trialing in NA. I have no actual information on this but i'm guessing it's for Contenders Academy teams.

I think I'd have London in 2nd, LAV in 3rd, NYXL in 4th and Dallas in 5th.

One funny thing I was thinking about is that I think most of Houston's problems would probably be fixed by having a player like EFFECT to match with Linkzr if they can adjust their shot calling structure. They need the strong flexible Tracer to make standard comps work while still leaving them space to have the niche picks.

I think it's probably true on an individual basis but doesn't has as much of an impact due to this being a team game.

Whatever gap there might be is most probably made up 10x over by how much stronger London looks right now.

Seoul Dynasty #1 fanboi here, and not ashamed to admit it! Been cheering on the boyz ever since I saw them at IEM Gyeongi back when they still had Dean and LTJ.

I don't think the Mayhem will be able to repeat the map win they got against London and imo they're outmatched both in overall player skill as well as strats/adaptability.

Anyhow, the only score I can see here is: FLA 0 - 4 SEO

the production and competition that APEX brought yes, if Blizzard is able to retain that level of polish and success there's no love lost, imo. that and being able to have a stronger connection from OWL to Contenders if Seoul decides to field an Academy team.

Evidently there are a lot of "ifs" in there and Blizz gave themselves the perfect opportunity for this to be great...or an absolute failure.

I'm hoping that they don't mess this up so that the tier 2 scene can starts it's much needed road to recovery.

If you go back and watch his APEX matches you'll see just how good he was. Basically he was so much better than the rest of his team that he hard carries them even though the team couldn't win matches. So to answer your question, yes, he's always been a standout but now he has the support he needs to absolutely dominate because his mistakes won't automatically mean the instant loss of the engagement.

I've always liked Fleta and it was really painful to see what was such talent with so much potential being wasted on a team that couldn't keep up with him.

The result of this match will probably depend on how well Philly can play the "kill Babybay" game. Given how this team is built on how much they like to aggressively dive I think they should be able to handle him.

Like most ppl already mentioned this is probably a 3-1 for me, unless the Shock can show us something new.

His tracer isn't great, it's OK but unless Linkzr is absolutely popping off he could get gunned down by enemy Tracers that focus on dueling the other.

In the long run I think having him play tracer would hurt them more than help, mostly because of how many former Tracer one tricks the league has.

He'd be "replacing" Grim and (Silkthread or Agilities) though. I say Grim because other than being a pure backup he doesn't play much of a role at the moment.

as for the other two i think AKM's hero pool works well with either of them with Agilities being more projectile focused and them sharing them both being able to run Pharah and Silkthread being able to play pretty much anything but probably having to focus on projectile to better fit AKM in this squad.

So you'd be left with Soon, AKM and either Silk or Agilities. Overall it would make sense to me but I'm not convinced they'd want to make those moves, since just adding him in without making any other chance introduces as much redundancy as the Shock have.

What do you guys think? What kind of team format would they need to have to make this work?

I wish I could fast forward to week 5 and see where everyone stands at the end of the first stage. Let's not forget that this is going to be an absolutely long ass season so player burn out/stamina is actually a thing.

Specially for that one 6 man team...cough cough. Who will still be fresh and who will fizzle out?

Biological differences were mentioned but were used as a reason to not treat her the way she'd like to be treated so it's more than that. Without going into debating whether that was right or wrong you all should feel free to seek out more information on the subject.

Let me preface my opinion by stating a few things that seem to sometimes get forgotten in these types of threads.

1. I'm not an expert on the matter and my references are limited to the multitude of articles on the net.
2. I haven't properly researched it so I don't have any scientific studies to back up my take on this subject.

Here it goes:

Personally I don't see the lack of female pro gamers in OWL as an issue per se. In my opinion the issue actually stems from the general culture of video games being, for the large majority, tailored for boys. Whether it's marketing or content it's a fact that the main audience is young men.

There's also the cultural aspect where female gamers are more likely to be treated differently and/or harassed than their male counter parts. These and several other factors likely contribute to the smaller pool of available talent when it comes to male vs female gamers.

This then leads into the "issue" we have today where due to the lower number of competitive female players in comparison to their male counterparts you will inevitable see far less that are able to compete at the top level. This is a number's game plain and simple. Out of all the Overwatch players out there there was only a maximum of 144 if all 12 teams maxed out their rosters. That's an insanely small portion of the community, and if we assume the same level of skill is present when looking at female gamers their already smaller numbers should leave no one surprised that none of them made it into OWL.

My take on it is that this isn't something that will change just because we're outraged that there are no women playing on OWL rosters. This will need a cultural shift that will most likely take years. There was a comment on a Reddit thread talking about Geguri that I feel illustrated the idea for the most part:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/7pvkp7/geguri_disputes_kotaku_says_her_not_getting_into/dskdunf/

Right now there are no female Overwatch players that I know of that I consider OWL caliber day in, day out. Granted I have very little information on these women in the first place so my line of sight on this is very narrow. I don't see this as a top down problem necessarily, the women that are already competing were able to go past that barrier, and I'm not discounting all the shit they have to deal with on a daily basis (see articles about Geguri for some examples), but getting into, and staying into competitive gaming seems to already be half the battle for women. If OWL is around for long enough it will eventually happen, but it'll probably take more time than some are comfortable with.

So in closing I think the debate isn't about if there should be more women in OWL, or about why there aren't any right now and I've omitted any reference to sexism in my arguments because I don't feel like it's overtly at the root cause of the issue. I think this debate should be about how we can normalize gaming to both sexes to try and eliminate that barrier to entry and hopefully have a more organic representation of people who just like to play the game.

#14 He has a point, unless one goes through the necessary operations you can't just class yourself as a different gender and expect to be treated like it or I might as well turn myself into a female tomorrow so I can wander around the gym locker rooms and check out the naked chicks.
If everyone on Dallas Fuel came out and said they turned trans over the weekend they wouldn't instantly become the first female team in the OWL, he isn't hating on trans people so stop looking for a fight that isn't there.

Your ignorance on the topic is impressive though I'm not entirely surprised. If you don't know please feel free to educate yourself on transgender people.

Teams need to deal with Fleta. As long as he has the space to do work it's going to be extremely difficult for teams to get the better of the Seoul team in the long run.

That being said, GGs to my boiz. They took control at the end of Junkertown and never let go.

Hindsight is 20/20 eh? Good on you for noticing the obvious though!

Really disappointed in what I saw but not that surprised. Boston looks like a team that has potential if they can add some depth to their strategies. That might come a bit later when communication gets better.

Florida on the other hand has nothing new to show, Logix isn't performing to the standards they need him at and with then being such a known quantity there's not much room for improvement. I know AKM said he'd rather join a good team and get paid less than have a high salary on a weaker one but he'd probably be an option to allow Tviq to focus on Projectile narrow what he needs to play.

In nay case I do hope Florida figure something out, or at the very least hold on until the mid season signings and fully take advantage of all the space they have.

Viewership numbers are viewership numbers. This argument is incredibly pointless, imho. Just watch if you enjoy and don't watch if you do not, comment on the match that was played if you did.

The tank and supports Dorothy SHD looked incredibly weak and the DPS duo wasn't able to carry. Hoping they decide to bring on Lateyoung (MY) and Shy (LGD). MY's main tank would also no doubt be a strong option. Hopefully Leave and Eileen are still at the top of their game once eligible to play in the league.

This team just isn't working right now, so hopefully MY's coach coming in is a sign of change in motion.

MY body is ready, but my heart is not.

Right but if you understand Korean culture you also know how much time they invest into the game. Take Kaiser as an example, AFAIK he hasn't been involved in boosting but it's also publicly known that he is going through tough finial times with his family situation and all.

No one is saying boosting is the correct choice you make. But you MUST understand why they might think it is instead of only focusing on the "cheating is bad" part of your argument. The suggestions you're giving do not even remotely apply to them. Remember that your way of thinking doesn't apply here, because this is Korea, not NA or EU.

Look it up if you need more context, because it seems to me like you're failing to understand how strong the motivation behind this, and why it's so rampant.

memes