I'm sure they were part of the decision since AFAIK any tournament over $10k needs their official approval.

I really doubt any top team takes Twitch chat seriously, although this was probably just a tongue-in-cheek comment and I just got baited.

Has anyone played and seen the format of ranked games yet? It's probably a good indication of the ruleset that Blizzard wants to officially push.

The site's doing fine. It's been picking up steam in the past few weeks.

Why were only 4 EU teams invited? Where's Rogue?

What was wrong with it?

@Taimou
Does EnVyUs already have a house in the US? Is that why all of you guys are coming here rather than finding a place in EU?

Not a bad start to NA LAN events.

I caught most of these live, but I'll be sure to watch the ones I missed. I'm most interested to see how the Chinese team played.

Seems IDDQD is still having a lot of success with a Zen/Symmetra + Tracer/Genji, although that could just be due to the strength of the team rather than the viability of the composition.

Those seem like pretty harsh Zen nerfs, but something obviously had to be done.

It's a shame the mixup vs. C9 game wasn't casted.

It's interesting to watch something new develop every weekend.

Isn't this sooner than anticipated?

GG IDDQD. Good run by Mixup though.

Does knoxxx maincall for this team too?

Always a fan of your writing Bloodsire.

It should be patently obvious that it's far too early to be imposing hero limits.

This will also be Team EnVyUs's first tournament after leaving the Hubris name.

I don't see them on the registered teams list. Are they still playing?

I expect quite a few more teams to participate in this week's. Last week's tournament was notably missing EnVyUs.

Anyone know the story behind IGGQD? I recognize Taimou from TF2.

NA teams (hubris and NotEnigma) have been participating in these tournaments (even on the EU server) and wiping the floor with EU teams.

I see the sun hasn't been changed.

I'm surprised it's this early given the estimate:

Jeff Kaplan:

I don’t have an exact date for when the Closed Beta will resume, but right now we’re looking at mid-February (and we don’t intend to slip out of February).

Someone finally broke the silence. Interest has been fading fast (even the subreddit's mostly dead). Hopefully this piques people's interest and sparks some activity in the community.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-12-11-overwatch-interview

We feel like ranked play is extremely important for the game, in fact we had a really deep, meaningful meeting amongst the design group about it yesterday. We're pushing super hard to get it into the launch of the game. If we don't feel good about the direction in which it's going or that it's not a Blizzard-worthy feature, we'd rather it slip the launch and come in sometime shortly after. We're not far enough along yet to know whether it's going to make that window or not, but I do feel confident in saying that if it doesn't make launch, it wouldn't be long after.

Thank god for the killfeed.

I'm still a bit concerned that ranked play isn't one of their priorities though.

hubris wins gg wp both teams.

Both Not Enigma and hubris are in the semis.

http://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/14487-former-planetkey-dynamics-overwatch-team-disbands/

The r/Overwatch subreddit can complain all they want. The 2-3k viewers for all the weekend tournament streams are pretty telling; a ton of people are interested in the competitive aspect of the game.

Awesome to see all those years of TF2 finally pay off.

Premature, imo.

Have there been any EU vs NA games? How do they fare?

It's not just one organization, there has been rumors for multiple. I'm 'mad' that people are already diving into competitive, making a name for themselves (Getting popular in the community, Twitch) and then getting sponsored as many of us just sit here and wait.
The nature of a closed beta means that some (or most, I guess) people will get shafted; everyone can't win.

Any "team" signing an actual sponsorship deal right now would probably get pretty piss-poor terms anyways.

FishStix is a Twitch dude so I'm guessing this event comes with front-page promotion too?

http://us.battle.net/overwatch/en/blog/19964704/

From Friday, November 20 through Monday, November 23, we'll be conducting our first invitation-only Beta Test Weekend. During this three-day event, we'll be opening up Overwatch beta (for a limited time) to a lot more players from our Americas and Europe gameplay regions.
Good luck all!

Jason Lake brings up an interesting point on "beta all-stars," which makes me wonder what he sees in the particular players he's talking to that disqualifies them from that title.