The league matches may have been canceled because of the pandemic,
but it doesn’t mean that it will never be continued.
The much-awaited Overwatch League Season 21 was scheduled to start
on February 8, 2020, but the global concern over COVID-19 had pushed the
league’s officials to postpone some of it. But transferring to other locations
wasn’t fruitful as the coronavirus outbreak gets serious. This leaves the
official to decide to postpone the season matches for March to April. In the
mid-week of March, it was also announced that the other live events scheduled
until May were also canceled. But along the cancellation news, a new schedule
for the matches was announced.
Staying Relevant
amidst the Pandemic
The Overwatch League is just one of the esports leagues that have
canceled its live events but have found a new way to continue what they have
prepared for an entire year. Instead of moving the matches to different
locations, the OWL has raised the bars by hosting online-only matches. The first-weekend online-only match happened
last March 28 to 29, and it succeeded. After this opening weekend, Blizzard has
also announced that they will finish the entire Season 21 through this type of
net-level gaming schedule.
With this, there have also been in-person events that are looking
into options, just like what the Overwatch league have done. Well, as the world faces the stay-at-home
economy, there’s always the bright side that everyone should look into. Thanks to that “bright side,” we get to
stream to watch our favorite teams play this season.
New Schedule for Season 21
Since the prepared schedule and location will no longer take effect,
further changes are inevitable. One of these changes was the host of the game.
Unlike before, it is the Overwatch league that is going to host the entire
games rather than having it by the individual team.
This new schedule aimed to remove the idea of traveling to the game
locations just for the battle. It will
also solve some latency issues by matching up only those teams that are in
similar regions. The company, Blizzard, have device this schedule to maximize
fairness, being able to factor equal matches for all the teams. This will lead
to having the Pacific Conferences team to play more than those from the
Atlantic Conference.
But wait, before you think it will be unfair, the schedule works
that way so that those teams will be able to catch up with the matches that were
supposedly held but got canceled. This means that their matches will not be
late and still meet up with the season midpoint. To give way for the new schedule, the league
is still in the process of evaluating these changes to the 2020 playoffs’
structure. The Hero Pool selection process will now be used for these matches.
This online-only game match has proved to be an effective solution
to in-person events that were affected by this pandemic. Well, in the first place, no one had wanted
the pandemic to happen, affecting not just these events but of everyone. Instead of having all the necessary
preparations go to waste, the online world had opened an opportunity to make it
happen.
