The May Melee was a boon for the Overwatch League, and now it will ride that momentum.
Two more tournaments are coming, the league announced Monday afternoon, both of which will try to replicate the successful May event that doubled OWL’s match viewership numbers compared to the standard regular-season games.
The second half of an already eventful regular season will conclude with two more tournaments and their respective seeding matches, starting with the Summer Showdown on July 4, and two weeks of matches so each team can end with 21 regular season matches played.
The Dallas Fuel’s seeding matches for the Summer Showdown will open with a significant challenge: against the Florida Mayhem (9-4) at 4 p.m. Saturday
Dallas (4-6) will wrap up its seeding matches against Vancouver (2-6) on June 20 and Toronto (4-8) on June 27. The second tournament will be in August, the league said, though no matchups or schedule details have been announced.
There was also an update to the hero pools system, adjustments to the tournament structures and other finalized details.
OWL fans, players and coaches were pleased with the May Melee, OWL Vice President Jon Spector told The Dallas Morning News, but they wanted to continue adjusting and improving their product.
The 2020 season began with big plans with teams traveling to homestands across the world. That came to a halt with the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19). OWL had to change its strategy in a huff while working with players that weren’t as motivated to compete in standard matches, and even leaving for other games.
The May Melee delivered in a way OWL needed, so Spector and the league looked to players and coaches for feedback so they could bring even more to the table.
“It was hard to get fans excited for the upcoming matches and why it mattered and made it hard to keep players excited, candidly,” Spector said. “So to see May Melee fire on all cylinders with a great response from our fans and our players was certainly validating.”
OWL made the matches matter with a cash prize, so teams competed hard. The incentive may have been elevated in that regard, too, as OWL raised the prize pool for each tournament to a $275,000 purse, with the winners taking $50,000 home.
The league didn’t announce a final playoff format, but Spector did include an updated free agency and trade deadline. It was originally set for June 15, but OWL pushed it back to July 31.
Fuel head coach Aaron “Aero” Atkins, whose team plays its first match since the break on Saturday, was heavily in favor of these tournaments, he told The News. The events brought in storylines, allowed fans to see their favorite teams go on runs and star players “pop off.”
But Aero got some of the changes he wanted, too.
Spector said there were only two changes to the tournament structure, with both being fairly minor. There will still be two brackets, one for the 13 North American teams and one for the seven teams in Asia. The seeding will still be decided by three weeks of seeding matches.
An issue with the May Melee, though, is that a lot of the first-round teams didn’t know who they were playing because the No. 12 and No. 13 seeds in the North America bracket had to play a qualifier match the same day the first round began. Top seeds then picked opponents, but that only gave them hours for final preparation.
That’s been resolved.
“We couldn’t tell fans they were getting a battle for Texas until an hour before (The Dallas Fuel and Houston Outlaws match) started,” Spector said. “I would have loved hyping that up for a week, so we are going to move that 12 and 13 seed match a week up to June 28, which will give all the teams a full week to see what the bracket looks like.”
The other issue with preparation came with hero pools. Teams only had a week to find a composition that worked for them, maneuvering their gameplans and strategies around the banning of four different heroes each week.
OWL alleviated some of that, swapping to a two-week system with hero bans, with the tournaments not including hero pools.
The first week of seeding matches before the Summer Showdown will be on one set of bans, with the third week and the tournament eliminating the pools. That will be replicated with the tournament at the end of July, and the final two weeks will be on the last set of hero bans.
That’s a change Aero and other teams were really looking for, Spector said.
“Hero pools in general make tournaments more work. You aren’t just building off what you did last week because it’s a whole new thing now,” Aero said. “It’s pretty similar in terms of how much you put in on the day to the playoffs, but it’s a lot more work leading up to it.”
The plan for these tournaments started in April. That’s when OWL was really able to regain its footing after planning matches week by week to scrap through an unexpected transition to online play.
Spector said they felt good about their idea, but didn’t want to get too far ahead of themselves yet.
“We can do all of this work to try and design the format and adjust to COIVD and feel good about it,” Spector said. “But it’s not until you watch those matches that you know you struck gold.”
The drama from the matches was a driving component for more content like it. Spector considered the May Melee Asia final between Shanghai and Seoul, in which Shanghai completed a reverse sweep to win 4-3, one of the greatest professional Overwatch matches ever.
He even brought up a defining moment of the recent tournament that included Dallas Fuel star, Jang “Decay” Gui-un.
“Watching Decay just go god-mode live was special,” Spector said. “The whole tournament was validating in that same kind of way.”
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