So OWL first season is over. London won it all.
All in all, I enjoyed it and it looks like it was a huge success. Rumors of Paris and another team in China are going around with cost between 30-60M, so these people are seeing something there. 90M contract with twitch, a deal for the playoffs with Disney and ESPN, and it seems it might be for season 2 also.
I think is attracting the owners is the stability that OWL provides being built like regular sport leagues with city based teams, playing a season and qualifying for playoffs rather than just tournaments here and there. It also is built with long term investment in mind. Whether all of it works out in the end remains to be seen but it is something familiar for the owners.
The league started with mostly just a few pc/gaming sponsors but diversified as the season went along, with some team even getting their own sponsors. Again this is a model investors are familiar with.
I hope they learn from season 1 and make some improvement in season 2. This isn't an all inclusive list but are some thing I personally would like to see. Some of these are kind opposite.
I think they would benefit from having the league on the same patch as the live game. It's annoying to watch them play with some heroes not up to date, or not there are all. You see things that are not reflected when you play the game.
I would like to see the map pool being done differently. Maybe have the map pool for 1 week instead of 1 stage, not seeing King's Row for an entire stage for example sucks, it's probably one of the best map in Overwatch.
This point is going to be a bit weird because there's a contradiction in it...I think it's important to have a diverse meta, a stale meta makes the game extremely boring to watch day after day. On the other hand the change of meta in stage 4 and final killed NYXL and some of the "stories" that were built during the season and that was kind of disappointing. Although I think the team will probably learn and not built team that are one-tricks. As good as Jjonak and Saebeayobe are they are mostly 1 trick zen and tracer and when both were a bit out of the meta, NYXL were not able to adjust. Teams that had players that could flex on more heroes were able to adapt to the changing meta.
I think they can improve the viewing experience somewhat, I think it would be easy for them to allow viewers to customize what they see. I, for one would love to have the overhead view on at all time in a corner. I'd like to be able to some extent be able to switch viewpoint of which player I follow. Seeing the game from Widowmaker 90% of the time just plain sucks,
And this is highly personal, and might not be an issue in season 2 because of changes to her and other heroes...but fuck Widowmaker. It is absolutely horrible that even at OWL level, games are decided by who has the better Widowmaker in a lot of cases. She makes for extremely boring game to watch, almost any game that doesn't have widow is more entertaining.
I'm genuinely looking forward to season 2, and see how many more teams will be there. It should be fairly different, Hammond, reworked Symmetra, reworked Torbjorn, changes to all damage drop off for McCree, Soldier, Mei and Bastion, nerf to Widowmaker, Zarya, Hanzo are stuff that's in already that weren't in OWL. I'm sure we'll get at least 1, maybe 2 new heroes and more changes before season 2 starts...so it will be interesting to see how teams adapt.