2020 Overwatch League season
The 2020 Overwatch League season is the third season of the Overwatch League, a professional esports league for the video game Overwatch. The regular season began on February 8, 2020 and is scheduled to conclude on August 9. It was the first season that the league implemented a city-based, home-and-away format, with teams traveling between the global home venues to play regular season matches, making the OWL the first major esports league to feature such a format.
League changes
Schedule
Prior to the 2020 season, the majority of all OWL matches took place at Blizzard Arena in Burbank, California. In the 2019 season, three homestand weekends took place – the Dallas Fuel Homestand Weekend hosted by the Dallas Fuel, the Atlanta Reign Homestand Weekend hosted by the Atlanta Reign, and the Kit Kat Rivalry Weekend hosted by the Los Angeles Valiant – in efforts to test how a completely localized match schedule would work. For the 2020 season, the league adopted a "homestand" model. Every team will host two to five homestands throughout the season. Each team will still play 28 matches and are responsible for the selection and operation of their respective home venues. In addition to homestands, every team is required to host at least three team events for the community in their respective home cities. The season marked the first time that a major esports league featured a city-based, home-and-away format.In the 2018 and 2019 seasons, the Overwatch League equally divided teams into two divisions – the Atlantic and Pacific. With the large amount of travelling that takes place in the homestand model, the Atlantic and Pacific Divisions were renamed to the Atlantic and Pacific Conferences, and each conference was equally subdivided into two divisions, the Pacific East and West Divisions and the Atlantic North and South Divisions. The smaller divisions were implemented in efforts to reduce the amount of time and money spent on travel.
With the large amount of localized play and travel, the season was no longer split into four stages. Instead, a midseason tournament is to be held at the same time as the All-Star Weekend. The tournament will feature the Atlantic and Pacific Conference leaders as well as the next best two teams, regardless of conference, based on the regular season standings through Week 10.
Rules
In the prior seasons, the winner of each match was determined by a best-of-four map series, with a fifth tiebreaker map, if necessary. The league announced at BlizzCon that match winners would be determined by a first-to-three map series, similar to that of the 2019 playoffs. Activision Blizzard senior director of product strategy and business operations Jon Spector noted that due to the elimination of Stage Playoffs, map differential would be less important, as it is not very likely that many teams would have the same regular season record heading into the playoffs. Every match still begins with a control map followed by a rotation between assault, escort, and hybrid maps. Similar to previous seasons, should a match still be tied after four maps, a fifth tiebreaker map will be played on a control map.After the announcement of hero pools in Overwatch for the competitive season starting in February 2020, the league announced that it would adopt the hero pool system beginning in the fourth week of play in March in effort to prevent stagnant metas. Each week, the league randomly selects one tank, two damage, and one support hero from a list of the most played heroes in the OWL from the previous two weeks of play; these heroes are then considered "banned" and cannot be selected during that week. Banned heroes cannot be banned in the immediately-following week. The hero pool system is only used in the regular season, and will not be enforced during the midseason tournament, the play-in tournament, and the playoffs.
Prize pool
The total prize pool remained unchanged at, although the allocation changed due to the discontinuation of Stage Playoffs. The Midseason Tournament champions will win $500,000, the runners-up will win $250,000, and the third and fourth place teams will earn $150,000. The All-Star event will have a prize pool for the first time, with a total pool of $250,000. For the postseason earnings, the Grand Champion team will earn $1.5 million, second place will earn $800,000, third place will earn $500,000, fourth place will earn $300,000, fifth and sixth place will earn $200,000, and seventh and eighth place will earn $100,000.Broadcasting
Prior to the start of the season, several of the shoutcasters for the League, including Malik Forté, Auguste "Semmler" Massonnat, Christopher "MonteCristo" Mykles, Erik "DoA" Lonnquist, and Chris Puckett, left for various reasons ranging from dissatisfaction with their salaries to concerns over the new management of the league following Nate Nanzer's departure as league commissioner in 2019.YouTube has replaced Twitch as exclusive broadcaster of the league, as part of a deal covering all Activision Blizzard esports events. The company also announced a deal to make Google Cloud Platform the preferred infrastructure provider for its game servers.
Regular season
Postponed matches
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Blizzard cancelled all four homestand events planned in China in February and March 2020. Four of the teams in the league are based in China, where travel restrictions and quarantines from the outbreak were enacted; the restrictions affected teams that were traveling to China to play matches there. Two of the Chinese teams, Guangzhou Charge and Shanghai Dragons, announced the relocation of their teams to South Korea, while the Chengdu Hunters remained in China. The cancelled matches were originally planned to be rescheduled in Seoul, South Korea during two weekends in March, with some matches being played during Seoul Dynasty's homestand event the same month. However, Blizzard later cancelled all South Korean events in March 2020, including the Dynasty homestand, over concerns of the outbreak. In March, French Health Minister Olivier Véran announced that all public gatherings of more than 1,000 people were banned in the country until April 15; the ban effectively cancelled the Paris Eternal homestand event that was scheduled to be held April 11–12.After the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 virus a global pandemic on March 11, the Overwatch League announced that it would be cancelling all remaining scheduled live events in March and April. The matches from the cancelled homestand events will be played online and broadcast live in March and April, albeit with some scheduling changes. Due to the inequity of the number of games played by each team, the All-Star Weekend was moved to the postseason, while the Midseason Tournament was canceled altogether. On March 31, the Overwatch League announced that they were abandoning the Homestand model entirely in favour of moving matches for the remainder of the season online.