The Battle Continues: Overwatch Upgrading the Season Match Amidst Pandemic

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.