Heading into the 2023 playoffs, the Overwatch League decided to change the format of the Grand Finals weekend, trying to make the competition balanced across all teams. While some felt the intentions were good, the outcome has left plenty of teams with a sour taste in their mouths heading into Sept. 28 in Toronto.
Coaches and players from across the league who qualified for the 2023 OWL playoffs are frustrated with how the opening matches were decided and how map picks work, according to a report from GGRecon.
The league used to run a double-elimination format for playoffs, but now it’s split into a group stage and a single-elimination stage, with the most chaos coming from how seeding was determined.
Not only did five teams make it to playoffs through automatic qualification, but there were two Western teams and one Eastern team that made it in through the play-ins. Regionally, this left an uneven balance of regional teams that the league had to make work. This time around, the OWL hosted a draft where teams chose who they wouldn’t face, which left some coaches perplexed.
The fact seeding was determined by the draft and not any regular season performances has led to overall frustration across the league.
Despite their regional performances, the seeding in groups (which determines which team gets the map pick that starts the series) goes in descending order: Atlanta Reign, Seoul Infernal, Florida Mayhem, London Spitfire, Houston Outlaws, Boston Uprising, Dallas Fuel, and the Hangzhou Spark.
One of the first to speak out on these two issues was Florida Mayhem coach Jordan “Gunba” Graham, who noticed the higher seed would always be able to pick the first map of Control. This was the same in previous events, but with the addition of the new map type of Flashpoint, Control will only be played once instead of two times per series.
So, for example, the London Spitfire is positioned in fourth despite being the last team to qualify for playoffs. This means they get map advantages over teams that, if they were ranked by performances, they wouldn’t have gotten.
“Having seeding determined in this way that puts London as the fourth seed is insane,” Gunba said to GGRecon, before suggesting Spitfire got a “huge competitive advantage”—and even the Spitfire coach agrees; their position thanks to their seeding “ends up helping us quite significantly,” Spitfire coach ChrisTFer said.
This new seeding also affects the way that on-site practices work in Toronto, as specific teams get even more of an advantage. The venue only allows four teams to practice at a time, with seeding determining which teams get the most time on their servers dedicated to scrimming against one another, according to Gunba. He also argues both the seeding and this practice time should be based on regular season seeding, not how you qualified for the tournament.
GGRecon reached out to the OWL to look deeper into this scrim issue and the league responded by saying: “All teams are receiving the same amount of practice time in equivalent facilities.”
Either way, teams are heading into the end of the 2023 season quite bothered. Boston Uprising coach KariV tweeted: “We work hard all year for a good record to impress the fans, but I guess that doesn’t matter for map pick in this league.”
Tensions are rising, but the teams are going to have to work through it to try and get their respective teams a title in 2023.
The impending OWL 2023 playoffs begin on Thursday, Sept. 28, and end on Sunday, Oct. 1 with the crowning of the sixth OWL champions.
