The Overwatch League 2020 season starts up on Feb. 8 and 9 in New York City and Dallas this weekend. Along with a new season come changes to the League’s format as well as new competitive changes to shake things up.
The opening matches will be held at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m., and 5 p.m. MT on both Saturday and Sunday.
The Overwatch League adopted a new conference format for the 2020 season, with hopes to keep local fans as a priority. Every weekend of matches will be hosted by two teams with each team having two “homestands” as well as three additional regular-season events in their home territories.
The twenty teams have been split into two conferences that each have two divisions: Atlantic North and South as well as Pacific East and West. The 2020 schedule will have a division from each conference play four matches per week that will be hosted at a live venue in the team’s territory as well as streamed exclusively on YouTube.
The opening weekend will be hosted by New York Excelsior of the Atlantic North and Dallas Fuel of the Pacific West.
The times for games will be optimized for the local market taking place every weekend.
Every team will face teams in their own conference twice each along with having matches against out of conference teams once. In total every team will play 28 matches during the season which ends in August.
Along with this new fan-focused schedule, the game will be implementing some new changes to competitive play.
Starting on March 7 there will be a new “Hero Pool” feature. This feature will lock some of the most played heroes every two weeks in order to encourage a wider range of play. This feature will be implemented in both the competitive ranks as well as the official league.
The full Overwatch League schedule is available here.
Story by: Alex Schilling
alexschilling98@gmail.com
Photos courtesy of: Overwatch League
