Former Overwatch League commentator Christopher ‘MonteCristo’ Mykles revealed on his Cloud9 podcast ‘Essential Esports’ that the OWL rejected a Mario Kart cup season format he originally pitched.
During his show with Houston Outlaws coach Harsha Bandi, Valiant coach Mike ‘Packing10’ Szklanny and former pro-turned-content creator Connor ‘Avast’ Prince, the group discussed the pros and (mostly) cons of a traditional season format.
The Overwatch League, for most of its third season, has run a standard season schedule just as major North American sports leagues do – something that has been widely controversial from esports purists, who find the format to be antiquated and boring.
While the OWL has recently changed course with the newly-added monthly tournaments (similar to Stages that ran in seasons one and two), they’re still quite different than what the Flashpoint Product Advisor had in mind.
“It was more along the lines of tennis, where you have the US Open and the Australian Open. You have the big tent-pole tennis events where everybody travels there and competes,” the 33-year-old stated when discussing his concept for the league.
“You can also compare it to like a Mario Kart race, where you have the Star Cup or whatever,” he added, getting a small smirk from Harsha.
Monte revealed that his idea for season 3, when the league began its home and away model, would have multiple “cups” taking place in North America, Asia, Europe with themes based around Overwatch lore.
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For instance, one of the cups could be called the Omnic Cup, while another would be the Talon cup, and so on and so forth. With the Omnic Cup, for example, teams from different regions would be playing in their different tournaments at the same time, with the Omnic Cup being the general theme throughout.
Eventually, once the winners are decided, there would be an international tournament featuring the finalists before moving into the next cup and going from there. Winning a cup would also result in circuit points that would lead to playoff seeding at the end of the season.
Notably, the points earned near the end of the season would be worth more going into the playoffs because of how the meta changes going into that final stretch. Additionally, not every team would be locked into their own region with teams playing two in their own and two away.
While this idea may sound cool, it was ultimately rejected was because it was “too complicated.”
“The reason why it was too complicated is the presumption that playoff points and all these individual micro tournaments, I was told, would be too complicated for fans,” he stated. “Even though we literally have twenty years of esports history that prove that people can understand this.”
It’s too bad that we never got to see MonteCristo’s cup format in action, but hopefully, as the OWL continues there’s a chance that this eventually gets the go-ahead.