Courtesy: Blizzard Ent
If you’re like me you’ve been following the Overwatch League since the preseason. The games for the most part have been very fun to watch and watching the crowd reaction in stadium, as well as online, has been great. But one issue has emerged. Map Fatigue. After week one people on Reddit and the Blizzard forums were starting to mumble about being sick of seeing the same maps.
The two maps in particular that have dominated stage one have been Junkertown and Horizon Lunar Colony. Now if you don’t know this, the Overwatch League is broken into four stages that are six weeks long. Each stage has a predetermined selection of maps. The first stages maps are Horizon Lunar Colony/Anubis, Oasis/Ilios, Numbani/Eichenwalde, and Junkertown/Dorado.
After watching week one we were seeing that since these maps were so common it was forcing teams to change strategies and routes. Seoul at one point ran a triple tank composition on Junkertown which is incredibly rare. The same maps at the same time also create an “even ground”.
But this does give mid-tier teams an opportunity to focus of specific map strategies and further attempt to hone their skills as a unit. Teams are being forced to come up with new ways to attack payloads. At the start of the season Junkertown’s first point was absolutely dominated by the “Pirate Ship” composition. If you’re unfamiliar with the comp itself you park a Bastion in turret mode on top of the payload and have Orisa lay down a protective barrier in front of him. At first this strategy was working but with familiarity teams are finding ways to slow down or stop that entire composition.
After stage one concludes on February 10th teams are allowed to add players to their rosters. One thing I’m sure Florida will be heavily in favor of. The stage two map selection has not been released yet but guessing by the fact there’s a ten day break in between stages, that will give Blizzard time to select the maps and let the teams know.
The main issue here is that map fatigue is a difficult problem to solve. The Championship Series allowed teams to pick/ban maps which led to teams constantly playing the same maps even more then. Shrinking the map pool is not something that would help this league at all.
All we can do is sit and hope that Blizzard is listening to our concerns as fans of the league. But seeing as Blizzard has invested incredible amounts of money, time, and talent into making this league something fun for people of all ages I’m convinced that they will do their absolute best to keep the fans, as well as the players, happy.
Are you getting map fatigue? Do you have any ideas on how to fix the fatigue problem? Let us know! Also be sure to follow The Game Haus on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Overwatch League news!
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