The Triathlon Tournament:
The Korean Overwatch league channel on Twitch has been broadcasting a triathlon tournament put together by Korean Blizzard as an offseason event. This is an event with 24 influencers and content creators from all over the space. Up for grabs is 100,000,000 won that converts to around 100,000 USD. The final winning team will get 450,000,000 won and the rest will be distributed to the 2nd, 3rd, etc place. In the Overwatch community, many of these names will not be recognized either because they are Korean content creators or not involved with Overwatch. Jehong ‘Ryuejhong’ Ryu and Daehoon ‘Runner’ Yoon are the most familiar names in this bunch.
Courtesy of Kr Blizzard
As it is a Triathlon the content creators will be playing three games of Overwatch, Hearthstone, and Starcraft Remaster during this tournament. How the scoring of the tournament is going to work is that for each game and set there will be points attributed to it. The team with the most points will be the winner of that set. Each game has its own ways of distributing points. At the end whichever team has the most points will be the winner.
Broadcast
There was already a broadcast in which the picking of teams was done. There, the basic information was broadcasted to the community such as the rules and scoring. Since that original broadcast, the content creators have been seen on their personal streams preparing for the triathlon.
Ryujehong, Runner, and many other of these influencers have been streaming their scrims. Though this is just for fun there have been a twinge of try-hard attitude melded in. Joonhyuk ‘Zunba’ Kim, Jinmo ‘Tobi’ Yang, Junho ‘Fury’ Kim, Daekuk ‘Kuki; Kim, Jinhyuk ‘Miro’ Gong, Hyojong ‘Haksal’ Kim, Junwoo ‘Void’ Kang, Gido ‘Gido’ Moon, and many others have been watching the scrims. Tobi even did a small coaching session with one of the participants. At one point Ryujehong had over 4.5k viewers with his scrim against Runner at 2am KST.
Content Creation
Not only is this a fun activity for the community during the offseason, it also generates content. The Korean Overwatch Twitch channel had not just the drawing of teams but then a follow-up stream. They showed each team and did funny areas of strength and weakness for each. This provides anticipation to the event and a funny narrative that the desk can use throughout the tournament.
The triathlon concept is smart. It introduces new content to the viewers. Ryujehong’s chat has been learning a lot about Hearthstone lately, and it has provided a chance for content creators of different games to collaborate. It has been fun to see these content creators supporting their team within the game they are known for as well as learning new games as well.
There has been little to no promotion of this outside of the Korean Blizzard social media. The semi-finals will be December 10th (Thursday) and the finals will be on December 13 (Sunday) at 5 KST. This tournament helps relieve the hole that the Overwatch League being on break has given to the community. Though there will not be an English component of this tournament (unless the author just has not heard of it) it will be fun to watch the teams compete. If you are interested in watch it will be on the Korean Overwatch Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/overwatchkr) at 5pm KST.
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