Experimental Card Roundtable – Korean/Seoul Representation

The experimental card roundtable stream was interesting for the Overwatch community. It was especially significant for the Seoul Dynasty fans to see that Jongryeol ‘Saebyeolbe’ Park be a part of the roundtable. The only other Overwatch League players as panelists were Indy ‘Space’ Halpern as well as Terence ‘SoOn’ Tarlier. He was the representative, it seemed, for the South Korean region on the panel. There wasn’t a Chinese player on the panel, but there were guests such as Ding ‘Ameng’ Menghan to come on.

This was one of the first large-scale inter-region events, which meant there still were some details that could be ironed out to make it better in the future. Here are some positives and negatives that came from the roundtable, from the perspective of a Seoul Dynasty/APAC region fan.

Mixed Bag

Positive

Danny Lim was a part of the roundtable. He was there to help integrate the Korean panel members of Jaewon ‘Jaewon’ Kim and Saebyeolbe. It was nice to see that the Overwatch League and Blizzard be more attentive to the globalization of the people in the panel.

It was nice that there were voices from other players and regions not at the roundtable. Sunghyeon ‘JJoNak’ Bang was the person to speak to potential changes to Zen. Having the voices from other regions was a nice change to have representation on these events that were being promoted on the NA YouTube channels.

Negatives

Though because there were so many English speakers Saebyeolbe and Jaewon did not get as much time. Danny was not in the moment translating, so was there another source of translation for the boys. Another option would be that both players are good enough in English to understand the conversations. Though, this doesn’t seem to be the case as when Saebyeolbe was presenting his ideas for changes for Reaper, he didn’t raise his hand for his own changes until Soe brought it up. There may be moments of confusion still for the Korean-speaking panel members. On top of possible language barriers, there were many times where they needed to be invited to speak instead of just be able to talk out like the others. At one point during the discussion about Soldier, Jaewon was tentatively raising his hand to speak, but inevitably waited until Soe asked him his opinion.

This started at 4;00 A.M. KST. If this had been moved even three hours later it would be at a more reasonable time for the Korean-based panel members. This would not be a huge impact on the NA time zones panelists. It would have been nice for the time differences to be considered for the roundtable.

Seoul Dynasty Branding

Some of the panelists were wearing their brands. Francine ‘Fran’ Vo was wearing the Toronto Defiant jersey as she is a streamer for that Overwatch League team as well as Space rocking an LA hoodie.

Saebyeolbe was in the Seoul Dynasty streaming room which Tiger Nation had seen in past streams such as the Washington Justice versus the Seoul Dynasty Scrims. Gen.G and Seoul Dynasty really have down the branding of the appearing in programs and streams. It shows a unification of their branding. It looked very professional and a good reminder that Saebyeolbe is a part of the Dynasty and not the NYXL this coming season.

Potential

This event had a lot of potential. It would have been nice to see an event that was exactly the same but had regional variants. Have a roundtable stream for China, Korea, NA and EU made up of players, streamers and community members. Then have this a global roundtable to see how the regions all differ in their understanding of the characters. This would then give more events for the engagement of the community. Regional differences are talked about a lot, but this could be a way to really visualize it. It could counteract the awkwardness that the Korean players had during this roundtable and then prepare them for the global one.

Roundtable

The Flash Ops experimental card tournament has a lot of interesting new twists and turns. When more information comes out, hopefully, there will be equal representation of the regions as well as consideration of time zones. It was fun to see cross-region events that did have language support. Hopefully, the Overwatch League and Blizzard continue with these events and improve them in the future.

You can watch the roundtable in its entirety here.

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