CoD World Series of Warzone set to reinvigorate Battle Royale Esports

The biggest ever Warzone prize pool is the punchline of the upcoming CoD: World Series of Warzone. The event features the largest prize sums ever named in a Warzone tournament, and naturally it features a fully original format.

While it is the biggest competition of this type ever hosted by Activision-Blizzard, its not the highest paying Battle Royale yet, with Fortnite and PUBG taking the glory in prize pools. However, the format and way points are counted, and the future potential of Warzone esports is something to be optimistic about.

World Series of Warzone Event Format

Heralding a new phase in the Call of Duty esports tournament era, Blizzard just announced the World Series of Warzone or WSOW. It’ll be part competition, part showcase for the top talent around the world . The series is however limited to entries from North America and Europe. The rest of the world will have to wait for future iterations of the event to potentially be included.

Split into four online competitions, participants will have a chance to win their share of the total $1.2 million prize pool that the overall series is slated for.

The very first of these four competitions is a trio one held in the NA region on June 23^rd. It will then be followed by three more duos and trios events later in the year. As for the event format, it will be draft-based with select Team Captains selecting players to build squads of two or three players.

Each squad will earn points for kills and their placement. They also contribute points for greater teams of ten squads each, led by a captain. Five of these captains will be drafting their 10 respective trio squads. In the case of duos events, it will be 15 duos teams per captain. The captains will be invited to the game, and their identities are to be announced later. Activision-Blizzard has teased some of the best the Warzone world has to offer though.

In order to qualify as a regular player, fans will need to go through one of several open qualifiers or specific community tournaments hosted by either the CoD League team, or a few WSOW partners. There will be an official list of these soon.

The other two options to get in involve either an invite from Activision themselves, or one from the 12 official CoD teams. Each of them will get the chance to invite an entire squad of their choice. Oh, and to keep things fair, trios will have a maximum of two CoD pros playing on them to avoid entire pro squads ruining the game for non-pro players.

World Series of Warzone Drafts

When all available player spots have been filled, the drafting phase will begin. First, each captain will pick the players to be on their own personal squad. Then, they will start picking players for the other 9 squads in their team. Once all players have been drafted to teams, the main event can start. In addition to the regular games, there will be another side event – the Captain’s Cup. There, it’ll be only the Captain’s squads competing for a smaller section of the overall prize pool. This is more of a show event than the rest of the WSOW.

Activision also made it very clear that they would be double- and triple-checking that each participating player and their account are in good standing and have neither banned accounts nor other issues on their history. This will be done before the start of the event. If someone is found to have such issues, they will be banned from all future tournaments, and someone else will replace them in the series.

WSOW promotes unique approach to BR tournament formats

Maybe the key takeaway from the entire event is how good the points format of this event sounds. PUBG Esports have dabbled with different tournament formats, with placements currently taking priority to the disdain of many pro players.

What Warzone is doing is downright genius. Instead of rewarding teams points for specific placements they cut down the format into multipliers to earned kills points. If you finish in bottom 15-30 teams you earn no multiplier for your kills, if you end in the top 2-15 teams you earn 1.5x multiplier to your kills points. And if you win the match you earn a 2x multiplier to your kills points.

Overall the format rewards kills regardless, but if you manage to frag out and place high in a match you are rewarded more heavily. As a result we will see teams focus more on fragging and less on camping as kills are still king, multiplying a low kill count is hardly valuable. This points format is a lot different then what both Fortnite and PUBG have thought of. It’s also looking like the fairest way to calculate points in Battle Royales in an esports setting.