Overwatch League changes for June Joust and what they mean

Not for the first time, the Overwatch League is making changes to the format of an upcoming tournament. This time it’s the June Joust happening in, well, June. It’s a pretty significant change too – in fact, it’ll strongly impact some teams game strategies since the OWL will be taking out some of the most popular strategies.

The official blog released a post that detailed exactly how the structure of the event would change – based on the results of the May Melee. The June Joust will be taking place using game patch 1.59.1 across all tournament matches.

Overwatch League changes for June Joust

Unlike the May event, the June one won’t have free hero selection – instead, Hero Pools will limit who can be played when. In other words, heroes with a more than 10% selection rate in the pro scene in the first month of the season will be banned. To give you an idea what that means – two DPS and one healer and tank each will not be available choices in the June event. In this case, the heroes banned are Tracer, Sombra, Reinhardt and Zenyatta.

Now, many of these are absolute team staples for many OWL competitors, and losing them will have quite the impact – it’s likely to severely shake up the odds of the participating teams winning. That’s not the only change though – the OWL has also made changes to the way tiebreaking works in the June Joust.

The idea is to make tiebreaks faster and to avoid having to play too many additional matches, as those can end up costing time and delaying further rounds. Thus, the new tiebreak structure considers the following:

• Map differentials
• Head-to-head records in previous matches
• League points within the tournament cycle

If after various stages of considerations somehow a tie still remains, postseason tiebreakers will need to be applied. What that means was a little unclear – no specific details were given. Still, between the map differentials and the head-to-head comparisons, it’s quite unlikely that there will be any ties at all.

As for the map pool – naturally, that didn’t get off without any changes either. There will be four separate map pools for each game mode, and they contain the following maps:

• Control: Busan, Ilios, Lijiang Tower, Nepal, Oasis
• Escort: Dorado, Junkertown, Rialto
• Assault: Hanamura, Temple of Anubis, Volskaya Industries
• Hybrid: Eichenwalde, Hollywood, Numbani

Overwatch League June Joust Changes reactions

As has often been the case, the announcement of these changes was met with ‘mixed’ reactions – to put it politely.

Indeed, people are particularly upset about the hero pool angle. There are of course also positive comments – however, you’ll have to scroll quite far to find any of them. Confusion and disappointment are by far the most common reactions here. Whatever possessed the OWL to go with this change is unclear as of yet. Especially considering the overwhelming positive sentiment the diverse hero pools have brought towards competitive Overwatch.

Twitter / @overwatchleague

On our end, the return of Hero Pools severely impacts Overwatch betting. Especially the odds which are likely to shift out of favor for various teams. On the brighter side, you can expect to make a good buck selecting teams that will benefit from Hero Pools instead. With odds thrown out of whack thanks to Dallas Fuel and Florida Mayhem‘s performance, there are opportunities for bets on Fusion, Outlaws and Defiant whos odds and performance are expected to rise.