Many sports historians, especially ones who follow baseball, will tell you that one of the many reasons sports are so great is because every day, you’ll see something that’s never happened before in the history of the sport. The final match of the third week of Stage 2 was something we’d never seen before. On of the day before Earth Day, Overwatch League’s first two expansion teams, the Atlanta Reign and Guangzhou Charge, burned about as many CPU’s as a Bitcoin farm in the second and third maps of their match, tallying 28 points between them in an hour-long display that reminded people that are only me of Arena Football or the ABA. It was a match so unreal, I had to figure out how just unreal it was.
The best way to describe most Overwatch maps (ie not Control) to a non-player like myself is probably to compare it to those arcade racing games you find at the mall. You have a set time to go as far/clear as many checkpoints as you can. Each checkpoint/objective gives you a point and some extra time, but at some point your time runs out and that’s game over. The kill screen comes for us all. However, the Reign and Charge collectively said “Not today” and held off the end for some ridiculous totals.
Expansion Teams, Expanded Score
Atlanta and Guangzhou’s map points per game vs. league average, Stage 2
| Assault | Hybrid | ||||||
| OWL Avg¹ | Gms 1-5 | Game 6 | OWL Avg² | Gms 1-5 | Game 6 | ||
| Atlanta | 2.2 | 1.8 | 7 | 2.2 | 2.6 | 7 | |
| Guangzhou | 2.2 | 1.4 | 6 | 2.2 | 1.6 | 8 | |
¹-Standard Deviation: 1.2
²-Standard Deviation: 1.4
Heading into the contest, Atlanta was bad on Assault maps, but decent on Hybrid, while the Charge were awful on both. That all changed in a hurry. Including this game, Atlanta’s averages are now 2.7 on Assault and 3.3 on Hybrid; Guangzhou went to 2.2 and 2.7, the later jumping one full point! Both sides not only out-performed their stage averages, each team out-performed the league-wide means by at least 3 standard deviations. On a classic bell curve, 3 standard deviations would include 99.7% of all data. These two were the outliers to end all outliers.³
On the flip side, this meant there was a lot of shoddy defense. Befitting a team with a 1-5 stage record, the Guangzhou Charge were bad on these maps to begin with, allowing 2.8 points per Assault map and 2.6 per Hybrid, where the Reign were at a respectable 2 and 2.4. Those all go up substantially, but no one cares about the defense. It’s all about clicking heads and moving payloads.
³-Granted the league averages listed were for before this match; coming out, they are now 2.5 and 2.6 with SD’s of 1.6 and 1.9, but those scores are each 2+ deviations above the mean, and on a curve, 2 deviations is 95% of all data.
