With more than 15 million players, Overwatch is definitely massive. Now, the game is making the grand gesture of gathering its best heroes in the Overwatch World Cup.
The event will be an international exhibition that will pit teams from countries and regions all over the world in the quest for global glory. The Overwatch World Cup will begin with players voting for their country's representatives, who will then compete with each other and make their way to the finals that will be held at BlizzCon 2016.
From every participating country, Blizzard will be nominating representatives, which may include skilled personalities in the community, professional gamers as well as local players who have made their name know during Competitive Play's first season.
Players can start voting for their picks beginning Aug. 11, with information about the nominees provided to help them in making their choice. Only those who have Overwatch game licenses can participate and votes may only be cast in behalf of a region or country where a player has registered their Battle.net account.
When voting concludes, the chosen Overwatch World Cup representatives will face off in best-of-three, single-elimination qualifiers online in September. The last 16 teams will then duke it out best-of-three, round-robin group stages and best-of-five single-elimination finals in November during BlizzCon 2016.
Blizzard wants to make sure that all major regions of the world will be represented at the Overwatch World Cup so the 16 teams will be made up of four from the Americas, six from Asia Pacific and the last six from Europe.
However, due to a number of factors, like server locations, regional connectivity and other geographical considerations, some countries will be automatically advancing to BlizzCon for the exhibition. These countries are the United States, Canada and Brazil for the Americas and China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand for the Asia Pacific game region.
Matches during Opening Week as well as at BlizzCon will be streamed live. There is no prize pool for the event but the top 16 teams to participate in the first Overwatch World Cup will get a free trip to BlizzCon and an appearance bonus.
BlizzCon 2016 will be held on Nov. 4 and 5 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. The event is expected to be packed with news and announcements for all things Blizzard and will see its attendees go home with the Goody Bag in the Box, which will include some nifty collectibles from Blizzard's biggest games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch.
