2017 Overwatch World Cup Participants Announced

32 countries, announced by the 2017 Overwatch World Cup will be bringing their best Overwatch players out into a big competition to determine which country is the best in this game.

The competition is being organized by Blizzard wherein each country that qualifies will have to choose its own players. The chosen representatives will contend in a series of qualifying matches during the summer. The group stage matches will determine who qualifies to compete in the eight-team playoff at the BlizzCon event in Anaheim this November.

This will entail several online qualifiers, organized by region. It will be held after the rosters for each country are determined. Said qualifiers will lead to teams from various regions competing at BlizzCon to determine who will compete at the event.

Who Is Competing?

The 32 countries have been determined based on the overall ratings of the players in the professional circuit. This includes a full analysis of players in different countries or regions based on their skills.

The qualifications were held from March 29 to find the average skill rating of the top 100 players in each country. The total was used to determine the overall ratings. China has the highest rating in the event. China also holds a skill rating of 4,550. This is significantly higher than the 4,000 rating for the Grandmaster tier.

22 other countries have been ranked with ratings of over 4,000. South Korea is in second with a rating of 4,522. The United States is in third with 4,470. Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom and Canada are in the third to seventh spots. Russia is back at tenth place.

Romania has the lowest rating among all the countries that qualified and has a rating of 3,861. Austria, New Zealand and Portugal are among the countries near the bottom of the qualifiers.

The overall ratings are not necessarily designed to be fully reflective of the people who will actually be competing at the event. Each country will have to select its own series of six different competitors. However some substitutes or alternates may be chosen just in case of emergency.

Also, the teams will compete in stages against others in the individual regions. Plans on when the competitions will take place and who will contend with one another will be announced soon.

Last Year’s Event

The 2017 Overwatch World Cup is the second annual edition of the event. Last year, South Korea won the event with Russia, Sweden and Finland in the three following positions. All of the top-16 teams took home $18,000 each during the event.

Most of the countries that were in last year’s event will be in the 2017 edition. Details on the payouts for the event have not yet been released.