The Overwatch League is a global esports league with teams and players from all around the world and going in to their 2020 season they had a plan to have the teams compete all across the world in each other’s cities, think the NBA or the NFL, but on a global level with 20 teams spread throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. This was their plan until COVID-19 sent the world into a global pandemic which put the whole world on lockdown. But this is esports, so the show continued online, but since it was online the teams in Europe had to relocate to North America and the teams that were in Asia could only compete against each other due to the latency issues that would happen if they tried to play against teams.
Going into the 2021 season, the Overwatch League had to come up with a plan to go on with fair global competition during these COVID-19 times, and their solution to that Hawaii, the University of Hawaii to specific. Because of a series of underwater routing cables, you are able to connect to the servers in Japan from the university with a latency of just 90 ms! This number of 90 ms was enough for the Overwatch League and the University of Hawaii to form a partnership to host teams from North America to play against teams in Asia.
Through an internship with Overwatch League and the University of Hawaii Esports program, I have been able to get a hands-on experience with the inner workings of the Overwatch League as well as getting to learn from of the industry’s top professionals in both casual and professional settings.
Learn more here about Overwatch League and University of Hawaii’s partnership that made this whole thing possible!