Given they are telling us about it… surely that implies they did know it.
The counter to this can be demonstrated with yesterday’s matches. The full broadcast went 19 of 20 maps, so each match got pushed farther and farther back, to a broadcast that lasted over 9 hours. Even with the encores starting at 7:30am PT, it would ultimately interfere with today’s broadcast starting with Watchpoint at 3:30pm PT.
This method ensures that the last match finishes at least an hour before the live broadcast starts. There’s a bit of overlap, so earning hours is truncated a bit, but even watching every encore in one day is enough to earn 6 hours, getting the team mascot sprays and Widow OWL skins.
Theoretically, by this point, if you’ve watched all of the original broadcasts and every encore, you’ve also already earned the 200 OWL tokens needed for the Royal Knight Mercy skin.
Now I gotta calculate how many Tokens did I miss just becuz I rolled my eyes and did NOT watch those Encores…And trust me, we’re probs talking a good 5,000 or more tokens I’ve missed out on, since I officially watched for Tokens since Season 3 of OWL…(INCLUDING TODAY!!! Which I am lucky there is still an Encore playing so that I can collect some of those tokens)
You could also cut all watchpoint commentary, map breaks, interviews, etc. and get under the 8 hour mark, so encore would line up perfectly with match start.
The real reason they don’t do this is because it’s simply easier on the editors to just clip the matches in chunks.
So, each tournament has, let’s say roughly 30 hours of encore presentations. With 4 tournaments a year, and 3 years of viewership (starting with Season 3, then watching seasons 4 and the current season 5), you’re looking at around 360 hours, or 1800 OWL tokens; 2400 tokens if we’re being generous with 40 hours per tournament. That’s still less than half of what you estimated for all 3 years, and this 5th season hasn’t even finished.
I was able to find a confirmation in early Season 4 of OWL via the Overwatch Streaming Rewards Guide thread, where they quoted the OWL website. Not entirely sure about Season 3 Encores (if those were available or not), but I recall it was pretty implicit that encores were put in place to allow other time zones to earn tokens/rewards.
okay bc im barely getting any from the premieres. i waited 2 hours sitting at 150 tokens and i got to 155 like what? thats not right. yall need to up it to like 10 instead of 5 or something
So I, uhhh…Over-estimated, ur telling me? (Even if I did overestimated, that is still a ton of tokens 2 lose, tbf…)
Don’t forget sometimes during the start or the end of the season there are double tokens. The first week of this season had double tokens.
True. Thinking back, I want to say double tokens has only really been for opening weekend and the Grand Finals championship match. Considering I was only looking at encore presentations, which only happen for tournaments, the Grand Finals championship match would add another 20-30 tokens to the total, or 60-90 tokens for the 3 years of viewership. Even though this year’s Grand Finals shouldn’t even count toward the total.
However, I’ve taken a closer look through this, as we’re only meant to look through encore presentations, and not all tournaments do encores for every match. Just now, looking back at the 2022 Kickoff Clash, only one of the matches from the previous day was encored, yielding 9 hours or 45 tokens for the whole tournament.
Encores are not necessarily tied to tournaments, either. Perhaps a better way to factor this all in is to look at what we’ve earned through encores so far this year. By my records, I’m seeing about 260 tokens earned through encore presentations throughout the first half of the 2022 season. By the end of this week, it should be closer to 360 tokens. Extrapolating that out across the 2 previous seasons and ignoring the tokens to be earned throughout the 2022 season, the estimate for missed tokens via encore for seasons 2020, 2021, and the first half of 2022 coincidentally still around 1800 tokens.
And again, this is all just tokens earned through watching encore presentations. There’s still plenty of tokens earned elsewhere. I think there’s a potential of something like 2500-3500 tokens earned across an entire season, including encores, so I wanted to get some rough calculations out because the previous estimate of over 5000 tokens for 2.5 seasons of encores felt egregious.
Nothing pushes engagement metrics better than delaying the point of the engagement. Skinner Box logic.