News coming out of Florida this afternoon:
Apply was always going to be leaving at some point. The Western players were all made inactive with a view to shopping them around after all. But now he is officially no longer with the Mayhem organisation.
My suspicion is that, since Mayhem has also somewhat confusingly got rid of their academy team, Apply may be rejoining his former Contenders teammates with an unsigned team in the very near future.
I have some interesting news as well, starting at 4 PM PDT, 7 PM EDT. There is going to be a new show on the Overwatch League Twitch Channel called “Overwatch League Rewind”. The Tweet itself is very obscure, but I suspect this might be related to the upcoming Overwatch League Viewer client for PC platforms coming out.
More surprise roster news, though this is on a sadder note:
Best of luck to Asher in whatever he does next
And with these releases, now Florida has none of their S1 roster left.
In other, I would say exciting news:
Philadelphia Fusion Main Support Elk, for the moment at least, returns to Fusion University, as they try to take the leap from North American to Korean Contenders
Dire news for the Houston Outlaws. It sounds like Infinity Esports (parent company of the Outlaws) is up for sale for $150 Million:
The worst part of it is if you look at who Infinity Esports are being sold to:
Immortals Gaming Club, owners of the LA Valiant.
They are not allowed to hold the rights to 2 different OWL teams, which means one of Houston or LAV will need to be sold an additional time.
There is some good news though. Founder of OpTic Gaming H3CZ is trying to buy back as much as possible of it. Basically Immortals only want the LoL slot, but to get that they had to buyout the whole org. And it wasn’t H3CZ that caused the money problems, he’s well within his right to save as much as possible.
Obviously as the birthplace of the #GreenWall, re-gaining the COD team is his highest priority, but both Houston and the OpTic CS:GO team are likely next on the list.
Update to this story, apparently Immortals did acquire Infinity and will be working to sell off the Outlaws franchise. Apparently there is still $10 million owed to the league office for this franchise.
I could imagine any sort of dealing could involve exchanging players among the two rosters, but I don’t know if the league office would approve of such trades.
I don’t think it’s related to the OpTic purchase but LAV have made a roster move today:
Their Tracer specialist? Wow, that is news…
Personally I’m hoping this means SoOn returning to a team he performed well with, and Paris picking up Spectr9l from Angry Titans, but I don’t think that’s likely
Seems I’m getting a bit behind on updating this. Let’s start with the roster moves:
Off Tank player GuardiaN leaves Shanghai. No future destination is yet known.
Atlanta flex support Kodak is making the step down to ATL Academy for the rest of the season. Note that whilst this is a permanent thing, and not a 2-way contract, Kodak will be remaining at the Atlanta OWL team house, because they still have plans for him in the future.
And finally the confirmation of a team sale:
Immortals Gaming Club, owners of the LA Valiant, have finalised the purchase of Infinite Esports, owners of OpTic Gaming and the Houston Outlaws.
What does this mean for LAV and Houston? Temporarily, they will be both owned and run as separate entities by Immortals. This will be heavily policed by Blizzard to make sure there’s no foul play. During this time, Immortals will be actively searching for a 3rd party buyer, who will then purchase the Outlaws off of them.
I’m not going to link the tweets (because I am fairly sure it will break Forum CoC and get me sent on a permanent ban), but Free recently released a statement via Twitlonger regarding some allegations surrounding him. I will leave it to you guys to find his Twitter account and his TwitLonger statement, but I suspect we’ll be hearing some news from the league here shortly.
Reminder that the OWL Discipline Tracker is updated when needed and can be accessed here:
Free was in Contenders so these allegations likely won’t affect the OWL Discipline tracker. I will say though that no matter how much of it is true, I’ve been impresses with the professionalism Meta Skyfoxes has shown in the situation.
Absolutely. Very professional. It’s just another reason why I’ve come to love the Skyfoxes in Contenders even if they get overshadowed a lot by the Academy teams.
Slowly but surely, Florida starts assembling a better team
Main Support RaiN joins the Mayhem from Korean team O2 Blast.
Trade alert!
Envy now moves to his 3rd team. First LAV, then Toronto, and now Shanghai.
And now the Florida rebuild is complete
In a triple signing, the Mayhem have signed DPS player DPI, Main Tank Karayan, and Off Tank Gargoyle from WGS Armament. All 3 players mysteriously disappeared from the starting line-up part way through Contenders S1 2019, so there was a high chance they’d been picked up, but now we know who by.
I could not wait until tomorrow to share this…
lmao, they never fail to disappoint, though that Vegeta-in-the-box will haunt my dreams for a while.
One of the many reasons to love the Spark. 