Seating Order Lock — Winners, Losers, and Mildly Interesting Stats
Recently OWL has imposed a restriction on the order in which players sit on stage. This has been met with frustration from fans and players alike. But like all changes, the seating lock will not affect all teams equally. Let’s dive in!
OWL announced recently that in addition to Role Lock, there will be a mandatory seating arrangement as follows: “ From left to right, when the viewer is facing the stage, players will sit in order of damage-damage-tank-tank-support-support” (OWL Twitter). A lot of fans and players felt the change was unnecessary and took to social media to express their disappointment. The biggest issue people seemed to take was that it just seemed unnecessary. OWL staff responded by saying that it was required to make the technical aspects of Role-Lock function (that is limited pool per player on the hero select screen).
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at which teams would be the ‘most effected’ by this change, based only on how often they naturally had their seating order OWL approved in previous stages. The chart below does just that. The percentage represents the number of maps a team played where their chosen seating arrangement would be allowed in Stage 4 divided by total maps played.
Before we go off the walls and claim “NEW OWL RULE BIASED AFFECTS TEAMS DIFFERENTLY”, let us remember that the above chart was based on stages 1–3 during the GOATS meta, where ‘DPS’ didn’t really exist and the synergies / information exchange was fundamentally different than it will be in Stage 4. But, with that major caveat out of the way — the above chart does show that not every team will have to make as major adjustments as the others. Guangzhou actually played every map in the order they will need to play stage 4 in, with Philly and SF also being compliant for 95%+ of their maps.
I don’t want to draw many conclusions from this because there are so many variables at play in stage 4. Some players have been transferred, the meta will be totally different, teams may sub in bench players, etc. But I thought it would still be good to have these numbers be part of the conversation so people smarter than me can discuss them. I know it has been a while since my last post on here, I wish my return article was something more impressive than just an ugly chart and a few paragraphs. I am planning on publishing more in the near future, about topics other than Overwatch. So if you enjoy my poor writing, stay tuned!
Sources / Notes: Data comes from OWL API data point ‘preferred slot’. This value, when spot checked with VODs, seemed to be accurate at determining where a player was sitting on his team. I also counted any seating order that had DPS-DPS-TANK-TANK-SUPP-SUPP the same as a team comp that had SUPP-SUPP-TANK-TANK-DPS-DPS because all contact points would be the same. Additionally, ‘role’ was not determined by hero played but by the ‘player role’ recorded in the API data — e.g Carpe would count as DPS not tank even though he played a lot of Zarya.
