You Left a Zebbosai Sized Hole in My Heart: An Empirical Analysis of The Impact of The Off-Season Drops

This article aims to provide context surrounding the number of drops made by each team —after all dropping a player that never played a single map vs a starting member of your roster is different. Please note that all charts and information displayed here is current as of Sep. 5th.

The roster news was slow up until the 2nd of September, around which time teams started posting farewell tweets at an alarming rate. All but two teams have announced the release of a player since the finals (London & Valiant), and some of the drops have been more significant than others. Most notably, the Shanghai dragons dropped a total of 8 players from their roster, leaving them with only 3 players remaining. The Florida Mayhem had a similar purge as well, dropping 6 of their 9 players. Interestingly, both teams kept 3 players, two of whom were Korean.

The above chart shows that many other teams dropped significant numbers of players as well, but not every dropped player is as important as the other. For example, dropping a player who had 0 play time all season is not as significant as dropping one of your all-stars. I wanted to find a way to quantify this difference, so I created the following metrics. First of all — I want to talk about my decision to only use games starting stage 3. Stage 3 was the first stage after the roster lock, and also the last stage in which a player could come of age to play. Therefore, using data from stage 3 onward will give the most genuine impression of what players actually were the most important to a team (in my opinion).

Let’s start with the red bar. This bar represents the percentage of games where the team had at least one player playing who was dropped during the off season. Put another way, The Florida Mayhem would have had a player playing in 100% of their games who has now been dropped in the off season. The teal bar gives a different sense of the magnitude of the drops. In each map of Overwatch, a team fields 6 players — so over 5 maps there are 30 player-slots that a team has to fill. The teal bar is the proportion of those slots that were taken up by dropped players.’ Some interesting takeaways — even though the Glads and the Mayhem have 100% of maps effected, Mayhem has 3x more player slots effected than the Mayhem.

In order to look at this at a more individual level, I wanted to compile a list of the most significant dropped players. Of the 34 players dropped in the off-season (who played at least one map for their team, there were 39 drops in total), the top 20 are listed below. Notably, even though the Outlaws & Fusion dropped 3 players each, none of those players show up in the table below.

What are the takeaways? Some teams certainly have some rebuilding to do, but other teams seemed to have just dropped players that were not really seeing play anyway — there are allegedly 8 new teams joining the League this year who each need to keep a minimum of 8 players, meaning there are 64 new slots opening up. For many of the bench players dropped in this off season, they are likely to find a home with one of the new comer teams, or with one of the teams that now has a lot of slots to fill. If people are interested enough in these numbers, I will update them as more news comes out!

❤ Beezy