FACEIT Is The New Home For The Overwatch Esports Circuit!
Hello Overwatch Heroes! We are FACEIT, and we’re here to work with you to build the future of competitive esports in Overwatch.
Since FACEIT’s inception in 2012, we’ve become the hub for millions of highly engaged competitive players and thousands of communities, tournament organizers and content creators. As a platform, we focus on applying sports infrastructure and framework to truly unlock the potential of a gaming ecosystem by:
- Offering a rich and consistent schedule of content that you can participate in, with a particular focus on enabling, supporting and growing the number of 3rd party organizers. FACEIT has more than 13,000 active unique tournament organizers on the platform today which are all, for free, leveraging our technology and admin tools to provide their communities with the smoothest tournament experience across many games.
- Enabling you to find a closed network of players where you can feel a proud sense of belonging and represent in different forms of content and organized competitions.
- Focusing on the sustainability of the ecosystem for the long term by getting direct support from the community via subscriptions, the best example of that is our Team Leagues in Counter-Strike, where more than 2000 teams compete each season for a share of over $200,000 prize pool, and by onboarding and partnering with advertisers and brands that are excited to connect with and support our esport world.
We believe Overwatch has the potential to be one of the largest competitive ecosystems in the world, where the entire competitive community can easily connect with the esports circuit with a clearly defined path to pro that is more open, sustainable, rewarding and aspirational. Our vision is to turn that into a reality.
In this blog we’ll cover three critical pieces of information that you should know:
- How to register on FACEIT, connect your battle.net account and sign up for the OWCS Open Qualifiers.
- How the automated API connection between FACEIT and Overwatch works, how it will make playing and hosting tournaments easier and the effect that will have.
- How do we look at the Overwatch ecosystem and our long-term plans to support it reaching its full potential.
OWCS Open Qualifiers and how to play
As previously announced by our partners at Blizzard Entertainment, FACEIT will be the official competitive esports platform for the Overwatch Champions Series (OWCS) in North America (NA) (Latin American players will be eligible to participate as residents for the NA region) and Europe, Middle-East, and North Africa (EMEA) regions!
To get started, all you need to do is:
- Create your FACEIT account and connect your PC Overwatch 2 account to FACEIT (Only PC is supported at the moment). Make sure to sign up for our email newsletter to be the first one to hear about any updates regarding the OWCS tournaments and future FACEIT product updates.
- Connect your Battle.net account to FACEIT with a few simple clicks.
- Find your teammates and create a team.
Once your account is up and running, you can browse and sign up for OWCS Open Qualifiers on the official organizer page on FACEIT.
Automated API connection and how it works
For the past year, we’ve been working closely with Blizzard Entertainment to develop the first-ever deep and automated connection between Overwatch and a 3rd party platform. This API will soon be live on the FACEIT platform and will help us ensure we are able to scale the amount of team OWCS Open Qualifier sign-ups. This technology will enable our platform to provide you with a smooth and seamless tournament experience where playing is much less cumbersome with much less manual actions you’ll have to perform.
For the first time ever, we are able to:
- Automatically configure your games directly on the FACEIT Matchroom with a veto system where team captains can select maps, server and starting side through a brand new pick & ban system designed to further push the strategic aspect of Overwatch Esports.
- Once the match on FACEIT is configured, all participants will receive an automatic invite inside the game at the top of the main menu screen, making the action of joining the match seamless with one click. FACEIT will be able to track what is happening inside the game which is very important in cases such as detecting leavers, AFK, or tracking live statistics.
- When the match ends, the result and all in-game statistics will be automatically collected by FACEIT, with your match result and profile statistics being automatically updated. You don’t have to lift a finger and gone are the days of manually having to result your match or waiting for the enemy to do it.
Until the start of the OWCS Open Qualifier we will be running further tests and if you wish to be part of that, we suggest you to sign up for our newsletter as we will be directly reaching out to registered Overwatch 2 players and organisers to inform them about future playtests and content to play on FACEIT.
The future of FACEIT in Overwatch
As we highlighted, our ultimate goal is to transform Overwatch into one of the world’s largest competitive esports ecosystems; to achieve it, your feedback is essential. You are our heroes, the game experts, and the ones we are building things for; your input is crucial for us to get things right.
Starting from creating your account on FACEIT and signing up for your first OWCS Open Qualifier, we invite you all to directly participate in shaping the future FACEIT experience in Overwatch and work closely with us to co-write the next chapter of Overwatch Esports.
We can’t wait to tell you more about what we’re cooking in the coming weeks. Until then, please follow us on X and subscribe to our email newsletter so you won’t miss the latest news! We’ll be in touch soon.
See you on FACEIT!
