📝 Overwatch Fantasy Rules and Format: World Finals 2025

Format

Transfer Periods

• Before the tournament:
  
  • You can make unlimited transfers to your roster at no extra cost.
    

• During the tournament:
  
  • There will be one transfer period between the last game on Friday, Nov. 28 and the first game on Saturday, Nov. 29 (10:00 a.m. UTC).
    
  • During this transfer period, you can make 3 transfers without any penalties to your score. You can make additional transfers, each with a -20 penalty to your overall score.

Budget

• You will have a budget of 100 points to spend on your players.
  
• When the transfer window reopens on Friday, Nov. 28, you will receive a 6-point increase to your budget.
  
• There will be NO price changes to players throughout the course of the tournament.

Roster Limits

• Your roster must contain 1 Tank, 2 DPS, and 2 Supports.
  
• You can include a maximum of 2 players from the same team.

Scoring

Scoring will remain the same as Stage 3

• Three eliminations will score a player 1 point.
  
• One death will earn the player -1 point.
  
• Damage and healing are combined, and 0.5 points are awarded per 1000. (eg. 2338 damage and 6802 healing are combined to 9140, which would score 4.5 points.)
  
• A player's total score is the sum of all the points they earn across every match they play.
  
• Your team's score is calculated by adding the combined total of all five players' scores, which are added to your cumulative total after every match.
  
• Highest score wins!

Prizes

• 1st: £120
• 2nd: £50
• 3rd: £30

Start Date

Price reveals will be coming out all of this week on our Twitter, with team building going live on Sunday, Nov. 23.

Dev Comments

We receive a lot of feedback and suggestions on Fantasy, from the site itself to the scoring and the format, to the prices of players. The idea behind this section is to offer more insight into one of our most popular features and our thought process behind the format and structure.

Functionality

The first step was establishing that we could actually run Fantasy and would get the scoreboards up consistently on broadcast. We are pleased to say that it will match Stage 3 in NA and EMEA, so we'll have to add the data manually, but we can manage.

The nature of the gap being quite short between Stage 3 and World Finals—even shorter from when we were able to confirm we could run the competition— this means development-wise a lot of the changes, improvements and integration into the main site that we want to do for Overwatch Fantasy won't be possible before World Finals. Meaning it will run on the same platform with the same functionality as Stage 3.

This was an easy choice, though; if we can let you guys play, then we will let you play.

Format decisions

Due to the fact that we weren't making any changes to the site itself, the format of Fantasy needed to work within our existing functionality. Which means the main levers we have to pull are: The prices, the transfer period/frequency, and the scoring system.

Prices

Prices were difficult. While we had good data for EMEA and NA, we had no data for Korea, China, or Japan. We all know Hawk and Cjay are point machines for Spacestation Gaming, but who are the point farmers on Crazy Raccoon? Is it LIP? Is it Junbin?

Similarly, within EMEA and NA, we have a pretty good idea who the top-performing teams will be. Generally, the better the team you are on, the higher your cost will be relative to your role and within EMEA and NA, this is quite established. While there are some teams that are easy to determine, Crazy Raccoon and Falcons will likely be top performers, but where do we put Weibo or T1 in relation to the top EMEA and NA teams?

Much harder questions to answer, so a lot of ideas were thrown around. What if there were no prices, and you were only limited by 1 player per team, or 2 players per region? It would solve the pricing problem, but would maybe eliminate a certain number of players from being relevant. A big part of the ethos we want from Fantasy is that there are multiple formulae to success; the more varied rosters that are viable, the better. And we thought a system like this would lead to a lot of similar teams.

In the end, the simplest solution was to issue a budget as normal and rescale the prices based on expected team/region performance. The more specific you try to be with power rankings, the harder it is to be accurate, so we used a broad system to rank the teams into four tiers based on their expected performance, using historical results and historical region strength.

Then, within that, we would use the data where possible (EMEA and NA) to further break up the pricing player-to-player based on their Stage 3 performance, with the added layer that we looked at their scoring only vs top competition within the region to try and account for the raised level of play at the World Finals. So, no rewards for stat-padding vs the 8th-place teams.

Then, for the teams we had no data on, we priced based on the players' perceived strength and importance within their roster, as well as the usual roles scoring. By the latter, I mean things like Main Supports (aka Lucio) score much lower than Flex Support picks. Similarly, most hitscan players score lower than their flex DPS counterparts. Which makes the pricing for these players a bit more art than science, but I'm happy with where we've landed. I'll find out where I went wrong after Day 3 of the tournament...

Worth noting, we also applied the same general principles to all players who are most likely going to share their playtime. They are priced lower as they come with more risk. Similarly, in this elimination format, the teams most likely to go further will cost more as they are 'safer' picks in theory.

Transfer Period/Frequency

The biggest hurdle with Fantasy for an elimination bracket over five days is balancing transfer frequency. The more control you have over your roster, the more engaging it is to play, but that needs to be balanced with how often it is reasonable to ask people to engage.

The regular season is really nice for this because you have to engage once a week, you know all the fixtures ahead of time and all teams are guaranteed to play. Even in the playoffs, because it is split over two weeks, there are clear spaces to give everyone enough time to make their decisions.

We entertained the idea of daily transfers, to let people customise and react to teams being eliminated or current form, but with the shorter turnaround between games, one night and one morning vs the usual one week, we felt this frequency would be hard for all but the hardcore to maintain.

The ethos is very much that the game should be accessible to as many people as possible, while still providing opportunities for the most dedicated to put in more time and effort and be rewarded for such. This felt like a nice balance where, for the more casual fans, there is only one transfer window that they need to worry about, while the hardcore fans still have places to put their effort and time that can be rewarded.

By splitting the tournament into 3 days, then a final 2-day period, much like Stage 3 playoffs, the biggest difference maker to a user's scoring will be how many games their players play. In the first 3-day period, this can vary from 2-4 games, with the added caveat that, depending on your path, 1-2 of those 4 games will be FT2. Fewer maps equals fewer points, which creates an interesting dynamic where you obviously want to avoid players who are knocked out in 2 games, but also players who go immediately through in 2 games might score less than players who have to battle it out through the lower bracket.

We're hoping this allows players to be successful by picking players they think will score well, but offers an extra level of detail and reward for those who can correctly theory craft teams' paths through the bracket and which team is liable to be the biggest winner of the format.

Scoring

There is always lots of talk about the scoring system during and between stages, and these last few weeks were no different. The biggest talking point this time is, "Is support broken?".

Our initial answer to this was yes, and we can equalise the scoring between all roles, as that felt like the healthiest state of balance. Classic dev post talking about balance. We looked into tuning down the rewards for healing numbers, though we kept running into the problem that every nerf we provided for flex supports ended up nerfing main supports even more. Some of this we can solve by pricing, having main supports cost less than flex supports, but it felt bad to have one role in a team have such limited value as a pick.

Another option was to buff eliminations. Quite often, the healbot supports that would sometimes end up farming points during losses, were scoring very few eliminations, so this solution would prevent those edge cases. However, there are two problems with buffing eliminations. Generally, eliminations favour whichever team wins, and this removes some of the ability for standout players to score well if their team loses. But, more importantly, it buffs tanks. When we broke down the scoring by role, the highest scorer on average was tanks. This is mitigated somewhat in the totals you see on the website because tanks are also the ones who get subbed out the most. Meaning split playtime stops their totals from getting too high. An example of this is ZIYAD, who was consistently the highest-scoring player per map, but his total was less than quite a few other players due to giving playtime and even whole series over to Chase.

For those interested, the new formulae we were considering were: 2x Elims = 0.5, 1k Damage = 0.25, 1k Healing = 0.25, Deaths = -0.5. You might be wondering why we changed all the numbers. Essentially, by buffing elims, you would balloon everyone's scores up massively, so reducing the points overall meant that with this hypothetical formula, the point totals would be similar in value to the Stage 3 scoring. A bit convoluted, but the easiest way to think about it is: in Stage 3, 30 points scored from a game would be a good score; we wanted to keep that as a metric rather than suddenly inflating all scores and 30 points turning out to be a mid-low score instead.

That all being said, nothing quite felt satisfying about these new formulas, downsides on all fronts. So, like a good bunch of nerds, we revisited the data, looking at how the patterns shifted over time and found that supports scoring tailed post the Wuyang nerf, and thus a new theory, support wasn't broken, Wuyang was. Looking through more examples from the playoff games, it felt like there was still potential for supports to outscore their opponents, but also the ability to score poorly, which is what we want out of the scoring system. Ability for all roles to do well and all roles to do badly based on how the matches go.

After much pondering, we came full circle and decided to keep the Stage 3 scoring system. One, it's easier for people to interact with, with a much shorter competition and a single transfer window, there is much less time to adapt to any scoring changes, which feels worse as a user. Two, none of the solutions felt like a clean improvement, just trading one problem for another.

Scoring is something we will keep looking at during the offseason as we head into 2026. One of the most promising suggestions we have talked about is role-based scoring, so we can tweak scoring based on role and get closer to every role having equal potential value.

Hopefully, you enjoyed this developer comment section. We will look to do more of this type of post with Fantasy as we go forward, make new changes, and add new features.