Top 32 Countries For The Overwatch World Cup 2017 Confirmed

Game Rant

By GR Staff

Published Apr 30, 2017

After a month of fiercely fought Competitive Play matches around the world, Blizzard confirms the top 32 countries for the upcoming 2017 Overwatch World Cup.

After a month of fiercely fought Competitive Play matches all around the world, Blizzard has tallied up the Skill Ratings of all participating players and confirmed the final 32 countries for the 2017 Overwatch World Cup.

Following the announcement of Phase 1 of the event in March, players from around the world had the opportunity to secure their nation's spot in the upcoming 2017 Overwatch World Cup by playing Competitive Play matches and pushing their Skill Ratings as high as possible. Each country's rank for the event was then calculated by averaging the Skill Rating of each country's top 100 players, and it was from this pool that the final 32 countries were picked.

With Phase 1 of the event complete, Phase 2 of the Overwatch World Cup is currently underway, which involves players and viewers getting the chance to vote on their region's representatives in order to form each region's Competition Committee. Once this committee is voted in, the group will be responsible for selecting and recommending to Blizzard the strongest Overwatch team from each respective region.

For those interested in participating, there are 4 days left before voting ends on May 5, and a Blizzard account is required for all voters. As for console owners, participants are required to connect their PlayStation Network or Xbox Live accounts to their Blizzard account in order to vote. The voted regional Competition Committee members will be announced on May 8.

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Once the teams from each region are nominated, Phase 3 of the Overwatch World Cup is scheduled to kick off this Summer and will be the group stage of the event. Finally, the World Cup will culminate with Phase 4 in November, which is the playoffs and involves four international events leading to the championship match at this year's BlizzCon. Taking into account how much larger this year's World Cup is compared to the 2016 event, as well as the recent establishment of the Overwatch League, it goes without saying that Overwatch's eSport presence has grown considerably in the year since the game's release.

With a player community topping out at 30 million (and still counting), the 2017 World Cup will certainly garner Overwatch quite a bit of attention come Summer time. Not only will it be fascinating to see how much bigger Overwatch will get among the eSports community once the play-offs kick off, it will be equally fascinating to see which of the 32 countries will ultimately emerge as the tournament's winner.

Here are the top 32 countries for this year's Overwatch World Cup: