If you thought there were a lot of blowouts in the inaugural season of the Overwatch League … you’re right. Between regular season, stage playoffs, and end-of-season playoffs, there were 262 games of Overwatch played. 79 of those were 4-0 sweeps, or WWWW, from the viewpoint of the winning team. 20 more were 3-1’s where the winning team won the first three maps, going WWWL. 19 games involved a drawn map where the winner was still decided before the fourth map, and there were 8 three-map WWW games in the playoffs.

Overall, that makes 126 games, or 48% of all games played this season, where the result was decided before a fourth map was played (if it was played at all). Here’s the breakdown of all game results, in table form:

And as a chart:

And let’s do another chart, but without WWWW, just to make the other results more visible:

Again, these are from the standpoint of the winning teams. Technically, there were the same number of WLLWW games as there were LWWLL games.

For the most part, you’d expect five-map games to be more rare than four-map ones, and for games with draws to be rarer still. Overall, that’s the case, with 161 non-draw four-map games, 68 non-draw five-map games, and 24 four-map games with draws. Add the 8 WWWs and the WWLDW and that gets us to 262.

The individual results proceed in that order, too; all four-maps-no-draws were more likely than five-map-no-draws, which were more likely than four-maps-with-draw … with one exception. LWLWW happened just six times throughout the season, but there were seven DWWW results (and six WDWW games).

It’s interesting to note that LLWWW, a.k.a. the reverse sweep, happened 14 times, just once less than the most frequent five-map result, LWWLW. The reverse sweep also happened more often than WWLLW (12 times), which, means that there were more instances of teams winning a five-map set after going down 0-2 than there were of them winning after going up 2-0!

As for all those blowouts, it wasn’t all the fault of the league’s worst two teams. Shanghai only accounted for 21 WWWW/LLLL results, while Florida added 13 more. Even without those 34 games, there still would have been 45 such games, still greatly outpacing the other results.

Are the high number of blowout matches – nearly 50% – a problem for the Overwatch League? Maybe, or maybe the league needs to do something else about its policy regarding playing a fourth map when the game’s already been decided. Or hey, maybe if a team goes up 2-0, they have to play their next map under Mystery Heroes rules. That would tighten things up a bit!