After a year and a half of running this site via WordPress.com — and a few months hemming and hawing over whether I wanted to invest the time, effort, and money into making a real site — I’ve finally pulled the trigger. Hopefully this shot will be better than my aim on Widowmaker …

As you can probably see if you’re reading this, the new OWLSI is open for business! That is, if your business is obsessing over statistical minutia and details related to the Overwatch League. This new site, owlstats.net, will allow me to provide more and faster information on OWL throughout the season, updating more regularly than the old site and with more and better-presented information.

The big thing is sortable tables, which you can check out on any of the 2020 pages. They’re a little empty right now, understandably, though I do have the full team schedules online. Try playing around a little with them (here’s Atlanta’s for example, or use the handy pull-down menu at the top of this page to choose your favorite team) and sort by time or location and then re-sort by date. All the pages should also have interconnected links, so if you click on a team name, it should bring you to that team’s page. Once the standings become more populated with real numbers, you’ll be able to see, for instance, what team has the best record on fifth maps or the worst record in North America — all assuming my tests and way-too-complex tables work properly. If they don’t, feel free to let me know via the Contact form on the site or on Twitter, where I’ve also changed my handle from @owlstats76 to @owlstatsnet.

(Of note: If you’re looking for a great way to add functional and versatile tables to your WordPress site, look no further than Tablepress. It’s easy enough to set up basic tables, but the great support from the creator, both in the form of extensions and his willingness to answer questions, has allowed me to enable all kinds of options.)

The site is ready to go for 2020, and the way I’ve set things up should make it easier for me to update than the previous incarnation of the site. There are still a few things to be done, though, most of which I hope to accomplish before the season kicks off in February:

• Updating 2018 and 2019 pages — players, schedules, and standings — to resemble their 2020 counterparts.
• Updating the records and overall team pages with the new styles
• Updating links on previous blog posts; when I imported the site from. WordPress, it came with links to all the WordPress pages on the old site (which is still up, for now, and you can still visit). I changed all of them throughout the site, but the blog posts are a little more chaotic.
• And there are one or two other little innovations I’m hoping for, but I’ll hold off on announcing them for now 🙂

In the longer term, I want to add better pages and info for players, so you can find out, at a glance, how many maps Custa has played or what Meko’s playoff win percentage is, for instance. That will require me to make a lot of new pages, though, so it’s probably a task for next offseason.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the new Overwatch League Statistical Insights! And if there’s anything else you’d like to see, let me know!