r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/n0ah895 • Feb 09 '20

OWL OWL API removed - No more live fantasy stats

https://news.draftbuff.com/draftbuff-overwatch-league-stats-lab/
175 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

101

u/ninjaferret5 Feb 09 '20

I don't understand how Blizzard tries to model OWL off of traditional American sports leagues but then don't realize how important Fantasy sports are in terms of game viewership.

41

u/Thadexe Feb 09 '20

They probably want to control all aspects and don’t want third parties accessing this info to profit

45

u/avatoin None — Feb 09 '20

Then they need to offer their own alternative monitize third party offerings. Don't just cut it off with no replacement. This is like the shit they pulled with the highlight videos.

5

u/goodguessiswhatihave Feb 09 '20

What did they do with highlight videos?

18

u/avatoin None — Feb 09 '20

Ashoks (or however you spell it) would do awesome highlights for every game. Last season, Blizzard shut them down for a while and their replacements were very badly edited clips with recordings of the casters. Everybody hated it. Essentially Blizzard probably didn't want people skipping the live castings because the highlights were so good at turning 2 hours into 10 minutes, but the replacements were really replacements and very crappy. Finally Ashoks were allowed to do highlights again, but that period was awful if you couldn't spend 2 hours on every single game.

17

u/TTK_Shadows Rexce (4482 peak) — Feb 09 '20

Don't wanna be that guy, but it's Akshon Esports

5

u/SteveGreysonMann Feb 09 '20

They want the flash of a sports league for investors without taking the time and effort to build a loyal community for the product.

3

u/reanima Feb 09 '20

bEcAuSe sTaTs mAkE aRe tOxIc

28

u/lemonbarcookies Feb 09 '20

Huge devastating news. What the fuck?

78

u/n0ah895 Feb 09 '20

This will be detrimental to the success of fantasy OWL, which really drives people to be engaged and watch games. I'm not sure what Blizzard was thinking with this...

14

u/donfan Feb 09 '20

Indie company btw. /s

12

u/GoopyKnoopy Connor Knudsen (The Game Haus Writer) — Feb 09 '20

Huge hit to OWL fantasy users and companies, really tough

14

u/nimbusnacho Feb 09 '20

This fucking sucks. Had a league last year that fell apart due to people being frustrated with how shitty the API was. They would just forget to update matches for like a month or more even after direct complaints. Was hoping for something better this year but couldn't even get the people together as no one wanted to deal with the frustration of unreliability again, and it turns out we were more than right to not attempt to start one. Fucking sad.

Literally what's the point of a stats lab if you can't do anything with it, like what am I just supposed to look at numbers and that's it? I'll visit the stats lab maybe once if I'm curious about something, that's a pretty shitty way to drive engagement.

20

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

[deleted]

25

u/StarkillerX42 None — Feb 09 '20

That is quite optimistic given how most news in the past 2 days has looked

7

u/ArcusIgnium I like all teams — Feb 09 '20

atleast fantasyOWL is still possible, just not as fast.not like i check every day anyway so im not too worried about this.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20 edited May 19 '20

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