A landmark event for esports in Hawaii is taking place at the University of Hawaii this week as the Manoa campus plays host to professional competition for two teams from the Overwatch League through Saturday.
“Project Aloha,” as the Overwatch team dubbed it, was in the works since December when developer Blizzard Entertainment decided it needed a suitable location to host online competition between far-flung teams based in North America and Asia.
“When we first heard about it … we’re like, it seems a little farfetched,” said Adam Mierzejewski, the Overwatch League’s manager of competition operations, to Pacific Business News during tourney setup this week. “It seemed pretty awesome too, like guys, who doesn’t love Hawaii? But the stars started to align.”
Overwatch, a prominent esports game, is a 6-on-6 team-based shooter that was one of the first to have a dedicated pro league. During normal times, Overwatch League involves teams playing head-to-head at one physical location in front of both live and online audiences. Teams would fly around the world to compete.
But, due to the pandemic and associated logistical travel difficulties, everything shifted online in 2020. And connection quality for high-level competition between the U.S. Mainland and Asia was a nonstarter, meaning last year, play was regionalized until the Grand Final in Seoul.
Overwatch League desired the return of true international competition for its fourth season; enter Hawaii as a logical middle ground within striking distance of both East and West.
That is, if the problem of Hawaii’s geographical, persistent lag problem could be solved — something the runners of the two-year-old UH esports program, Sky Kauweloa and Kevin Nguyen, had their doubts about.
“When I was informed of this project, I told Kevin, ‘do they not know we have some horrific ping?’ That’s the story that gamers in Hawaii know,” Kauweloa, the head of the UH esports academic task force, said with a laugh.
But after some rerouting of data to Tokyo instead of to the Mainland by the UH IT department, the Overwatch League was able to test latency speeds in the 80-to-90-millisecond range, good enough for competition for their game.
“The big breakthrough was when we were able to really start testing internet connection speeds with the University of Hawaii, and got really successful testing at the end of last year,” Jon Spector, vice president of Overwatch esports, told PBN. “We had the light bulb go off and say, ‘this is a silver bullet solution for us.’”
Four four-team, double-elimination midseason tournaments were approved, the first of which is this week’s “May Melee” with a $100,000 prize for the winning team between the Florida Mayhem, Shanghai Dragons, Chengdu Hunters and Dallas Fuel.
Two West Region teams will qualify for each of the four tournaments and come to Hawaii, while the two East teams play from their home base. One of the two North American teams competing at UH this week, the Dallas Fuel, advanced to Saturday’s 3 p.m. tournament final.
The Overwatch League is fronting the full travel and lodging costs for the 14 players and staff for each team, plus six members of their own staff on the ground.
UH esports was only too happy to host OWL at two sites on the Manoa campus — its Information Technology Center building and its I-Lab. The teams will not cross paths per Overwatch Covid protocols.
“The partnership with U of H has been really helpful in this regard, where they already have the esports group there, and they’ve been able to help us find spaces that have worked really well for competition,” Spector said.
The major upside for UH was that the Overwatch League agreed to allow 20 to 25 UH esports students to staff the events as interns who can earn between one to three UH credits. Some are more interested in the technical aspects of esports than actually competing, Kauweloa said.
Some universities, including Hawaii Pacific University, offer scholarships for esports. UH does not, as of yet, but it has an extended community of gaming and esports enthusiasts of about 300, including 50 that play competitively for the school.
“To highlight how important it is that Overwatch came here, for the most part esports are localized in the California area,” Nguyen said. “For us to get a job opportunity or volunteer experience, we’d have to fly there. So this is probably the first time a major IP has flown here. And the students get to interact with Overwatch staff for the first time. That’s such an awesome thing to see.”
Kauweloa said seeing the I-Lab used for such a purpose — nine top-of-the-line PCs with a backdrop featuring the Overwatch logo in the official competition area, plus a “bullpen” area for coaches and support staff — could lead to a reimagining of what the space could be.
“Even for us, directing this project, this is a very new experience for us,” he said. “And we needed to see it. We needed to get the people here, get the equipment here. In the I-Lab itself, we’ve stretched the space in ways we never imagined before.”
Over 50,000 people were concurrently watching the Hawaii-themed YouTube-livestreamed match, complete with remote broadcasters calling the action, between the Florida Mayhem and the Chengdu Hunters on Friday night.
Hawaii-based Overwatch enthusiast and Twitch streamer Keegan Ohta told PBN there was no discernible dip in quality of play. OWL has the ability to synchronize latency between the Asia and Hawaii teams for fairness.
“It was completely normal,” Ohta said.
It's an open question if Overwatch, or even other titles, will return beyond this summer.
“I’ve said this multiple times — I hope this event sets the stage for other titles to look at us and say, ‘Oh, it is possible to host esports events in Hawaii,’” Nguyen said. “We have the infrastructure in terms of hotels, and we have to show them we have the infrastructure in which we can hold a high-caliber esports event.”
Overwatch League is keeping its options open, Spector and Mierzejewski said, including for this season’s Grand Final. They learned last year that making plans more than a handful of months ahead during a pandemic is a difficult proposition.
“Depending on how things go this weekend, we can definitely keep [Hawaii] as an option,” Mierzejewski said. “There’s so many years ahead of us for this.”
