The San Francisco Shock won the Grand Finals over the Vancouver Titans to become the league champions.
[1] By September 2018, Blizzard confirmed it had signed eight additional teams based in Atlanta, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Toronto, Paris, Washington D.C., Vancouver, and Chengdu, bringing the total team count to twenty.
Teams played 28 regular season games instead of 40, with the league citing players' mental health and additional chances to interact with their home cities as reasons for the change.
[4] The Grand Finals were held at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 29, 2019.
[8] Though most matches were still played at the 350-seat Blizzard Arena,[9] the 2019 season introduced three "Homestand Weeks," which took place in three Overwatch League cities.
These were held as practice runs for the planned expansion of the Overwatch League into true home-and-away formats for the 2020 season, seeing teams travel across the globe to compete.
The fifth week of Stage 3 was held at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Cumberland, Georgia and was hosted by the Atlanta Reign.
On the first day of the 2018 season playoffs, Disney and Blizzard announced a multi-year partnership that would bring OWL and other organized Overwatch competitive events to ESPN, Disney XD, and ABC, starting with the playoffs and continuing through the 2019 season.
If a tie that affects the qualification for Stage or Postseason playoffs still cannot be broken, the teams were to play a tiebreaker match.
Baptiste was designed by Blizzard as to disrupt a three-tank, three-support composition (frequently called GOATS in the game's player base in reference to the non-league team that popularized it) which had been dominating Overwatch's metagame for several months prior to the 2019 season and had been frequently used by teams during Stage 1.
The stage marked the first time that assault map Havana was played in the Overwatch League.
All matches in the fifth week of Stage 3 were played at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, Georgia.
Additionally, the Overwatch League hosted LGBTQ community Pride Day on June 7 at Blizzard Arena.
This GOATS composition was difficult to counter at this level of play and was deemed boring to watch.
Blizzard had tried to introduce changes in the game to better counter GOATS, but these failed to materialize.
This change also came to normal quickplay and competitive mode in Overwatch outside of the league at the end of September 2019.
The winners of each quarterfinal match advanced to the semifinals, where they faced either the seventh- or eighth-seeded team, depending on their own seed.
[24] On February 22, 2019, the Dragons defeated the Boston Uprising, giving the franchise their first win.
[25] On June 12, 2019, Immortals Gaming Club (IGC), the parent company of Immortals and Los Angeles Valiant, acquired Infinite Esports, the parent company of Houston Outlaws and OpTic Gaming, marking the first sale of any Overwatch League franchise.