The first South African Overwatch Tournament of the year run by Mettlestate is done and dusted and the excitement for the year is ever-growing. While it was only a single-day tournament with nine teams participating the hype was most certainly there.

While results are always important I think the biggest takeaway from the tournament is the community involvement that we saw. Whether it be in the Twitch chat or on social media itself there were so many different people showing their support for what was quite a small tournament. Seeing old faces pop up was also great to see. One person, I want to mention with this is ThePeachZA who went the extra mile to display tweets on the stream, which for sure encouraged multiple members to engage and show that our community is not so small. I know for myself, seeing both the memes and serious tweets coming out from our community made the viewing experience a whole lot better.

A big thank you must go out to the casters, production, and admin team for this tournament, who without them we would have not had this tournament as well as a broadcast that encapsulated our community in the best way possible.

As for the results of the tournament, everything went as one would expect them based on how the bracket looked. A top four of Enigma, Beasty Boys, RandburgFireDPT, and Team Gaming was to be expected. Before the bracket was announced you would have expected the like of Omnius Gaming Kintsugi to fill out that top four instead of Team Gaming but unfortunately for them, the bracket did not play in their favour and they ended up facing Beasty Boys in the Quarter Finals. Enigma with their debut showed up and it was a great series between them and Beasty Boys but unfortunately, they just fell short losing 2-1 in the end. The final went about as expected with many of the reigning ATK champions from last year appearing in the RandburgFireDPT team defeating Beasty Boys 2-0 and securing themselves R2500 to share amongst themselves. Then in the 3rd and 4th place playoff Team Gaming put up a strong fight against Enigma pushing them to the brink on both maps but could not close it out dropping the series 2-0.

All in all, it was a very exciting tournament and I can not wait for the tournaments throughout the year, especially to see the progression of teams. Something else I want to see is different matchups that did not happen. Two examples are how Kintsugi would have done against Enigma or the matchup between Rage Quit Odyssey and Team Gaming. Hopefully, in the upcoming tournaments, we get to see these and many more going forward.