Former Boston Uprising player and current caster Connor “Avast” Prince has built up a significant community through hosting co-streams of the Overwatch League, garnering 15-20 thousand viewers for his roundtable of brutally honest critiques of live matches. But from the passion of those tens of thousands of members, a series of fan-organized, Avast-hosted subscriber tournaments has emerged.
While these tournaments started small, much like Avast’s stream itself, they have now grown into a way for average members of the Overwatch League community to showcase everything from their in-game prowess to skills with graphic design, video creation, editing and other talents.
Avast said he doesn’t quite remember who came up with the idea to run the tournaments, but he does recall the slight speed bumps he had to overcome in those earlier days.
“I remember I fully casted the first two sub tournaments,” Avast said. “It was brutal… but we made a lot of progress and it was fun.”
After that minor hiccup, he helped cultivate a large crew of casters, analysts from professional and amateur backgrounds. As the tourneys grew more popular, his team included more special additions to the broadcast.
One of the key developments in these tournaments was having fans vote for captains, popular members in the community to design and lead the creation of teams. After these captains are voted in, they show off their team name, design and logo. Then they draft from a pool of Avast’s subscribers to build their teams. Fans apply via Google Forms, putting in their skill level and role within the game. These drafts don’t always focus on simply picking the best players; friends of captains and popular figures tend to get in quick.
Avast himself isn’t fully up on all the details these days. He admits he is “relatively uninvolved” when it comes to planning these tournaments, at this point. They have taken on a life of their own.
“A sub tournament is more like I’m using my channel and the reach I currently have to just broadcast it to the community so that everyone can enjoy it and be like a figurehead,” he said. “It’s more so the community doing all this and putting on the show.”
