Overwatch community clowns OWL team for overedited player highlight clips
It has been a rough season for the Shanghai Dragons in the Overwatch League. Earlier last week, the team lost to Contenders roster Sin Prisa Gaming twice in a row, eliminating them from the Summer Spring Knockouts.
Now the entire Overwatch esports community is grilling the former OWL Champions for their unfortunate highlight clips to the point that the organisation removed them from their Twitter.
What are those?
It doesn't start out too badly. A typical team intro, including the logo in the team colours flashes the screen to industrial sounds. It gets a little tacky with another logo flipping on the screen, revealing Shanghai's dragon in chrome before light flashes across its surface.
For some reason, the screen shows multiple arrows pointing towards nothing in particular as Shanghai's skyline fades into the background. Also included in the graphic: Shanghai's long lats. *chef's kiss*
As Ellie Goudling's angelic voice starts playing, we see Kang "Gangnamjin" Nam-jin's player POV on Kiriko…somewhere behind the endless filters of light particle effects. Lightray…tentacles(?) reach for his crosshair.
The clips playing in the background are rather unremarkable. None of Gangnamjin's Kunai are really impressively connecting, and soon, we switch off a clip of him playing Zenyatta and… kicking air? Before we can confirm that the volley he charges does indeed hit his target, the clip switches with a transition of a water wobble effect.
The clips keep rolling to differently overwhelming editing effects. As one shot does finally correct, the video experiences a 6.1 earthquake on the Richter Scale.
Gangnamjin's video is one of many on the Shanghai Dragons YouTube channel in the same style of all of Shanghai's active players. Admittedly, other videos show off more of their players' skills and the editing shows more intentionality.
Nevertheless, other Overwatch League community members soon took note and clowned the highlights, leading the Dragons to delete some of the Tweets in question.
The birth cradle of a meme
The response to the videos wasn't immediate, as critical mass had to accrue first for the Overwatch League community to take notice. However, when they did, the responses ranged from critical to hilarious.
In response to a now-deleted tweet containing one of the highlight videos, President of Esports for Misfits, Albert "yeHHH" Yeh tweeted: "It takes talent to make an OWL player look mediocre, this is one of the most impressive highlight reels of all time."
When yeHHH found the aforementioned Gangnamjin highlight clip, he also couldn't help but spot the humour too, tweeting: "Upon further review, nobody is doing it like Shanghai when it comes to highlights. They've been cooking like this all year."
The San Francisco Shock Twitter account found the competitive angle, nagging the Dragons for their unsuccessful season and implied lack of impressive plays with a classic faux-highlight clip montage. Fans also got their shot in, taking up the "template" and running their own highlights through the editor.
The Dragons have one more chance at season playoffs. Having failed to qualify through the aggregated results of their Knockout stage performances in Spring and Summer, the Chinese team will now have to go through the APAC Play-Ins to fight for the last available slot.
