When Overwatch League’s next major competition starts on June 13th, it will make use of the same format as its recent May Melee tournament. The Summer Showdown will kick off with three weeks of qualifying matches that will culminate in two weekend-long tournaments that will take place between July 3rd and 5th. As with the May Melee, the two competitions will feature Overwatch League’s North American and Asian teams playing separately. However, Blizzard has increased the stakes. Both tournaments will feature combined $275,000 prize pools, with the champions from each region taking home $50,000. 

Blizzard is also tweaking hero pools, a feature the studio introduced to add more variety to Overwatch‘s metagame. Moving forward, the list of heroes teams won’t be able to pick during their matches will change every two weeks instead of one. However, teams won’t have to worry about hero pools during the knockout stages of a tournament or in the week leading up to a major competition. In a separate post on its community forums, Blizzard also announced it’s disabling the feature “indefinitely” within Overwatch‘s competitive mode, which anyone can play once they’ve gotten their account to level 25.