Blizzard’s Overwatch has to be no doubt one of the biggest games of 2016. Near the end of the year they tentatively gave a world cup a go. Competitors hailing from more than 50 countries, including Australia, clashed in online regional qualifiers, and a global audience watched as South Korea became the world champions. Admittedly it didn’t have the structure to compete with DOTA and LoL but this year they’re stepping things up.

The competition is currently in it’s national placement stage. If you play competitive mode you have the direct ability to change your countries placement. The SR of the top 100 players in your country affect its ranking, and only the top 32 countries will make it into the World Cup. At the moment New Zealand is placed 33rd with an SR of 3793. This is ten below the United Arab Emirates. So if a couple of our top 100 guys would hurry up and get a jiggle on we might have a chance! The countdown is on and there are less than 25 days more to go. You can check our rankings here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-p5V4nQU5k

As a bit of fun I decided to get the top 33 teams and break down their skill rating by population size. We’re the smallest country on the last by a million people or so. But that doesn’t give us a good excuse. Finland and Norway are barely bigger than us and they still outrank us by miles. However, New Zealand is like an ant, everything an ant does is amazing in comparison of size. If we were just as good at this one thing we’re mediocre at proportionally, then we’d be amazing. It’s just a trick of finding the right stat to put us on top.

If you split the numbers by SR per million, we’re at the top with a skill rating of 793.33. China, who’s ranked second in the world would have a rating of 3.28 per head of capita.

rank Country Skill Rating Population SR per Million
33 New Zealand 3793 4,781,140 793.33
14 Norway 4153 5,258,317 789.80
8 Finland 4261 5,502,640 774.36
10 Denmark 4224 5,748,769 734.77
22 Singapore 3979 5,607,300 709.61
21 Hong Kong 4015 7,374,900 544.41
30 Switzerland 3863 8,391,973 460.32
24 Israel 3961 8,667,710 456.98
31 Austria 3836 8,773,686 437.22
4 Sweden 4346 10,033,000 433.17
32 United Arab Emirates 3803 9,856,000 385.86
29 Portugal 3896 10,341,330 376.74
25 Belgium 3948 11,353,461 347.74
15 Netherlands 4147 17,000,000 243.94
16 Chinese Taipei 4105 23,544,189 174.35
13 Australia 4156 24,405,500 170.29
7 Canada 4274 36,493,300 117.12
17 Poland 4092 38,439,000 106.45
27 Argentina 3945 43,850,000 89.97
1 South Korea 4531 51,446,201 88.07
19 Spain 4069 46,812,000 86.92
20 Italy 4068 60,589,940 67.14
5 United Kingdom 4284 65,110,000 65.80
6 France 4279 66,996,000 63.87
23 Thailand 3977 68,298,000 58.23
9 Germany 4253 82,800,000 51.36
26 Turkey 3948 79,814,871 49.46
28 Vietnam 3945 92,700,000 42.56
12 Japan 4184 126,760,000 33.01
11 Russia 4218 146,804,372 28.73
18 Brazil 4087 207,287,000 19.72
3 Usa 4500 324,740,000 13.86
2 China 4531 1,382,320,000 3.28

This only all works of course if you snip it at the top 33. Iceland, ranked 48th with its SR of 3541 and population of 338,450 has an SR of 10,462.40 per million. Impossible I know, but it’s fun to play with bad maths and then break it.

Back to what matters though, unless New Zealand gets its Skill Rating up 10 points in the next month, we’re screwed no matter what our population size is.