The Best Female Overwatch Players [December 2019]

The hero shooter craze of multiplayer battle games may have been replaced by the battle royale genre, but that hasn’t stopped Overwatch from being one of the biggest games in the world. While the genre owns a tremendous debt of gratitude to Team Fortress 2 for paving the way for the idea of the hero-based online shooter, Overwatch has become one of the biggest games in the world on the strength of its gameplay alone. From the incredible, Pixar-like graphics to the tight gameplay and a wide selection of game modes included by Blizzard, it’s no wonder that Overwatch has retained such a major player base since its initial launch two years ago. With regular updates and the backing of a company as economically well-off as Activision-Blizzard, it’s no wonder that Overwatch has captivated the gaming community for far longer than any of its imitators.

With the success of the game, it’s no surprise that Blizzard made the move to create the Overwatch League, a professional eSports league dedicated to Overwatch with Blizzard’s full backing. First announced in 2016, the League was seen as an advancement of an already-popular game, designed to compete with the likes of Dota 2, Call of Duty, and League of Legends in the ever-popular eSports genre of entertainment. With eSports leagues becoming mainstream with distribution deals through the likes of ESPN, it makes sense for Blizzard to try to get in on the ground floor. And by Blizzard controlling the League from the start, the company will have more control over the shape of the League to come.

As we ramp up into 2020, the Overwatch League is about to enter its third season beginning on February 8th, with 20 teams and 28 matches throughout the season. Despite an improved second season from OWL, the League hasn’t existed without its fair share of controversy. For example, during its first season, multiple players have been found making sexist, racist, and homophobic comments that caused players to be suspended for their actions, released from their team contracts, or at least received formal warnings from the League for causing havoc among the players.

One of the more controversial elements of the League sprang as stage one of the game’s inaugural season began, when spectators of Overwatch realized the League had yet to contract a female player. While some were quick to leap to the Overwatch League’s defense, citing that the game had only a few pro-level female players to begin with, it was still strange to see such a game become a boys-only club so fast. Though the first female player was signed to a team contract in stage two of season one, it was obvious that plenty of progress could still be made in future seasons of the game.

So, with all that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the top female players in Overwatch today. When you’re looking for a good Overwatch player, you don’t just want someone good at the game. You want to look for someone who works well with others, especially if they happen to be on a team with them. You want someone who is good at multiple heroes, or at least, excellent at one or two. Someone who knows their position, knows how to be patient, and can react and adapt to a new situation at the drop of a hat.

Unlike our list of the top female Twitch streamers and YouTubers, it’s quite a bit more difficult to verify female Overwatch players, thanks to the anonymity that can easily come with playing games online. These seven personalities all have fairly large followings online, making it easy to find out their rankings, scores, and to watch some incredible gameplay from each of them. While we can’t guarantee they’re the best female players in the entire game, if you’re serious about watching some incredible Overwatch players, these seven are certainly players to keep an eye on in the future. In no particular order, let’s check out seven of the best female Overwatch players.

Fran, who originally went by the name FranPlaysHalo online before switching over to the username Fran on Twitch, is a streamer and Overwatch player who happens to be one of the best players in the game. Ranking anywhere from the 95th to the 98th percentile, Fran is one of those players who consistently puts out great plays, great teamwork, and more. As you might imagine based on her original name, Fran rose to prominence while playing Halo, one of the earliest modern online competitive shooters, but has since spent much of her time focused exclusively on playing Overwatch. In fact, she now partners with Atlanta Reign, one of the OWL teams from North America, for her streams.

While playing, Fran mostly focuses on support and tank characters, though she’s a flexible player and good at making the game work for her. Recently, she’s been focusing on heroes like Zenyatta and Brigitte, both support characters, along with other heroes like Reinhardt and Lucio. With a skill ranking over 4,000, Fran is consistently ranked in the top 200 worldwide, making her one of the best female players focused on Overwatch right now. Maybe the best part: while plenty of Overwatch streamers have moved to streaming games like Fortnite, Fran has remained an Overwatch-heavy channel, focused on showing off some great gameplay and skills. With over 209,000 subscribers, Fran’s Twitch channel shows no signs of slowing down.

Ysabel Müller, better known to the Overwatch community as Noukky, is a great player in her own right, but her accomplishments in the Overwatch scene don’t stop at just being good at the game. In addition to being an excellent player known for her support and tank rolls, Noukky has become well known for her role in the competitive scene prior to and following the rise of the Overwatch League. Originally from Germany, Noukkey became known for her part in organizing, working for, or creating tournaments in the Overwatch Contenders league, an official Major series tournament co-organized by Blizzard.

Since then, Noukky has become the manager of the British Hurricane, an Overwatch Contenders team owned by Cloud9, one of the biggest games in competitive gaming. If the logo and team colors for the British Hurricane seems familiar, it might be because the Hurricanes are the official Contenders team for the London Spitfire, one of the official Overwatch League teams. While Noukky has gone largely silent on her own Twitch channel, she has been working hard as the manager of the British Hurricane, along with the coach and analyst of her team, to make sure her team’s players are ready for each match. She even was recently featured in an article for eSports Heaven, where her managing style was on full display. Ultimately, Noukky is a great player and a great manager to keep an eye on, making her a double threat throughout the upcoming season of OWL.

Currently, her Twitter and Twitch.tv are offline, with her Twitch account noting that the streams should relaunch soon.

Speaking of the London Spitfire, we have a second player-turned-manager on this team to focus on. Susie Kim has a long history, not just with Overwatch, but with eSports as a whole. For more than a decade now, Kim has been focusing her life and career on all aspects of eSports from managing to coaching to playing herself. Known as lilsusie or “the eSports Mom,” Kim has spent much of her career focused on providing guidance and strategy for younger players. She was influential in the mid-2000s Starcraft scene after having attended Blizzcon in 2005 and meeting players and commentators who could sense her passion. Her ability to speak both English and Korean paid off when she was asked to help translate for an on-stage interview at the World Cyber Games in Seattle after the translator that had been hired became stuck in traffic.

Since then, she’s contributed in countless ways to the eSports community. She’s worked with Twitch to help build out their South Korean network. She’s participated in games like Starcraft, Starcraft II, World of Tanks, and League of Legends, both behind the scenes and as a broadcaster. In the first season of OWL, she worked as the manager of London Spitfire, putting in effort to provide unlimited support for the players and making sure their needs, both physically and emotionally, are met while they train and compete. Like Noukky, Kim does player Overwatch in her own time, playing ranked and occasionally hitting silver in the process. Her favorite heroes are Bastion, D.VA, and Lucio. You can read more of ESPN’s profile of Kim here.

As an Overwatch streamer, AnneMunition has achieved some major success, with her stream even being featured by Blizzard during a streamer spotlight. She’s been streaming since 2014 when she quit her job and went full-time as a streamer, having spent much of her youth playing video games both casually and competitively. During her time playing Overwatch while streaming, AnneMunition has played multiple roles and characters, including offense, defense, support, and tank, most recently showing her support for characters like Pharah, Widowmaker, and Zarya. When Brigitte was announced for Overwatch in February as an engineer turned squire who plays as a support in-game.

For those looking to tune into the stream, however, AnneMunition hasn’t been providing much in the form of Overwatch over the last few months. Though she did play a pretty big stream live from the Games Developers Conference (GDC) in March of 2018, the last year has seen Anne focused more on Apex Legends than Overwatch. Still, AnneMunition continues to be one of the best players around, and is well-worth watching both for her occasional Overwatch gameplay and her Apex streams alike.

Loserfruit is an incredibly popular Twitch streamer, with over 16 million viewers on her streams and nearly 500,000 subscribers as of writing. As a streamer, Loserfruit (real name Kathleen) cut her teeth primarily on competitive shooters, both first and third-person, becoming incredibly popular for her entertaining streams and her solid gameplay alike. While Loserfruit isn’t ranked as highly as Barcode or Geguri in overall players worldwide, she’s still in the top-1000 in the United States, a difficult spot to obtain by any measure. When playing Overwatch, she tends to play characters that deal out tons of damage, like McCree, Tracer, and Widowmaker, while also experimenting with different characters and heroes in-game.

When Loserfruit isn’t playing Overwatch, however, she’ll often compete in similar games, including more traditional first-person shooters like Call of Duty, and more recently, a whole lot of Fortnite. That said, Fortnite hasn’t completely dominated Loserfruit’s streams on Twitch. She still plays Overwatch fairly often, jumping into matches to try out new heroes and skins or new maps when they roll out. Loserfruit is definitely worth checking out on Twitch if you haven’t already.

It’s hard to find much information about Barcode (seen in-game as IIIIIIIIII and whose real name is Ally) outside of her stats and the commentary she hosts on her Twitch channel, but any research into pro-level Overwatch players will undoubtedly include information on her. Ranked in the top one percent of players, Barcode is considered one of the best DPS players in Overwatch today and one of the most popular female players in the game overall, so it was a bit of a surprise when she said she wasn’t interested in going pro (although considering the controversy that has surrounded the League since its launch, it’s less surprising than some might have expected).

What is there to say about Barcode that hasn’t already been said by her numerous fans around the world? Originally having become known for playing Widowmaker and Tracer, Barcode has also become known for playing heroes like McCree, Soldier: 76, and more. Her skill ranking typically sits between 4300 and 4400, consistently placing her in the upper-echelons of Overwatch‘s competitive league, and is generally speaking, one of the most interesting and fun players to watch stream on Twitch. And while watching Barcode play Overwatch is the highlight of her streams, she also plays some Fortnite every once in a while to balance the channel out as a whole. If you’re interested in watching a player who seems to be great at every hero she tries her hand at, you have to check out Barcode.

There was never any doubt Geguri would make this list. Not only is she a fantastic player in her own right, and the only female player in the entire Overwatch League as of this writing, but she’s had a long history of making news since the launch of Overwatch two years ago. By June of 2016, just one month after the launch of the game worldwide, Geguri—whose real name is Kim Se-yeon, had developed a reputation as one of the best Zarya players, despite only being sixteen at the time. Geguri had competed at the Nexus Cup and had won handedly, shooting her in-game opponents with such accuracy that by the end of the tournament, she’d been accused of cheating by members of the team Dizziness, who’d competed against her own team.

Despite Blizzard repeatedly saying that Geguri was the real deal, Dizziness stated that she must’ve been playing with cheats enabled to hit her accuracy marks as well as she had. Two players in particular had stated they’d quit the game if it turned out she wasn’t actually cheating, and when Blizzard and Korean site Inven hosted a livestream with Geguri to prove she was as good as her record stated, they followed through, though not before one of the Dizziness players—Strobe—made a death threat towards Geguri. It was a messy incident, the first in a long line of Overwatch conduct embarrassments that still continue to this day.

Following the incident, Geguri faded from the limelight for a bit, joining Korean team EHOME until they disbanded in 2017, and then signing to ROX Orcas. Once it became obvious that Zarya, Geguri’s main hero, was becoming popular and a viable pick in the metagame once more, rumors began to spiral that Geguri would become the first female Overwatch player signed to the Overwatch League. Despite being passed over in initial picks, Geguri was finally signed in February of 2018 to the Shanghai Dragons. She’s still with the team, and will once again be representing them in the 2020 season.

As of writing, Geguri’s skill rating places her within the 99th percentile of players worldwide, so you know you’re getting the real deal with Geguri. She streams on Twitch fairly regularly, though her page and streams are spoken in her native Korean. You can also watch her compete whenever the Shanghai Dragons play, and you can find that schedule here. Time Magazine awarded Geguri as one of 2019’s Next Generation Leaders for her work in the eSports arena, and it’s easy to see why.