In-Game Events and Gatherings

Hello Spacefriends!

On the 11th June we announced Oceanic Assault on the o7 show. Since then we have processed over 100 sign ups and begun preliminary matches. During this time we also secured sponsorship from CCP, eve-bet, EveNews24 and Iwantisk in addition to this we will be accepting more sponsors all the way up to the finals.

Today I'm here to announce we will be streaming live from the Oceanic Assault studio at 1115UTC (15 minutes after the beginning of downtime) on the 8th August 2015 on the official CCP Twitch channel.

We will be accepting submissions for advertisements to run during the tournament, your adverts should be a maximum 20s, can be in any format as long as they are 1920x1080 (i or p is fine) and at least 25fps.

During the finals stream we will be joined by Hunt from eve-bet to give away a billions of isk worth of prizes, Slim Mat and Shadoo as commentators and yours truly as one of our presenters.

A recent donation from IceIce Baby has increased our isk pool by 25b.

1st Place
1x EVE: The Second Decade Collectors Edition
1x EVE Universe: The Art of New Eden (Signed by devs)
1x Quafe Dominix
1x Quafe Megathron
10x Plex
16b isk

2nd Place:
1x EVE: The Second Decade Collectors Edition
1x EVE Universe: The Art of New Eden (Signed by devs)
1x Quafe Vexor
5x Plex
8b isk

3rd and 4th place:
1x EVE Universe: The Art of New Eden
1x Frigate Skin (TBA)
2x Plex
4b isk

5th - 8th place:
1b isk

A couple of closing notes: If you are in Western Australia and have the knowledge and skill to be a tournament commentator feel free to send me an evemail.

To the competitors: Good luck and may the meta be forever in your favour.

The second round of matches starts in an hour and a half.

We will be broadcasting voice commentary on netgameradio.

http://netgameradio.com

Tl;Dr: Intense hatred for boundaries.

So first up big thanks to Chiimera, Bnizzle and Otto Bismark for hosting and refereeing Oceanic Assault. You guys rock. I'm super looking forward to next year.

Most of you know me as BayneNothos in the EDU channel. After hearing about this I joined up straight away but alas the Bayne character has issues with sec staus and general Amarrian hatred for him. Luckily I had Natalya here from Dust 514 days around and fairly well skilled to sign up with and fellow corpie from Germany, Fetox74, decided to come along too.

Pre OA: The weeks leading up to OA were filled with light theorycrafting and light stressing on the possibilities of potential fits. We managed to get a couple of sessions on Singularity to fight against one another which Fetox thoroughly dominated. Generally both our thoughts settled on what I call the Mini Deimos Thorax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqBSnz2SDu0

We both use a lot of active rep boats and use similar thorax fits in w space so it'd be familiar and still very potent. I also got to run a few fights vs some other EDU peeps which was nice.

First Round: I got matched up vs Kane Carnifex, Fetox vs Garion Thelas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6RqWSvES54

And I straight up derped up hard. I got exactly what I wanted to fight. I'd fought a RLML Caracal on Singularity so knew I could hold up vs it no problem and would be faster than it. All I had to do was not mess up and I should grind him down no problems. Kane to his credit sat way out on the edge of the boundary. I did see this and shut off the mwd early, about 20km short but turned it back on again as it kinda looked from my position that he'd came inwards. He hadn't and I boundary violated by a couple of km.
GF.
If I had my time over again the second prop boost I'd roll in at about a thousand m/s and cruise in ontop. It looked like he was just afterburner fitted so I had plenty of speed over him to catch up again after sliding in behind his orbit path. Lesson learned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86hnwin9Oq4

Fetox had some problems first with concord, twice lol. After that some overview fleetmember problems but kinda got them solved in the end. He'll come along later and talk more about it from his eyes.

Second Round: So I didn't get a second chance draw but Fetox was still in vs Kromix Xun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beVmSt9fhiw

Kind of a replay of my fight. Caracal out on the edge, boundary violation. lol.

So all up, curses to boundaries but we had fun.
See you all next year!
-Nat and Fetox

We've had another great AAR written by Edeity which can be found here:.

To quote the man

The audio commentary from the second round of matches will be out soon. If possible you could edit it into your video.

Awesome AAR

--->continued

As I watched the tournament stream I took careful note of what everyone was flying as killboards are always delayed, and a lot of people seemed to not have APIs in any of the major killboards. At this point my main worry was being able to predict my opponent’s ships. With my full tank setup I was pretty much a lock to beat any brawly setup, but if I mistakenly took my projection setup into a brawl my tank would be severely weakened and there was a high chance of dying.

I took a gamble on my match to go into the quarter finals against Cannonfodder Ellecon. I saw that the pilot had brought a rapid light Caracal in the past, but from watching the majority of matches, it seemed the rapid light users has been sticking to fury missiles, which meant I would be able to hit with precision HAMs in my normal full tank fit. I got lucky as my opponent opted to use a blaster Moa for our match. Having to sacrifice two of his mid slots for a MWD and a scram meant that his tank was significantly weaker than mine. The Moa had great damage, but it couldn’t hold up to the consistent dps of the HAMs, and he was inevitably caught between ASB reload cycles.

At this point I was pretty stoked. I was in the top eight and was “in the money.” Both Joffy Aulx-Gao and Techstrategyremake, pilots who I considered to be serious competition in my arm of the bracket had been knocked out, and I had a soul read on my next round opponent Runkett. So far Runkett had been consistently using what appeared to be a full kite heavy missile Caracal. I swapped back to my projection fit and warped to the arena at zero. My read was dead on. My HAMs began applying almost immediately, and even as my opponent burned to the edge of the arena, he couldn’t escape the damage. Within a few moments the match was over and I was moving on to the top four.

Sumiko Tanaka had not shown a consistent choice of one particular ship in the tournament, but had favored brawling fits regardless of the hull. I swapped back to my full tank fit, and warped to the field at 30km again. When I saw the Vexor waiting for me I knew it was almost certainly going to be another win for me. However, the match ended up being a little more interesting than my previous encounters with Vexors. As expected the Vexor MWDed right onto me and began applying neuts. My opponent’s tank was spiking wildly, but he managed to hang in as his neuts turned off my invuln field, softening my tank. At this point something strange happened. My heated invuln field got stuck in heat mode, and became non-interactive. Unable to turn off the heated module my rack quickly built up heat, endangering my ASBs. I frantically spammed the rack heat button on and off, which managed to solve the problem in the nick of time, with both of my ASBs 90+% heat damaged. Shortly thereafter my opponent ran out of cap boosters and his tank finally submitted to my HAMs.

Going into the finals I was pretty sure I was going to see a Vexor from my opponent as he had favored the ship heavily throughout the tournament. I stuck to my full tank setup, and sucked another blue pill before heading onto the field. Coming in at my usual 30km I was greeted by a rail Moa. I was a little worried, as he could potentially outrange me and then it would all be over. I got lucky though. Joshua MIstweaver had opted to go with a full tank no prop fit, which meant that my slightly faster Caracal was able to dictate range. I closed in on the Moa, trading rounds of missiles with hybrid charges. I miscalculated the Moa’s ability to track me at close ranges and as I came in close I the damage spiked. I immediately moved back out to a 15KM orbit and the damage subsided to a much more reasonable level. The match continued on at length, with both of us trading a few drones, and me slowly orbiting him. As we continued our slugfest I realized I was getting out to about 65km on the arena, and started to head back in. I knew this would cause me to cut back across Joshua, allowing him to load his close range ammo and give me another beating, but I was not about to boundary violate in the finals. As I cut across him back into the center of the arena I caught as momentary reprieve as his tracking slacked and he reloaded. Then he began hammering into my shield. I had extreme heat damage on all my modules at this point (98% on my invuln and 90+% on both ASBs) so I could no longer overheat to get bigger boosts. Having to adapt cause me to miss calculate on my reps and I bled a significant amount of armor. However, as with all my other matches the incredible tank of the Caracal won out. Joshua ran out of cap boosters like so many of my previous opponents, although sooner than I had expected him too. The reliable dps of the HAMs had simply outstripped the intermittent tracking of his railguns. Going into the finals match it was not the match I was most worried about, but it ended up being the best match I had throughout the entire tournament.

There are a few closing points I would like to make about my OA experience. First, thank you to the organizers of the OA tournament and those who donated to the prize pool. I think everyone had a ton of fun, and I look forward to next year. Secondly, thank you to all my opponents for being great sportsmen, and for showing up to your matches (I got to fight every round). And lastly, in almost ten years of playing eve across many characters, I had never flown a Caracal until this tournament. Why I have been ignoring this space puma all these years I can’t say, but it just goes to show that there’s always something new to do in this game, regardless of how long you have been playing.

a good read there Torei Dutalis, thx for posting!

I felt the OA was a general success and was very happy that I got so far.

I think the format and rules could be adapted a little to have the fights more open and a little less tanky but thats thoughts for the next year I guess.

Big thanks to the OA team and all Pilots to make this a EVE experience to remember!