EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

I simply can't care much about entry fees for official events. That does not mean I don't have an opinion about it.

After all...It is how the rest of the world does it. But I love this blog entry by Mr. Teg - -

http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/05/pay-to-win.html

Yeah, should be easy for the conglomerate leaders out there to "fix" entryprice to levels that 99% of Alliances can't compete with. Once again CCP blatantly flaunt their ignorance in public. I even urge The Mittani and friends to abuse the hell out of the situation, just so we can throw this in their faces, and once again show them just how out of touch they are with reality.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am.
I'm sure K162 can "scrape" the cash together, but I think on principle we just don't want to anymore.

Edit: Allow me to illustrate how "competitive" this tournament is:

Pick the 32 richest Alliances in the game (Blob-conglomerates, Market-PVPers and Wormhole Farmers).
Pick out 32 lucky lottery winners (The 50-100 teams who didn't make the cut clearly just aren't good enough).
Throw them in a tournament and figure out who the "best" PVP Alliance in the game is.

GG.

so what's your brilliant idea, chief? The split between random lottery and bidding for serious contenders is really the only fair to do this while keeping the field a manageable 64.

Off the top of my head:

Top 8 from last year autoqualified for 32-team groupstages. Seeded into A-H groups.
100-128 Teams randomly matched up in a best of 1 knockout stage (Afaik we had around 105-110 signups last year).
Split your 64 winning teams (add teams based on points if less than 128 signups) into 16 groups for pre-qualifying.
Top teams each group (+ some of the teams with best points) seeded into A-H groups in regular 32-team groupstage.

Entryfee doesn't matter, but to discourage no-showers, maybe 5-10 plexes. Skip the auction altogether.

Yes, it would require some more work to pull off, but having seen some other E-Sports out there I'd hardly call it unmanagable. Check out the Dreamhack HON qualifying tournament for example with 128 teams from North America, 128 teams from Europe and 128 teams from Oceania.

Edit: Corrected some of the numbers.

Talk is cheap.

Any work I don't actually have to do is easy.

Any alliance that cannot afford 10 PLEX doesn't deserve to enter imo.

The new rules on entry are great in my opinion and should do alot to get rid of time wasting terrible teams that no one cares to watch and make room for the more serious teams that care enough to make the isk to compete.

Being unable to afford is not the matter in this case.
Most decent game dev companies actually pay money prizes to the winners of tournaments, while CCP has become so unique that they charge their customers with an extra payment for participation.
Lets do some basic calculations:
32 teams (random draw winners) pay 10 plex each.
32 teams pay... presumably 15-20 plex each in order to get an auction slot.
(320+(480-640))/2*$35 = $14000-16800 (/2 as 1 GTC = 2 plex, GTC price is $35).

Since when CCP became so poor?

I don't think anyone would be complaining if the starting bid and entrance fee was 5 billion. This is exactly the same thing, only CCP can actually fund some of the event. It's still the same isk sink, just that now it can make a dent in the cost of operation and the cost of all of the free prizes given out viewers like laptops and computer hardware, plus the rent on the studio equipment and the extra building the need to film in. I can guarantee that however much ccp is getting in plex money, they are footing significantly more just to put the tournament on air. Plus, if you're one of the top two teams, congratulations because you can now buy more plex than you'll ever need.

Everybody that you saw at the end of the last Alliance Tournament (http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/270362_818247079520_38903801_38016653_6809402_n.jpg) had to give up their weekends off for a month or more and I don't think Loxy got a full night's sleep the whole time I was there. In order to run the matches you need at least 4-5 mods or devs, and to stream you need double that. Eve isn't a match friendly game where you can just set a bracket and let teams play, you need to manually teleport them, check all their fits, check all their pods, monitor the boundary, and a myriad of other things throughout the entire match. The amount of overtime they'd have to work is staggering for even a single extra weekend.

You can try and have the prelims be player run, but I can guarantee that you'll have more bombing runs on those matches than you can possibly imagine. The alliance tournament requires devs to work, and a lot of them.

The tournament isn't pay to win, I can guarantee that most of the teams who pay won't win anything. It's pay to play, like any tournament with an open registration and a limited number of slots.

Everything is not a zero sum game FYI. We try to find a happy medium in what is very much NOT a tournament game. I don't think anyone thinks it's perfect at all, but I also don't think it's fair to compare what we do with a game that is designed from the ground up to be nothing more than an e-sport contest like HON or LOL.

That means finding a balance in capital whether that be people or money. I'm sorry if you disagree with that approach but that's what it is and contrary to popular belief we don't all just sit around playing pocket pool all day then randomly decide these things because the tournament bosses need their coffers filled again.

:edit: I'll add that we're quite happy with the way the system is proposed. We think we will provide an awesome tournament and believe we have in the past. If you don't feel that's the case then sorry for disappointing you, but I think it's a bit early to call massive success or tremendous failure at this point simply because you don't like how the teams are being selected.