EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/07/what-rote-kapelle-can-teach-new-players.html

A lot of the trepidation from new players, once they learn how the EVE Online skill system works, is that they can never be competitive, that they can never reach parity, with much older players.

(tl;dr skip to the paragraph following the Theme Parker's link below.)

There is no obvious plateau in EVE Online, as there is in other games (usually that plateau being a level cap.) At some point, in those other MMOs, all characters eventually settle out at a common set of skills.

Whereas that's not the case with EVE Online, every character skill does have a hard cap (every skill progresses to a fixed point unable to progress further), thus within a specific area of the game, players do reach parity with their peers. Any new player with nearly maxed-out skills in frigates and their chosen small weaponry can be competitive, if not outright better, than characters that are years old.

The new player isn't going to be flying pimped out battleships and carriers anytime soon, but players that do fly battlships and dreadnoughts do not fly those to the exclusion of everything else they learned beforehand. Every ship has its place.

I've already covered much of this in my Theme Parker's Guide to EVE Online series. So I won't rehash it all over again.

I'd like to talk about ISK, EVE Online's currency. Since stuff is destroyed in EVE Online, earning the ISK is of vital importance. ISK allows you to replace what you've lost, ships, modules, and implants. New players don't have a lot of it, older players have a tonne of it.

Even after a new player finally understands that 100M skill points doesn't always trump 5M skill points in a fight, they begin to wonder about the ISK divide. New players often wonder how they can compete when older players can afford the best ships and modules.

While it is true that officer modules, faction ammunition, and pirate ships do give bonuses over their regular T1/T2 module, standard ammo, and T1/T2 ship counterparts, player skill plays a larger role in the outcomes of battle. Given players of equal motor and cognitive skills, the player with the 500M ISK frigate is going to win out over the player with the 10M ISK frigate 95 times out of 100 (those numbers pulled out of my ass, though likely accurate.) The thing is, though, players are never of equal piloting skills.

Every year, CCP Games stages a spaceship tournament for EVE Online, the Alliance Tournament. This year, the tenth year for the event, saw one fight in particular that demonstrates, without a doubt, that piling ISK into your ships doesn't equate to victory.

The last match of day six, featured Pandemic Legion versus Rote Kapelle. Both teams are well-known and well-respected for their PvP abilities. Both teams needed the win. Ignore the reported ship values on the match page (linked above.) They do not take into account modules or ship rarity.

Rote Kapelle fielded a fairly standard set-up, with a total ship value of approximately 1.3B ISK. They also fielded a team that was 8 points below the maximum allowable 100 points. Discussing why they did that is out of the scope of this article, but suffice to say that they fielded a team that was weaker than it had to be.

Pandemic Legion, on the other hand, fielded their full 100 point allotment. Beyond that they spent oodles of ISK. Their flag ship was worth 20B ISK alone. The four Malices they brought (only 50 of which exist in the game) are worth approximately 25-30B ISK each. Several of their other ships were worth multiple billions of ISK.

If the tournament was based on ISK alone, Pandemic Legion would have been clear winners, fielding approximately 135B ISK in ships to Rote Kapelle's 1.35B ISK. A 100:1 ratio. The tournament isn't based on what you can spend, though, it's based on what you can blow up. ISK can certainly help, but it doesn't win you the day.

Here is the match. I won't ruin the outcome (though the point of this article might make clear that outcome). I recommend viewing it at 1080P and fullscreen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PYVw-D3b-s

The premiere match, so far, of Alliance Tournament X. And it is an example to all new and aspiring players. Developing your spaceship flying skills goes much farther in this game than having 100B ISK in your wallet, or 100M skillpoints on your skills page. Pandemic Legion may have had the bling on this day, but Rote Kapelle had the internet spaceship skills.



Disclaimer: this article is not to suggest that Pandemic Legion is without internet spaceship skill. They have won the Alliance Tournament three times in the past. Pandemic Legion is a highly skilled team. They were simply outmatched on this day by another very talented team.

Not sure if I should post in this thread, but eh, what the hell.

The tourney really comes down to a few major factors, namely:

- How much you practice.
- How well you keep sensitive information under wraps.
- The experience your pilots have in the ships you're going to fly, as well as associated skillpoints.
- Your wallet, and how it allows you to buy and fly expensive setups that look promising.

But suffice to say, it is a very complex and tricky thing to do - that said, I do encourage anyone interested in competing to find an alliance that is competiting (or prod their own into it), volunteer your time and money, and give it a shot. Fresh blood is always encouraged, and the more wins and even losses you rack up in the tourney, the more experience you'll have for the next time around.

In short, stay in school kids.

Thats all very nice. But still my subscription is cancelled and Ive removed EVE from my laptop after 2 months. Let me tell you why:

1) EVE requires a lot of patience, especially at the start, where you need to wait for basic skills. I dont have that patience, I come home exhausted after work and just want to have fun, not wait months to have fun.

2) EVE is primarily an economic simulator, not a pew pew game. I work in business and marketing, Im full of makíng money all day long, I couldnt possibly care less about having a virtual job raising money in EVE. I dropped 3 PLEXes in my 2 months, but it only made the game even more boring.

3) PvP is just .. weird. And painfully boring. Graphics are ugly, game mechanics are so simplistic even an untrained chimpanzee could get a hold of them and get bored to death in a week, fights are decided before they even start - or at least it seems to be so (as in, having good intelligence and bringing the right ship is more important than the actual PvP and pressing F1, F2, F3).

4) EVE is absolutely casual hostile - you cant just log into the game and go have lonewolf fun when you feel like it (or at least not in your first months of gaming) or queue for some action when you have a spare hour to play. You have to log in, fly around like a total moron for crazy amount of time to group up with people who you either have to have luck to find or wait for them to be online and even then the PvP is nowhere near because you either have to scout a helpless target (isnt really a challenging fun like, say, WoW arenas) or camp a gate (even more manly). Same goes for making ISK if youre a kid and cant pay for you game (I think people who farm ISK 30 days to pay for EVE and save 15E are likely the lowest breed of MMO nerds I ever encountered in my 10 years of online gaming)

5) EVE has no endgame - I can either become a professional industrialist (I would rather kill myself than to have a job in MMO and seriously, all of those "pro indy players" should seriously consider finding a real job instead). Or I can become a blobber (eg an anonymous purple square in an ocean of purple squares pressing F1 as told to to shoot red squares). Or I can become a "small gang PvPer", which basically equals the ganker of PvErs or profi gate camper. Neither of them is really exciting to be honest.

There are probably tons of people who love spaceships too much to drop EVE, who love making virtual money, making virtual spaceships or just making sure someone is pissed for losing his ship.

I personally hated every day I logged in (which I later almost never did, even setting up skill queue seemed dumb), I cant honestly believe I endured for 2 months but now I totally understand why the laughed at MMOs have millions of subcribers while EVE has 40k online peaks.

I know 9 people in real life ranging from little kids to old bums who tried EVE and only one survived through his first year. He is 14 years old and loves to gank "carebears" while having nothing better to do with his life. Pretty much sums it up for me.

Well, the OP clearly had the intention of luring newbies into the game and / or keeping the existing ones in it. I offered a real new player insight.

Loyalty of EVE people never ceases to amaze me.

1st - I played on maxed out settings. As I stated, I work in business and marketing. Try googling it kiddo, youll find out it involves a lot of graphics to work with, my laptop is likely worth more than youre annual savings.

2nd - I spoke of PvP mechanics, which are indeed simplistic compared to basically any other MMO on the market. Or would you call clicking typically 3-5 active icons hard? Whoa :-)

Anyway, I expected to be flamed. Ill just go one of the "other" games to have challenging fun, no point arguing with the deluded anyway.

A completely uninformed opinion.

Son.

No, you offered just one's view on it. Yours. Just because you could not hack it in this game, or didn't like it, is just that. You didn't like it.

The message from the Rote vs PL match, and the overall theme from ATX, is that there are so many strong teams and so many unique archetypes that anything can happen on a given match. PL can field a 170b bling fit and get dumpstered by a 92 point hardcounter. Although the combat itself is not very indicative of Eve combat, one aspect holds true: regardless of isk, regardless of skill, regardless of numbers - superior fleet comp will always give you a chance.

when you have a blog about a spaceship game you should probably take a good look at your life

EVE Online - When you've been served a sh*t sandwich during your day, come to EVE forums to vent your frustrations. Real-life can be hard.