EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

I was a little hesitant to make a thread like this since we didn't make it that far, but meh, we won more matches than PL.

About a week before the deadline for the teams were up, someone asked in our alliance forums if we were going to make a team. I stepped up to the plate and offered to fully fund and field a team of Nulli Secunda members. I accepted everyone that showed interest in the team, as well as calling on a few alliance tournament participants. We came up with 17 members and filled the rest with alts. I had never been in a tournament and never led a team before so it was quite the learning experience for me. When the auction came around I had put forth a good deal of plex and a we also got a good bit from member donations. We ended up getting a spot for 36 plex, definitely not the worst it could have been, but I love CCP for the refund :).

We had a huge problem of getting members to show up for practices and stuff, we had a really rough start. We never had one solid practice and I can say only two that actually achieved anything. However, we we're still confident of our ability to get somewhere in the tournament. Kitt JT and myself were the major EFT warriors on the team. We churned out about 8 concepts, with a main goal of fielding teams that were unique, it was very hard to do and we quickly understood the reason why cookie cutter setups were the norm. We were not going to be put off by such thinking.

Our first match was against Goggle Wearing Internet Crime Fighters. We had banned the bhaalgorn and the tengu. We were going to bring our nightmare setup, that could permanently run an ASB and with heat absorb almost 3000dps. We knew that a kitting team would just kill our tackle and then just run the clock down on points, and we knew a cap warfare team would cause a problem, though we didn't know to what extent as we never tested it. On the other had we knew we would decimate a rush setup, even being able to handle vindicators and kronos setups. We were conficent GWICF was going to bring a rush setup, and much to our dismay they brought a kitting setup. When we failed to pull together and take out their frigates, we knew the match was over. Someone on GWICFs team told us in local we were fail for not fitting prop mods, they would have made zero difference, nightmares just don't go that fast even with MWDs. Also projecting damage at long range would have been no good either, you just simply can't apply the damage far our. As you saw with the vargur and mach sitting at 60km easily getting solid shots on us and doing very little damage. Lastly bumping macherial equals dead macherial. Overall we just went up against the one team type we absolutely did not want to see and lost, no big surprise.

Our second match against blue ballers, my favorite match of all showed our vigilant team. It consisted of 2 vigilant an ashimmu damnation logistics and frig support. We made strong showing, though the team we went up against would have lost to pretty much anything. The amount of DPS and defense we had was staggering, and the team worked better than I ever hoped. Two main ships banned was the bhaalgorn and the curse, the main weakness of the team was cap, and keeping these ships off the field was crucial.

Our third match was against Much Crying Old Experts, while we lost, we made a strong showing and it was a respectable match. We were planning on fielding our broadsword setup, however much to our surprise MCOE thought it would be just funny to ban them. I banned two battleships without thinking, I should have banned the bhaalgorn so we could field our vigilant team again. So we did the next best thing for the ships that had been banned, we quickly made a bhaalgorn team on the spot, we had outlined the concept on the forums be we never really sat down and looked at it, so we had some idea of what to fit up. When we saw bhaalgorns on the field we knew were were in for a special match. As the match started we played it safe, stayed back and tried to draw the enemy in. (If we had known from the start that MCOE didnt bring the full 70 point roster, we would have maintained a defensive posture) However, we gave in and took a more aggressive approach, an oracle was trying to flank our left side for some reason, it was off by itself so we stuck our assault frigs on it, given enough time it would have eventually died. Our two bhaalgorns comitted to their bhaalghorn, given enough time we would have taken it down as well. If you watch the match Kitt JT was droping rather fast, this was because I was holding back with the logistics, I didn't want to get caught, if I did that would have been the end of the match and I knew it. Eventually I had to come in and rep up the bhaalgorn, which did not take long and I knew I would have no problem bringing back up to full armor. However, this left me exposed to the enemy frigates, I tried to evade them but they go faster. I called for logistics drones, and assault frig support, but it was too late. As I went down, the game was over. If we had stayed back and made them come into us, I am absolutely confident we would have won by bringing the clock down to zero and pulling through on a one point lead.

Overall, it was extremely fun, I learned a lot and next time I will know what to do. I look forward to fielding a team in the future, with more of a time window to practice and flesh out a team. You cannot field a team on hopes and dreams, you have to practice and they have to be productive. Two weeks is not enough, to start up a team and expect to win. All I can say is thank you CCP for this wonderful opprotunity.

Good Read, Loving these stories