EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

I wanted to publicly recap what the ATXI experience was like for Exodus, as well as get the opportunity to give credit to those who made our AT run possible.

Despite only having played since March, 2012, I decided to shoulder the responsibility of team captain. While I expected this to be at the very least difficult, in retrospect, I probably would have never had stepped up had I known exactly just how difficult this undertaking was going to be in the end.

Due to the size of Exodus being what it is, (there’s maybe 50 actual people in our alliance, only a handful of whom are active) there were some rather unique challenges that we faced as a team. Practicing, theorycrafting and preventing burnout were the main challenges that we faced as a team. There were only about three people who ever put in a significant amount of effort, which meant that those of us who were leading the team were essentially taking on a second full time job.

Getting good practice was a constant struggle and probably what lead to our downfall more than anything else. We were never able to get more than fourteen members online at any point during our practice sessions. This meant that we were only able to test certain portions of fleet comps that we wanted to run, and required us to do lots of multiboxing and running link alts in an attempt to accurately simulate a tournament environment. We ended up only having maybe five or so practices sessions in which we were able to get enough people online in order to properly test any of what we had theorycrafted.

Theorycrafting was a constant struggle for us as well. Relatively early on, we realized that ATXI was going to be a Game of Drones. Sentry setups are not only able to do a large amount of damage, but are able to project their damage from essentially everywhere inside the arena, while largely being immune to e-war. While we really only had two theorycrafters with myself being busy trying to run the team, we were able focus most our attention towards drone setups.

Week One:

After CCP released the bracket we were somewhat nervous. While we knew that we’d been given a relatively easy bracket, we knew next to nothing about our first weekend opponents JIHADASQUAD or Exiled Ones. Given that there were no bans for the first week, we decided to run triple dominix setups versus both of our opponents. We killed pretty much everything on field while taking no losses, and started preparing for our second week.

Week Two:

Our next week of matches put us up against Transmission Lost and Late Night Alliance. We knew that Transmission Lost was going to bring a shield tinker setup, so we opted to not show our hand to any of our stronger setups, and brought a weak dominix armor tinker with neuts and racial ecm to break their cap chain.

Late Night Alliance made us more cautious than any team we’d faced previously, and they correctly banned out our dominix setups. Against them, we opted to bring what was more or less the same setup we’d brought during the first weekend, but with heavy neuting armageddons to counter their heavy dps blaster battleships.

Week Three:

Against the Ronin, we knew that’d we be forced to bring out some of our more serious setups. From watching their previous matches, we knew that they were fans of blasters based setups with a heavy assault frigate wing, so we decided to bring harpies and a link tengu as a defensive screen. The Ronin fought well round 1, but they were outcomped, and we started off with a quick 1-0 lead. In the second round, called our primaries poorly, got swarmed and then promptly died in a fire. At the beginning of the final round vs Ronin, we were able to quickly kill the enemy logistics, picked off the hostile assault frigate wing, and then spent the last few minutes of the match clearing off of the navy scorpions. Ronin was a very competent opponent, who never failed to punish us for every mistake we made.

Round 1 vs Hydra, we came against them with Navy Dominix/Sin drone team (which in retrospect was a terrible idea) We spent forever trying to shoot at a 100mn ab’ing Guardian which took the better part of five minutes to die. One of our hero Navy Dominixes was able to neut off his ab and hardeners, and we were finally able to kill their logistics. However by this time, we had lost nearly half our points, so I ordered everything onto one of the limited edition ships, and we were able to kill a malice before all of our ships were taken out.

Round 2 vs Hydra, we brought the same setup we had brought round 1 vs a Hydra rush team supported by an Etana and Cambions. Knowing that the Etana Hydra had lost vs PL had a single energy transfer, and would prevent us from neuting off any hardners they might have, I chose to primary the Etana. While the Etana did die, by the time we had managed to kill it, our logistics was dead, and we lost the dps race against them.

For someone who has played since 2012 you did a seriously good job at being captain. I don't think I'm ready for a captain role yet and I've been playing this game since ~2004.

Was good watching you guys fight, great job, cya next year!

Yeah, impressive showing considering your circumstances. I've been in the same seat, me and 2 other guys trying to lead the BANE team back in AT8 with a team too small to run proper tests with, having to base it all on pure theorycrafting. It's hard and a serious disadvantage compared to larger teams, but you still managed to perform well, much better than we did.

Bloody hell, you guys did incredibly well with those challenges to preparation. Being a small alliance does present a few unique... Experiences during tournament time, don't it?