EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

First off thanks to CCP and all the teams who competed, I really enjoyed the alliance tournament, it was great.

Disclaimer - I am a bit of a noob in Eve and if you find the following noobish that may be why.

My only grip with the tournament was how drone heavy the whole thing seemed. I remember watching the first weekend and practically every match had 3 domis and drones. I almost didn't watch the next two weekends which would have been a huge mistake. It got much better with the next two weekend but overall I'm left with a very droney after taste.

Not sure if anyone agrees with me but I'd rather see more piloting and shooting actual guns. At one point I was wondering if drones have such good guns why don't they fit those guns on the spaceships?
I think Fozzie said something about nerfing the tinker setup so hopefully we will see less sitting in one spot at 0 velocity in future tourneys. That might be enough right there.

Anyway that's my two cents, again thank you very much CCP and everyone who took part. That was a lot of fun to watch.
Ohhhhh and well done for the streams not dropping like last year - that really pissed a lot of people off, me included. Great improvement this year :)

I want know which companies manufacture sentry drones, because they clearly financed the tournament pretty heavily.

:tinfoil:

Maybe that will change for ATXII with the new and improved CREST API now released. It's possible that # of drones and drone types could be shown on the UI. Although, the AT UI is pretty cramped as it is.

I agree that the sentry dominance was rather boring to watch and while it got better in the later stages with less Domis I'd say the Gilas/Ishtars/whatever were still too strong with them.

And I think there's a relatively easy fix for sentry dominance both in the AT and also for their (ab)use on TQ in these slowcat setups. Just make assigning drones work like with fighters where you can't control more than your skills allow.

That would mean less instalocking sentries and even more importantly it means you could use ewar in a meaningful way against a drone setup. If each support frig can only control 5 sentries then damps and ECM become a viable option. This would probably remove a lot of the boring dominance without even touching any stats.

I have to disagree there. While the differences you picked out are of course correct, I think the main advantages of Domi and cruiser sentry setups are the same: very applicable long-range damage and immunity to ewar. Control plays such a big part in tournament matches and it just can't be applied against sentry drone teams to any significant effect.

Oh, I think they were. I haven't counted the matches, but I think if you were to look at sentry vs. non-sentry matches this year you'd find a win quota of around 80-90% which is what I would define as "I-WIN".

... is that sentry setups were banned a lot. Without bans we probably would've seen sentry setups all the time after it became clear that they were strongest. Please note that all the other setups you listed usually only won when not going against sentries.

@ Rob Crowley



I think this generalization is misdirected. It seems as though you have underappreciated domi v. armageddon metagame contest. Both the domi and the geddon benefit from the sentry drone advantages described, however the dominix prevailed in the metagame over the geddon even though the geddon sported superior control modules. Why is this? Because the advantage of the dominix was in denying enemy control (by wiping out the support wing with superior tracking drones) instead of the geddon's superior control. If the team opposing the dominix setup was able to keep their support wing alive it'd be a much simpler matter to catch and brawl the dominixes; it is exactly this denial of control that made the dominix prevail in the metagame.



I think you're underappreciating previous tournaments and over-emphasizing the later weekends of the tournament. In previous tournaments one of the most dominant setups on field were the "Windicators" featuring strong Vindicator cores that trampled much of the opposition. While their overall win rating was like the above (80-90%) it wasn't that "Windicators" were overpowered. It was simply that stronger teams saw the advantage of this setup over others and chose to field it more often, and there were many teams that underperformed in the setups and got themselves massacred (just not enough to drop the win ratio too much). So it was the strong teams carrying the ships, not the strong ships carrying the teams. This can also be seen even further back after Hydra introduced the Stealth Bomber teams.

Also, we can both agree that later weekends in this tournament skewed the results of the metagame war with bans. I went further and browsed the entire first two days (64 matches) comparing setups and looking at winners. Day 1 saw strong, but not to the exclusion of everything else, use of sentry setups (compared to day 2), and they were generally fielded by powerful teams and saw great results. The sentry setups proliferated in the extreme in day 2, and their win ratio remained intact because of it, but far more teams fielding sentry setups died in their copycatting efforts.

Below are a few matches I found in days 1 and 2, listed chronologically, where sentry setups (defined by the majority of their core ships using sentries) either underperformed or were defeated by non-sentry setups.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87A30CySgZg&list=PLQvKSs1k6DLOurN8bu82rZ5OhKPYFVaQ0 armageddons v ravens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0fGGOsXRFw&list=PLQvKSs1k6DLOurN8bu82rZ5OhKPYFVaQ0 domis v vindicators

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCd8ggqJlNw&list=PLQvKSs1k6DLMpIYY3BOimUasUXuayrpjN vindicators v geddons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARzaUIjkN2Q&list=PLQvKSs1k6DLMpIYY3BOimUasUXuayrpjN N. Scorps v geddons

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMB1rDDay4E&list=PLQvKSs1k6DLMpIYY3BOimUasUXuayrpjN domis v vindicators



I'll refer you to the above for most of that. And you are right, bans did skew the results. And, again, I concede that, as the weekend went on, sentries (as the dominant weapon type) became more and more unchallenged. But dismissing sentry v sentry teams is, imo, an oversight. A dominant metagame where it's not the ship but the weapon that is prevailing means a whole lot more then a simple ship type prevailing. The later matches where all-in dps setups squared away with doctrine domi setups and hard counter setups with traditional rattlesnakes all used sentry drones but in extremely varied ways. This was even done in TRADITIONAL ships. Let me emphasize that the setup that won the tournament was a TRADITIONAL (defined by unchanged from previous tournaments) ship: the rattlesnake. It didn't benefit from a redesign, and sentries themselves weren't buffed in between this tournament and last, so the ship wasn't really any better then in previous tournaments. It was the niche that the ship filled being more needed in this tournament than last, and I think that's sorely underappreciated when analyzing this year's tournament.

Tl;dr In this year more then ever good teams won the tournament, not good ships or cheap tactics

P.S. Even despite this analysis it does seem that CCP agrees with you where the dominix is concerned considering the announced nerf to the ship. But, in an objective sense, I do think it's the drone assist mechanics that are OP.

I'm not really dismissing it, the occasional mirror (or near-mirror) match is alright and interesting and pretty much all of your detailed analysis of sentry variations is correct.

However, I'm looking at the big picture here and I generally want to see rock, paper, scissors which was pretty broken this year and devolved into heavy rock, sharp rock, smooth rock with no-one even bothering bringing paper or scissors anymore (unless forced to by bans). And while past tournaments had strong setups like Windicators, at least countering them with a kiting setup or an ECM setup was not totally futile, it might have come down to execution, but you didn't have to bring another close range setup to outbrawl the Vindis.

Yep, I fully agree.

I kinda dislike arbitrary module bans. It might fix the problem (along with removing a lot of other drone tactics that are absolutely balanced) but IMO it is by no means the root of the problem.

I didn't even know the AT had a tinker problem. Seemed to me tinkers were brought every now and then, sometimes they won and often they lost because they didn't kill anything. If anything the only problem with it might be sentries again cause they're too good a weapon system for tinkering BSs.

I can also attest to a dislike of arbitrary module bans. The root problem, unfortunately, is wrapped in messy, years-old code so I can see both sides to that argumet.

I also wonder if the new 'teams practicing in locked systems' contributed to the lack of ecm we saw in the tournament. In previous years some of the matches looked like there was obvious spying going on in ecm matches where one team brought the perfect jammers.

I could also be overappreciating the metagame, but I haven't seen this point discussed in much depth before

Removing drone assist (both on TQ and in the AT) would go a long long way towards "fixing" the currently expanding drone meta which quite frankly isnt that fun to watch or compete in.

Much of the final day of AT11 basically boiled down to what team was better at right-click assigning sentry drones and then who had the most DPS/EHP to win the match. Over the course of the day we ended up stripping every single bit of EW off our cruisers/frigates and adding HP because damps, td's, and even target painters dont matter when you are shooting another sentry cruiser which can assign its drones off in less than 5 seconds.

Not to mention the horrifically boring slowcat fleets that get thrown around on TQ, quite possibly the least interactive fleet concept in the game. Drone assist basically means that you as an individual dont really have to play the game, all that matters is the F1 button of your drone bunny.