EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Further have some introductory videos to the mechanics during the tournament which would let non-EVE players enjoy watching.

Thanks for the comment.

It's expensive in more than ships, it's training and fitting, and then it's giving up fine summer weekends.

Then there's looking foolish infront of the community when your cheap ships get crushed by a serious team.

I don't think 20b will cut it, you need 50, at least that's my understanding, also think of all the time required.

To foster participation and renewed interest, especially for younger players and alliances in the alliance tournament I would rather the prize structure be modified slightly. Plex for the top 16 (or at least the top 8) would go a long way in my opinion towards making participating a more attractive notion. A lot of the people I've talked to seem rather apathetic about the whole thing; "what's the point in wasting 20-100+bn and hundreds of man-hours practicing if the same people are going to win again anyways." At least allowing relatively successful alliances to recuperate what they spent on the entry fee and lost in ships would be nice, doesn't have to be crazy.

I mean, CCP gave out nearly 700 plexes for a relatively minor event involving shooting defenseless (heh) NPC carriers in highsec and lowsec. Surely the hallmark PVP tournament that only occurs once a year can at least match that in terms of prize money, and in a way that somewhat diminishes the massively front-loaded nature of the tournament ship prizes, where 1 and 2 get 5-10 trillion isk worth of tournament ships and third place gets a bronze medal for their efforts.

On the fanfest e-sports roundtable there was some talk about creating special ISD volunteer dept and giving them access to your tools (limited to test server) which would help to run such events and there was a mutual agreement that it was a good idea.

Speaking of the prize Distribution: I posted a big wall of text on Failheap, but I think I'll repost my thoughts here.

I think the current prize distribution should be changed to the following for prize ships;
1st - 30 Cruisers & Frigates
2nd - 15 Cruisers & Frigates
3rd - 5 Cruisers & Frigates

This aims to solve 2 issues, firstly, 3rd place historically in the tournament has always been a boobie prize, even the bronze medal description jokingly refers to being 'Worst of the Best'. Opening a 3rd prize position gives more incentive to competitive tournament teams that aren't quite on the Absolute top like Hydra Reloaded and Pandemic Legion. Coming in 3rd place in the current tournament climate is incredibly difficult with the amount of good competitive tournament teams we have (Albeit not quite on the same level as PL/Hydra)

Secondly, The different between 2nd and 1st place is minimal, and in the context of the tournament, the 2nd prize (Frigate) often ends up being the better ship for use in the tournament. This puts more pressure and excitement on the difference between coming 1st and 2nd. Currently 1st/2nd is mostly about pride rather than isk/prizes (which there is nothing wrong with, hydra takes the tournament and coming 1st place very seriously, but I think this will make the audience more excited)

In addition to this, I think we should have plex rewards for prizes ranging from 4th-10th (The final weekend). CCP can add plexes to this pool if they are feeling generous, although I think redistributing the entry plex used should be fine like what was done with the New Eden Open. Rewards would be 5 + Percentage of total remaining plex pool (the 5 is the reimbursement of entry fee)
4th: 20%
5th: 18%
6th: 16%
7th: 14%
8th: 12%
9th: 10%
10th: 8%


The plex prizes should for the most part, cover the expenses of an alliance tournament team, and the higher prizes will probably end up profiting the victors. This encourages strong teams to compete and creates smaller meaningful goals for alliances that aren't quite up to snuff but are still talented.

Additionally, I would like to see a reward for every team that competes in the alliance tournament, Similar to the NEO II T-Shirts which were handed out to every character that took part in the New Eden Open, this creates more interest for groups who 'just want to have fun' or see how far they can go without actually being competitive and taking it seriously, and lesser teams gain a piece of eve history so they can say 'I was there'.

One idea I really like is a cosmetic ship skin based on the Prize ships. It would be a skin of the Prize ships without actually being a prize ship (No stats, same as t1/t2 hull the prize ship is based on). Give a 20x run Condor(Crow) AT Edition, and a 20x run Blackbird(Falcon) AT Edition to the team captain of every team that competes in the tournament, or alternatively, you could give a 10x run copy of each for every match you play in the tournament, so every match you win earns you an extra 10 run BPC of both cosmetic prize ships, although this would create more work for CCP. The Art Assets are already in the game and given that new cosmetic ships seem to be relatively simple to add if the model already exists, hopefully this method would be acceptable to CCP in terms of the limited time they have available for the tournament.

The reason why I arrived at the 20x runs is because this will typically mean that most small-midsized AT teams would be able to gift their pilots with both the Frigate/Cruiser prize ship skin. And larger teams can at least gift their contributors with at least 1 or the other.

Another idea that I really loved, although admittedly it would be a great deal more work for CCP, is bringing back the New Eden Open team cards. They were kinda flirted with for ATXI but never happened. Putting your team/characters on an ingame item has a high value amongst certain players (I was there). This kinda comes into another issue with the AT, in which I feel like the majority of the playerbase doesn't even know it exists, in an ideal world where CCP had the time to do it, I would love to see 'baseball cards' for alliance tournament teams/known alliance tournament characters (Or at least, the top teams, maybe the final weekend teams? then a captain card for those teams, and then maybe an additional card for another player on the team, total 30?), and then have them drop via exploration or some other distribution method which makes them end up in the hands of the average eve player who never checks the forums etc. and would hopefully in some cases garner interest in the tournament and educate them about it.

First I have a lot of respect for the work you do putting on the AT so thanks for that.

I guess if you wanted a big tournament you'd have to rely on volunteers as much as possible.

Having it on the test server is a good idea, it makes it cheap and you could seed a region with only t1 and let people make their fits there.

You could also simplify the rules a lot.

Eg If any player on your team goes more than 100km from the beacon your team is out of the tournament.

If two teams draw they are both out.

If you fail to show up you are out.

That way all the games could be neatly scheduled for 10 minute slots and no more. There would be a lot of mistakes by the volunteers but if you kept the rules super super simple that wouldn't be so bad.

You could have a big mumble server with all the players in as a lobby where they can all chat in different rooms and then one voice comes over the top of it all when there are announcements, calling the next teams etc.

It would be a lot of fun though I respect the fact you don't want to put a huge amount of CCP time into it.

I think this is a really great idea, if some time was put into creating tools for volunteers to run tournaments then the community could do a lot of the work.

I agree also that it would be great to have comedy tournaments, like how long can you hold out against waves of attackers? Collect as much loot as you can. Gumball rally. etc

Some tools to facilitate these would be really awesome.

I have to say I am pretty impressed with the thought and seriousness about extending prizes to encourage more participation from the pro teams.

As one of the members of one of the minnows we see our biggest challenge in getting further than we did last year and if prizes went all the way down to 10th place or those who make it to last weekend or whatever it would certainly make it easier to sell and more exciting.

The stronger you make the tournament to more chance you will breed new teams to challenge PL and Hydra (which I am sure even they want to see).