EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Hello everyone.
During today's Alliance Tournament XII matches some unusual issues occurred and we want to catch you all up on what happened and what our response has been.

After the Test vs Pasta match one pilot experienced a bug that prevented him from being moved out of the system and caused a delay while we worked to get him back home. We eventually remapped the solar system containing the tournament activities to a new node.
Unfortunately when the system was remapped, a duplicate copy of the Crimewatch process started running behind the scenes and caused unusual behavior in the next match.

For the match between Shadow Cartel and Afterlife, both teams experienced identical issues with modules and drones needing to be manually activated instead of auto-cycling, and with damage not appearing on ships until they hit structure.
Unfortunately the players involved did not notice the issues during the pre-match time when we could have corrected them before we started.

This circumstance falls under the following clause of the Alliance Tournament rules:


In accordance with our pre-existing stated policy surrounding issues of this sort, the match is valid and the results will stand. We are very sorry for the negative experience that these teams encountered in this match.

The issue that caused these symptoms has now been resolved and we do not anticipate any similar problems for the rest of the Tournament.

This is a shameful conclusion.

I'm not involved with either team... but even twitch chat noticed immediately after the match began that something was very wrong. Why wasn't the match halted and the issues investigated?

How are the participants supposed to notice issues they would never expect after CCP just remapped the node?

I'm reasonably certain a weapons check at the pre-game beacon would have exposed it. This kind of thing is exactly why we wrote this into the rule:


I want to reiterate Fozzie's sentiment that we're sorry about how the match went.

How are you supposed to do a weapons check if you aren't allowed to put out drones or shoot something before the beginning of the match?

Clearly you should have run your "systems check" module. You guys didn't have one fitted?

Seriously though, wouldn't that be on the check list for CCP to check to make sure a reboot happened ok?

Hmm, it sounds to me like the honest answer from CCP should be:

Our system messed up, you had no reasonable way to detect there still was a problem after we told you it had been fixed. A problem still occurred, but we pushed forward with the tournament schedule so fast that to go back now would be a pain, so suck it up.

Pitiful. Very, very poor decision here and it casts a shadow on the tournament.

my understanding is that no damage showed until each ship reached structure...that would require more than shooting each other "a little bit". Even the commentators were confused at how ships showed no damage before going deep into structure.

It is very strange to feel disappointed with a games Devs rather than mad at them.

For what is supposed to be the top notch tourney that everyone looks forward to each year, the quality certainly is not there in my humble opinion...
But, enough posting about it, gotta go kill the incursion that spawned in our home system last night lol.

That's kind of harsh considering how close that match was. For that reason alone, I think you should reconsider.