EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

What are advantages of this combination:
1) Rules are not getting much more complicated. You just adjuts existing ones (list of ships allowed to use RR modules, list of modules not allowed to be used in tournament) or introduce fairly simple points which are hard to misinterpret (t1 drones, t1 damps)
2) Powerful drone setups had not many downsides in tournament meta, they're mostly vulnerable to just not-so-mobile setups with battleships and smartbombs, and drones by themselves hamper use of many control-oriented modules/ships (most powerful of which is also getting nerfed within scope of this proposal). Drone nerf and damp nerf combined should make other weapon systems more attractive, making other ewar types (jamm/td/neuts) look way better.
3) Damps are almost like drones in tournament fight in terms of being OP - ability to overheat them skyrocketed their efficiency. You can overheat them for long enough time, and it acts almost like a jamm, completely disabling ship despite of its initial lockrange and amount of RSBs applied. Multi-link command ships made it much easier to minmax damps too. I like both ways to limit abuse of damps, with first targeting strength, and second targeting their amount. In case of t1 damps only rule, even if someone spams them on all ships and complements with ganglink - they can be used mostly to shut down long-range ships, and still there's much more space for counterplay with RSBs. With another option, you are limited to just few damp ships (potentially even less with damp ship bans), thus you're locking out just one or two enemy ships, which allows other undamped ships to suppress/remove your damp ship one way or another. I like t1 rule more just because it's much easier to read and understand.
4) With t3 logies removed, turtles are still possible: battleships ETing each other, or t2 logi-based not-so-turtles. Both have much weaker active tank and in many matchups things may go one way or another (e.g. these turtles are unable to completely ignore control of mobile setups, because they have to run some defensive screening on their own to reduce dps applied to logi, and mobile setups do not have superstrong damps to prevent that screening)
5) Regarding marauders - they still should be cool just because of their ability to MJD every minute. Ewar immunity and huge tank which bastion brings are too good for AT's arena.

Adjustments to ship point costs

Now, knowing the rule adjustments, we can take a look at point costs. I will be mostly making underpowered ship cheaper, but reverse approach could be applied too. Number in bracket shows that i am unsure about point cost assigned and this number could be used instead:

- Pirate battleships - 19
- Marauders - 18
- Navy Battleships - 17
- Black ops - 17
- Command Ship - 16
- Tech 1 battleship - 16
- Strategic Cruiser - 15
- Recon ship - 13
- Logistics - 13
- Navy BC - 13 (12)
- HAC - 12
- BC - 11
- Pirate Cruiser - 11
- HIC - 10 (11)
- Navy cruiser - 9
- Tech 1 logistics - 8 (9)
- Cruiser - 6
- Tactical Destroyer - 6
- EAF - 5
- Interdictor - 4
- Assault frigates - 4
- Pirate frigates - 4
- Tech 1 ewar frigate - 3 (4)
- Stealth bomber - 3 (4)
- Navy frigates - 3
- Interceptors - 3
- Destroyers - 3
- Industrials - 3
- Covert ops - 3 (2)
- Frigate - 2 (t1 scanning frigs might be 1)
(- Rookie ship - 1)

What and why:
1) Despite natural boost of BSs and BCs as combat platforms they already get via damp nerf, i feel they deserve additional point cost reduction to be more usable.
2) Navy cruisers - no comments here, they are garbage at 12 pts
3) t1 logi cruisers - maybe unneeded change but with damp nerf great deal of protection is gone, and possibly their weakness (low sensor strength) will come into play as ecm should also be much more popular than before
4) EAFs, t1 disruption frigs - the reason to keep them so expensive (superstrong maulus/keres) is gone, 1 point less is enough to make ships like crucifier or hyena more viable
5) HICs - 1 point less compared to hacs might be enough, but dps is still inferior so I'd make them 2 points cheaper
6) navy frigs - trash at 4 points
7) covops - better t1 frig for support role (it might be too good for chremoas but keep in mind that i am not talking about uniques here at all)
8) bombers - with nerfs to damps and more viable battleships they might become much better. But they still should be shut down by even t1 damps, and still super vulnerable, thus risky to use. I would prefer to have them at 3 points to make sure people use them from time to time, to make sure setups built around many heavy and slow ships do not forget about some kind of control or antisupport.
9) recons - with more bigger boys on the field, recons are getting weaker. Only 2 recons were more or less used, curse and rook (lachesis and huginn are not as good as these 2), and curse should have harder time at dealing with stronger capacitors on battleships, rook hasn’t seen much use and it's also harder to use it to shutdown BSs (which, unlike cruisers, can often fit ECCM w/o huge loss in efficiency), so i am inclined they also should be cheaper.

Place for random ideas
At some point i thought, what if you couldn’t put more than one ship of a given ship type into a setup? I haven’t refined this idea at all, but in large scheme of things it might change meta hugely (not necessarily in positive way).

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We talked with Bob for a while about all the AT rules and realized that while we agree on some points, or opinions vastly differ at times (especially on bombers!). Would be nice to hear opinion of other AT dudes - how would they change rules if you were running whole thing? And hopefully CCP can borrow best ideas to make AT13 more diverse & interesting for everyone.

I totally agree with most things and think that this would improve the tournament quality/balance and fun both for the audience and the players immensely.

Regarding your suggestions towards damps and dampening ships I couldn't agree more. Restrict them to ships with that role (maulus/keres/celestis/lachesis/arazu), restrict the use of dampening ships in a comp to 1 per class and T1 damps only. And no bastion or T3 logistics either.

I personally think drones should be restricted to T1 only. Not even integrated should be allowed. Drone boats will still get enough DPS out of T1 drones to make them viable and this will also encourage the use of ewar drones in ships that previously used drones to supplement their dps.

As for limits on ships types I would like to see 2 of a kind. It would encourage the use of ships that haven't seen much use in tournaments while not burdening too much the theorycrafters.

I wouldn't impose a requirement of 12 per team as smaller teams will have problems in dealing with this but maybe a limit of 8 or 9 would be reasonable. It would still require the already weakened tinkers to expose themselves further by having a few frail ships without causing too much problems to smaller teams.

Mindlinks are very useful to all comps. If they are banned entirely other setups that rely for example on speed to kite or to catch things would also suffer greatly from the lack of extra bonuses.
I wouldn't ban mindlinks but I'm not against restricting the number of links allowed in a comp to 3. That would force teams to make serious choices about which bonuses to use.

You probably misread my post. In my 1st list i wasn't suggesting to introduce all of the points, i was making multiple suggestions on how to approach fixing something i considered as problem.

I agree that my way to split setups into classes might be flawed, there're multiple ways to do it; i chose the one which we used by the end of AT13 to plan strategy.

Dominix was not that overpowered, just nobody was ready to fight such thing. There're many ways to deal with that kind of setup with pretty universal setups, primarily exploiting weak dps of triple-domies.

But yet they were ridiculous because they signified beginning of the era of drones online in AT (and if nothing is changed, it will be 3rd year in a row).

I am not hater of turtles. In fact, I am the most experienced with them from our side - the most (if not all) turtles we tested, used, were planning to use were made by me. I am hater of RPS approach and alike, where 80% of outcome of the fight is decided by the type of setup you decide to field.

My problems with turtles and bastion'd marauders are (as i mentioned):

- The fact that setup you chose for fight matters everything, how people execute means nothing (unless they're completely ******* it up - e.g. damping their own logi)
- Requirements these setups place onto any other setup you can bring
- Boring mirrors (although what we had in neo3 was fun, but it's fun just for the 1st time and only for participants)

You can think of turtles as of tactical nukes; because risks are high, even chance that enemy brings one forces you to either bring some kind of all-in (huge DPS to break it), or limits variety of ships you can bring by extreme margin (because they should have tools to deal with turtles). Turtles are also the most fool-proof setup to fly: it's hard to make mistakes which can cost you match, usually because you're taking positioning out of equation. Yes, even in machines execution matters a way more than in turtles - because most of its ships have to actually move to survive for a longer time. But even there it's still far from coordination required to run conventional mobile setup or turtle based on t2 logi (where mobility and control are essential for setup to be successful).

says the Hun reloaded guy that rode a triple vargur set-up all the way to the finals a few years ago.

They are not just another Battleship

Points for ships should always be adjustable for each alliance tournament. That i can not argue against.

Every year I watch the Alliance Tournament in awe. I get really excited about how some people think and the meta side of it is just crazy. This shows off eve off at its very best and creates a sense of epicness and ingenuity that no other game can rival.

Eve is a game played by players on TQ and is not designed to be as 10 minute TV battle game show. So some rules are required in the interest of time and fairness eg. multiple cap transfers and logi limitations.

By saying to players "you can not bring XYZ because we don't like it" you're only gonna take away from the Alliance Tournament. Eventually the ship comps will become more and more similar until the Outta-The-Box setups are gone.

So in my view

1) Don't ban modules unless you have to
2) Adjust values on ships types and in some individual ship types like the Ishtar last year (Save that for player bans)
3) Spice up the format to make more fun but not by taking away from players. For example...

"Before bans each side can choose to nominate one ship that cannot be banned but the opposing team can ban an extra ship." (Not specifically this but something like this which gives to players rather than taking away)

While I do agree that changes need to be made I think only small changes will make it work.
1. bringing down from 3 till only 2 hull types allowed .
2. banning gecko's and augmented/integrated drones.
3. adjustment to points cost of some ships.

I disagree with trying to ban tinkers from the tournament banning energy transfers and bastion mode , but I do agree some tinkers are just to powerful, but points adjustments and 2 hull types only would take care that.
I agree with banning gecko's and augmented/integrated drones, gecko's for me are just to powerful due to Omni damage, drone teams should have to make a tactical decision on drones to use before the match . And augmented/integrated drones due to cost well not so much integrated drone cost but banning both will just stop confusion . Team A should not get an advantage over Team B because they have deeper pockets.


1 other ideal I agree with is leadership mind links should be allowed along with slot 6 implants EG-603 and EE-603 all others should be banned

I agree with many of the point in the post.

Nerf drones a bit (even though I love them)
remove cap transfer except from logi as suggested
Not sure about your damps solution damps can be devestating but can be countered, maybe meet halfway and restrict the number of ships that are dediciated damp ships to 2 of each and not 3 of each?

Marauders - I don't dislike your idea but I have a different idea. What about this. Your flag ship can be either a faction fit BS OR a standard fit (non faction) Maruader that can use bastion.

That way people will need to weigh up whether they risk that flag ship and also if taking a maruader as flag is better than a faction BS.

All in all we do need to do something ot increase the viable number of setups. Last year we had some very fun setups in our test bag that would have been soo cool to fly but had not a chance to beat the "Machine" doctrine or "drones doctrine".

I'd like AT13 to have that wow factor again - a bit more "I did not expect that doctrine" as seemed to be more the case in AT8,9,10.

Also Bans do make it interesting they also make life hard as a fleet organiser...don't know the answer there but I did not feel that bans stopped any meta last year so are they adding value - they are NOT adding more doctrines.

Also I think your points estmates might need more work I see a few issues there - faction cruisers at 9 points if I read correct - bring on the VNI fleet again!! Unless you nerf drones but still is low fopr the others anyway.

there are some really good and varied ideas here. banning faction drones like geckos augmented drones maybe T2 etc. is a really good idea; you can have faction mob yet you can have faction drones as thing stand now. The bastion mod is a problem with marauders so banning it would cure it but in both of these cases it would not apply to flagships, that way you still have to plan for it but it won't crop up so often and you would have a better idea if you were going to face it due to the flagship list being published.
Damps jams and the like could could be dealt with by increasing the points cost of the ships in question and/or limiting setups to having 2 of a kind hulls.
one idea I had if you want to shake things up rather than adjust what's there already is to limit hull base types to 3 (or maybe 4) of a kind so that if you have 3 ishtars then no vexors VNIs etc.

Most of the AT ships are actually pretty bad for tournaments now , since CCPs ship rebalancing imitative.

I personally would support a flat 1 point increase for all AT hulls to reflect their increased power , but even this would mean that perhaps outside of the etana you would see almost none of them fielded.

I like uniquies in the alliance tournament , they add a lot of drama to a match and people do get really excited to see them used and to flat out ban them would be a great loss to the event