EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Niden has just published an article with this title describing the exciting Eve_NT tournament coming up: http://crossingzebras.com/the-future-of-eve-sports/

It's great to see CCP support the tournament community with unique prizes and, as game developers have found in a lot of other MMOs, cosmetic prizes can be handed out like candy without affecting the meta.

But Niden doesn't really talk about the big picture so I'd like to do that here.

The biggest sporting event in the world is the FIFA World Cup. What makes the World Cup so magical is that any spectator can look at the action and visualise himself of herself scoring the winning goal or making that great save. There are famous stories of great players like Pele kicking a tin can around the street with a pack of boys, all too poor to purchase a real ball, and then going on to bedazzle the world. And become spectacularly rich and famous. Children dream of being the football hero.

There are several elements that Eve-sport currently lack or under-sell and we'll need to fix them to make Eve-sport a prominent part of this game's direction for the next decade.

- AT lacks the "it could be me doing that" factor. Partly because it's not clear what's actually being done - the commentary team gets it right in flashes like highlighting a great bump but misses a lot of the plays and doesn't do enough to make those plays seem accessible. (A lot of Eve players for instance have no idea how to bump and are not aware that it's an easily learnable skill that they could add to their box of tricks).

- Camerawork is of varying quality and a lot of the plays aren't shown because the camera is watching the wrong thing. Imagine a football match when when a goal is scored the camera is on a defender picking his nose on the halfway line - that's AT camerawork half the time. Camera operators need to be trained, perhaps using null-sec.com, on where the critical plays are happening and how to show them.

- we possibly need an over-the-shoulder camera, ie a shot showing elements of the UI, to make matches like tinker v tinker interesting. These really enhanced Formula 1 when they were introduced.

- lots of key elements are not shown - how burnt out modules are, whether a jam attempt is successful or not.

- there's a whole host of issues around tournament prep that Mr Rive has collated, I'll let his thoughts on that speak for us as he's spot on and has done lots of work identifying the issues.


The big thing for me is we need grass roots involvement early in players' development. Play in a Tournament should be an Opportunity that newbies can pick and could see them face off against other rookies in rookie ship for a special rookieship skin or even an actual rookieship. (It's important not to be too generous with prizes as we don't want these newbie tournaments flooded with alts). One way of stopping too many alts competing would be to run a more lucrative contest at the same time for veterans and forbid people to enter both.

Leagues and tournaments could be run all year round and could help with allowing teams to qualify for the AT instead of being picked randomly.

Random picking is a disaster for the success of this e-sport. The biggest and richest alliance in the game didn't get in. And didn't play. And its 14000 members didn't have a stake in watching the event.

Instead we had a lot of teams that couldn't even scrape 12 players together which is part of the reason for the plethora of first weekend tinkers making the event duller.

Regarding the first weekend coverage Squeebles and TMC did a really great job and were very interesting but the uncommentated stream was unwatchably dull. It was a disaster really that people were being directed to the ISD streams - those were not the finished product and without commentary will have turned casual spectators off.

So here I am, Captain of an AT squad that had great fun playing and practicing together, in the position where I'm disbanding my squad and telling my players there's no content for them, a content creator in an alliance full of newbies unable to create this content for them and wondering why we have a premier event that is pretty much the only official event in a game were people love participating in tournaments when given the chance. My guys were nearly all completely new and nearly all of them feel it's the most fun they've ever had in this game. It sucks to be shutting it down.

So TLDR: give us all year tournament content and structure it so it's accessible to new players.