EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Figured for anyone interested - most may not be - a behind the scenes.

We are a pretty small Alliance and we went into AT13 largely for fun again. We all had a blast and made it further than we had hoped or expected. One thing that was pretty clear though was the lack of understanding about what was actually going on by the desk "experts".

It was pretty clear that these folks made no attempt to learn anything about any of the teams that were not the top 4-5 alliances. Furthermore half the stuff they rabbited on about was absolute fiction. So rather than spend a wall of text and griping about that I figured I'd just post a few behind the scenes things and a few facts for new alliances or small alliances that want to get into AT.

Our budget - 5 plex entry and about 20 bill isk

Our roster - 15 core players and about 5 emergency subs

Our youngest toon in team - approx. 14 months

Our oldest - me.

We had at least 1 DC in the last 10-20 min just about every match - I think it was done just to give me a heart attack :)
We only had the one practice partner and rarely were we able to pull all 12 together for a full practice (we often borrowed from the other team during practices).

Will we be back next year - hell yeah.

Match 1 V Afterlife
We lost (well one of the reasons) because someone burned out their guns just as the first rattlesnake of Afterlife died ....oops - it did get a laugh though and is going to get us some mileage with said person for some time to come.
It was funny to hear this sheepish voice say "Ok guys I am gonna have to own up to burning out my guns". Especially when said person may have been FC-ing that match and went through the don't burn out your guns speech at the start of the fight.
Desk experts said something like your not PL only PL can make that comp work. Well what it did do was make several teams start banning Ecm against us which we never intended to field again - nor did we ever intend to field the Vindi after seeing the meta.

Match 2 V Gone Critical

To the desk experts who all hated our comp. Um we used it because we did our homework and knew there was a better than 50% chance they would bring the same comp again - which was mainly guns. Meta is not all about the best ships its about best ships for the job.

Match 3 V CVA
Hey there desk experts. We all laughed our asses off when one of the desk guys starts saying - "This is a comp these guys have practiced. They know what they are doing its not just a comp they copied from week 1. Um well um we had no bomber comp in week one but we knew a week out they may be a problem so we copied (I think it was Tuskers) week one match. We literally had no practice. However we all know how to starburst and hand off tackle. Also if you paid attention we warped bombers in at 10km each time so at the start they did damage from 3 sec in rather than mucking about in the back field failing to kite.

Match 4 v Dream Fleet
Hey there desk experts. We brought rattle snake on purpose - its not that bad a ship even with t1 drones. Mainly because we knew our comp was pretty strong and backed ourselves against Dream Fleet. We also did not want SNI banned in the next match if we made it that far. Up to this point in the tournament we had not repeated a set up hopefully making the opponents think we had whatever meta we liked (in fact we had 4 comps) Two of which we did not feel were strong anymore.

Match 5 v Dead Terrorists
Bombers again. SNI never got banned. Everyone to 10km to just dump DPS before bombers died and it worked. Hey desk experts who were so convinced out proteus/legion ban was because we were terrified of armor tinkers....um actually we banned those because DT started banning what we wanted to ban so it was like FC what do you want to ban now? Oh crap I dunno just ban proteus/legion at least that will confuse them :)

Match 6 V Gorgon
This was a hard one. We had expended all our comps and knew our B comp would not match them. So instead we decided to try force them to their happy comp - which is exactly what they brought. We then ran our own version. Why did we lose. Their BS pilots were actually awake and kited as hard as they could away from our bombers who could not keep up. They neuted out our tacklers. At the same time they dunked our logi (which we were expecting - just not that quick). After that we had not traded anything and it was all over. Hats off to Gorgon. I knew we should have used out rush fleet lol.


Anyway that's that. I encourage all the smaller or new alliances who have ever though of giving this a go to really step up. Ignore the experts as they are just trying to sound like they know what's going on. Most of the serious teams a very friendly and will always give you a GF in local even when they stomp you.

I'll admit to being one of the people who underestimated you before the tournament

Thanks for the write-up, it's always fun to see lesser known teams make it relatively far in the tournament. Hope to see you guys next year

And I can confirm all that Gen said in the OP. Or, at least the stuff that wasn't OP Sec.

We went into this for fun. Our alliance had no ego, no protests, no issues. We had fun, gave Gen a couple heart attacks and laughed on comms.

This has really been a high spot in my EVE career, and I don't regret any of it. Even the losses.

HUGE shout outs to all the teams we faced. Afterlife for kicking our asses and making us work for it.

All the teams that we defeated. o7 gentles...

Most of all Gorgon...you gave us a hell of a fight. o7

Thank you all very much for an excellent AT 13!!

The 14 month old is me, right? Babby of the team reporting in.

Huge thanks to Gen and everyone else on the EoL team for being understanding of my limited skillset. Was a good run for us and I am very proud to have been a part of it.

Hugs to all of my teammates and the opponents we faced. Throwing in an extra hug for CCP Larrikin because he believed in the EoL machine, if only for a moment ♥

AT XIII was excellent, looking forward to next year!

Great read. I like reading about everyone's AT experience, regardless of who they are.

You guys were one of our potential opponents at one point, so we did look at your matches pretty closely before the final weekend. One thing we were wondering among ourselves is why you banned Proteus + Legion against DT, and it's amusing to see that it was a random selection!

Cheers for all the replies especially from some of those top tier teams. I have to say hats off big time to the top four teams that was some epic epic stuff on the last 2 days.

Big hats off to all those prepared to fly and lose tourney ships too - epic. Keep on killing them - less to go around next year :)

Faffy - your piloting basically took us down so gratz to that we needed to kill both TFI fast to be a chance. Also a slight fitting fail on our part - no nos on the inty - oops :) - small mistakes like that occur when you are a small organisation under pressure.

Also hatz off for your fight against Shadow - that one was epic and sooo close.

To clarify this was our 3rd AT. At11 for us was just a lets do this. At12 was hey lets see if we can do better. This AT was our most serious attempt. It also helps heaps to know the sequence of events that happen prior to a match.

In fact I think the biggest challenge for the new teams is the logistics and knowing all the pre-match stuff - it can be tense.

Also no complaints about being underestimated by the other teams :)

Also for you Au TZ people - doing pvp from 1am to 5am all on the same day with work starting at 7am the next day - easy as :)

Once last funny story - right in the middle of the fight with Afterlife - I get a pm from a guy we pvp with and against asking me if we are in the AT....turn on autoreject invites when in AT folks :)

AT14....wondering if I should retire now because I thinking I might have peaked :) and leave it to our next generation

Go Vendolife !!!

Nope, you can't retire, we need you as our practice partner again next year!