EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Great write up, Hoodie, and I agree with a most of what you have said. I am not familiar with the regular AT and have no frame of reference for comparison so will not comment on that aspect. I know you've said it, and I've said it elsewhere, but I enjoyed this so much I will say it again - Besides allowing ECM on Day 1, I think the format was fantastic! Getting the rules so close to the matches I believe really balanced the field so those of us that cannot spend months practicing, or have deep pockets like PL/Hydra/etc, had a viable chance of success.

Granted my view of this whole experience may be greatly skewed(in the positive) because I am looking at it through an RP lens, but I think a vast majority of people will agree with your assessment.

My only disagreements are with your comments about captain selection:


This is the Amarr Succession Trials. You(your character) is applying to an Heir of one of the Great Houses of the Holy Amarr Empire. It was stated at the beginning captains would be chosen from an In Character perspective. If you have no history of supporting the Empire and a particular House, why do you think an Heir would even look at your application?


I was one of those people who had zero footage to start with. I believe there was about a month between the announcements and the application deadline. If I was able to throw together a 5 minute combat reel with my limited game time, I can't imagine why anyone else wouldn't have been able to.


PIE corporation had 4 applications and 4 captains spread over 3 Houses. If there had been any other outcome I would have been shocked and appalled. Again, this is not some tournament for a tournaments sake, this is the Amarr Succession Trails. If you have no history with the Empire, even with a well written application and 10 AT championship belts, the Heirs(CCP) rightfully could just ignore you. But they didn't. Some Heirs showed great latitude in who they picked as captains, even to the point of picking a heretic(alleged). This is an primarily an RP event, so to those upset tournament enthusiasts I say this - go put on your wizard hat and HTFU

Nice writeup :)

I think CCP did a great job with the RP element all the way through, including how it affected application selection. It's easy to pick up on how multiple teams came from a single alliance, but we'd really have to read every application as an individual to make a proper judgement. I read a few but definitely not all. My application was carefully constructed to stand out, especially since it was to one of the more popular houses. I also captured all of my PvP footage after the tournament was announced, which I like to think showed the dedication of my application. I was literally a nobody, with no history/affiliation, coming from Caldari FW and with some "interesting" things on my killboard... but I felt that I understood what the applications would be judged on, and I made it happen. Being given a clean and equal opportunity to be accepted into the tournament was a huge deal for me, and is why I committed my time to applying.

This application process definitely wouldn't work for other type of tournaments, especially non-RP ones, but this one had its place, and it was very cool.

Single-elimination was brutal... being nobodies and knowing that we could go up against the likes of Tyrrak Thorrk in the very first match and get crushed was not an easy thing to face.

I definitely see what you're saying about combining ECM and single-elimination. That was a bad mix. My matches were mostly cruisers and larger, so ECM wasn't quite as crippling as it must have been for the dessies and down, but I will point out that in our first match we used ECM heavily and won against a team using it moderately (from what I understand) and in our second match we used no ECM or ECCM at all and won against a team that went full ECM... so it can definitely add a huge element of randomness that takes away from player choices, but in our own experience it didn't feel like it completely ruined the tactics.

...ECM needs to be rebalanced obviously :P

You are aware that this is exactly the same way it was handled in 2003, Vollhov?

While I'll agree that the tournament style isn't really the best (a belief held by many of the heirs, in their commentary throughout the years with regard to the 2003 succession trial), it is neither new nor unheard of for it to be handled this way. The Succession Committee ICly determines how it is to be handled, and the heirs have to abide by that ruling. The Succession Committee said it would be handled the same way as the 2003 one, and so it was.