EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

The New Eden Open, CCP's first cash tournament, was a great success with amazing matches, dramatic fights and fantastic visuals. Thank you to all the involved teams, the studio crew, sponsors and the EVE community as whole!

We are now curious about your impressions and feedback.

What did you like, what did you not like? What do you think went well, what do you think could be improved? How did you like the format, did you like the cash prize?

Let us know what you think!

More bans 3 each team at least :D and 10 players per team.

A clear improvement on most levels compared to previous tournaments. The tactical information bars and bans were propably my favorite new features. I missed the always great alliance ads, but that's not a feature suited to this type of tournament anyway, so I don't really even want any change from CCP on that front. Overall a great tournament.

Can we also give feedback to the Alliance Tournament discussion?

• The biggest plus in NEO is that you can go together in one team with pilots that are not in your alliance.
NEO/AT is about small scale PvP, but lots of small scale pvpler are not in an alliance, so something like allowing "guest" in the AT would be nice.

• Not patching the camera client, causing a one hour delay was bad .. really bad.

Everything that makes it easier for small corps/groups to participate is good :)

Thank you very much for this tournament!

Watched all of it and it was ok for me. But the delays that you guys had this weekend are kiling me.

*Bans: Banning format was very refreshing, went a long way towards making this tournament more complex than the ones in the past. I think with more experience and practice from the teams themselves, it could get very interesting in future tournaments.

*Team size: While I really liked the 8-man teams for this tournament, I have to say I did not enjoy the 24 character limit per team. The aim of this tournament versus a traditional alliance tournament was to increase the viability of smaller, less known teams as serious contenders. Team flexibility is of utmost importance in a tournament with a banning format, and limiting team size to 24 characters instead of 24 members gives a decided advantage to the older characters with hundreds of millions of SP. Just seems contrary to the idea that has been preached for a long time that younger players can equal or surpass older players through their alts and specialization.

*Teams: Teams are a good idea, but they lose a lot of the meaning for most of the average viewers. In EVE, people identify themselves with their alliances (or corps), which creates interesting comradeship and rivalries between viewers. The idea of small teams is somewhat foreign to EVE, and I feel like a lot of the reason why this tournament wasn't as popular as previous was that the average pilot couldnt identify with the teams themselves. I think an average person has heard of the big names like Goonswarm, Pandemic Legion, HYDRA and formed at least some opinion on them based on their actions ingame. However, they are unable to identify who is actually on these teams and thus have no reason to cheer for one team above any other. This might change in future events after we start to get more experience with the same team names, but I'm not really sure how to solve this otherwise.
Edit: Shadoo went into more detail and explained this more elegantly below, I completely agree with him.

*UI: I really enjoyed the new control bars, as they quantified what a team was capable of a little better. Some things I would like to see added is a game counter in the Bo3/Bo5 matches, as well as make the banned ships a little more visible and evident (perhaps a graphic before the match with the ship portraits?).

*Bo3/Bo5: I like the idea of best of matches, but it does make for a LOT of downtime between matches with a 40 minute banning sessions. Shortening the ban reaction time is an option, but that presents other complications with making sure the people are in the right ships and etc. Post-game team interviews have been brought up,and I think there is space for more fun events between matches.

I know you already realize that you screwed up pretty badly in the time leading up to this tournament, so I'm not going to touch on it too much. Listening to player feedback through methods like this is a good start though, so I hope that next time around some of the issues are ironed out. Similarly, I want to see better publicity next time around, as the vast majority of people that I have seen either didnt know about or care about this tournament in the slightest.

All in all, while this time around there were some problems, it was nothing too serious and should not in any way discourage you from doing more events like this.

I tried to come up with a more elegant way of putting this, but falling short once again but I'll comment quickly on one of the points made during the last day around teams vs. alliances.

One of the reasons I tuned out completely this time around, except for the final day, was because there was little to no larger EVE context to the event. Alliances/Corporations were absent, teams were made of pilots -- but since everyone in EVE uses alts that didn't really feel relevant to me either. Alliance Tournament back from 2005 onwards to me has been around a competition which is disconnected, but still somehow relevant to the game I play rest of the year.

Without that connection, with people I know forming teams and flying in multiple teams just felt a bit meh. EVE isn't terribly interesting game to watch on a stream, being brutally honest here, at least to me -- it's always more about the grounded larger subtext. EVE is interesting to play, because the UI has so much detail to show what's going on and what your gang/fleet/etc members are telling you -- but this just doesn't to me come across well in a streamed format just yet. The control/attack/defense bars seemed interesting, but without scaling that up to individual ships -- didn't seem wildly relevant to how the match was going. Camera work was very good though, and they managed to pickup the ships in danger of flying out of boundary and caught some memorable occasions, so good work on that.

I think one of the main reasons the teams which WERE sponsored or named after alliances didn't really feel like "their" teams either, was at least from my personal experience point of view largely down to the price format. A cash price to me encourages small team work. It incentives you to attempt to win with as few real people as possible to pickup as much of the per member $ as possible.

In a game, which is ALL about team work that scales up to tens of thousands of people driving towards the same goal -- that just seems out of place. The Why Dash team which was sponsored by PL for example, did not practice, theory craft or draw much of anything aside from isk from the alliance sponsoring it. It therefore didn't feel like "our" team to me, and thus I didn't even tune in to watch the matches. I think that's largely due to the price pool. To draft in help from hundreds of pilots to test and practice would feel pretty dumb to go and win 6000$ which you then split between a dozen dudes.

I don't think that's bad, it gives smaller VERY focused teams who don't care anything about the corporation/alliance a good place to put a ton of effort in and win a competitive tournament, because the larger entities who would be able to test/practice/etc do not care enough to participate.

But... It doesn't make it very compelling viewing unfortunately, at least it didn't for me. I think that's fine, and the ~3000-4000 people tuning are probably the most hardcore/interested folks out there. Just seemed to me like the broadcast format was still targeted towards the LARGE crowd format, and thus just felt a little out of place. I would personally been happy with just an audio commentary running along the great camera work guys pulled out this time around with maybe little more put into the screen about what was happening at each of the ships (with a larger delay on stream in order to not make it competitively sensitive).

This seemed to me like a pro player tournament, so making the cast/screen better fit to that audience just would to me anyway been more relevant. Anyway, good tourney -- I did enjoy watching the last days matches.

Loved the information in the new client, but I could barely read any of the fonts in the lower layout, and the ship/player/distance information in the top screen not at all.

Was watching the "HD" 480p (though that's not actually HD...720p is the lowest HD resolution) on my 62" 720p television, if that helps. Was also blurry on my 1440x900 MacBook Pro on 480p.

I thought it was good, over all. I don't think I need to tell you that the technical issues were annoying but there's only so much you can do about that. Patching the camera client would have been a good start, though.

The ban system is fantastic. It makes the meta so much more visible and intricate. 2 bans also seems well balanced for most matches. Enough to disrupt standard comps but leaves room for exciting and flexible improvisation (e.g., the Scorpion gambit in the final match).

The best of 3/best of 5 format is likewise exciting, but in the future I think it might be worth really doing something that forces the teams to get creative toward the end, and make it a real test of pilot skill. Easy solution: In multi-game matches, have the bans be cumulative. They ban two each first round, and one each every following round, but the bans carry over. It does restrict the available setups a lot and you would never see the same setup twice, which is both good and bad, but my favorite part of these tournaments is seeing the familiar minmatar rush/vargur barrage/blaster BS setups get chucked for something totally inventive and out-there. Making everyone realize that they need enough set-up depth to have all of their favorites ruled out and still find something to fly? The winners would have to really be the best of the best.

The downtime is an issue with those multi-part matches, even when there aren't technical glitches. The downtime seems basically unavoidable, and while the upcoming-patch dialogs are kind of interesting, you still end up with some blather time toward the end. Maybe have a dev frigate dueling league to run in between matches that you can show. Guard vs. Ytterbium would be a riot.

Match size was great. ATXI qualifiers should never drop below 8v8. 12v12 still seems useful for the primary tournament, because as much as this was good, there's a level of intricacy, planning, and just totally different strategies once you get up to 12v12 matches that I think is still valuable. Mostly I will be very interested to see the evolving 12v12 meta with the ban system in place.

DE format had advantages in terms of balance and number of fights but was also very confusing. At a minimum you need infographics with the match brackets so we know what the hell is going on. Maybe an interactive scenario planner on the website so we can actually predict who will be fighting what next.

Studio background was excruciatingly dull (and had constant issues). Green/blue screening is all well and good, but if you're going to do it, make sure your table and people mesh with it, and do more with it than you could have done with the static set you used for ATX. For eff's sake, put on Jitacam in the background or something. Give us the station windows we've always asked for.

EDIT: Oh, and tourney overlay was great. No real changes needed, though it'll get cramped in 12v12. Maybe get really fancy in the qualifiers and do "points needed to win" or just give commentators ability to highlight important ships to watch. Oh, and have ships flash/highlight wen taking damage. Commentators talking about something being invulnerable as it melts is funny but not exactly the effect you want.

I only have one quarrel with the overall tourney; PLEASE let ships use faction and deadspace mods, I just have a fetish with super pimped out alliance tournament ships being blown up. I really don't see the reason why they can only use t1 and t2. if there is an important reason someone please explain