EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Announcing the creation of the Syndicate Competitive League! (To be clear this is an EVE wide competitive league and not limited to the inhabitants of the syndicate region.)

The Syndicate Competitive League is being created in order to complement CCP run tournaments as EVE continues to develop into a mature E-sport. The SCL looks to fill the need for a more consistent and accessible competitive environment for tournament format play. We intend to accomplish this by hosting frequent events, to be run over the course of a weekend, with a focus on developing the competitive EVE community.

Why is the SCL needed?

As CCP moves forward in its attempts to bring EVE to the forefront of the E-sports scene, a number of obstacles have presented themselves. Among the concerns voiced by the tournament community, the spectators, and the media the most common are derived from the vacuum in which EVE tournaments seem to exists. The game play is not relatable to game play which is available to the average spectator, the teams lack permanence and are not well know outside of the small community around the tourneys, and there is no good way to determine which teams compete in tourneys or to bring new teams into the community.

It is our goal to address these obstacles by hosting a series of frequent and accessible tournaments, in the format of existing EVE tournaments, with a focus on developing a community which is passionate about EVE as a competitive E-sport.

Format:

The SCL will be run as a series of small, 8 team double elimination bracket tournaments with teams accruing season points based on their placing. Each match up will be run as a best of 3 set. At the end of the season, the teams with the highest amount of points accrued will be invited to participate in the championship tournament. In addition to normal season matches, we intend to run amateur and pick up team matches as a means of getting the community involved in the tournament game play.

Each individual match will follow the same rules and guide lines as the recent NEO, with the potential for a few modifications if the need arises. They will follow the same 8 man format , picks and ban method, ect.

We feel this format is the best possible for encouraging a dynamic meta game, and competitive community. However, due to the large number of matches teams will be asked to purchase ships for we will be holding all matches on the test server. This will hopefully allow us to streamline the set up process for matches, and keep the matches moving along as swiftly as possible.

Teams:

Any player in game with an active account will be eligible to create or participate on a team. Teams will be allowed to be created throughout the season, and will consist of 8 characters and up to 4 alternates (which may be other players or alt accounts.) Team rosters may be changed up to one week prior to each event, and any player on the team my be dropped or replaced except for the team captain. Once a player (the actual person not the account) is registered with a team they may not be registered with any other team for the season.

Broadcasting:

SCL will be seeking a partnership with Own3d.tv in order to stream the matches. We will also be looking to partner with EVE radio in order to have them carry audio coverage of the events. All broadcast matches will be commentated, and we are going to look to include giveaways and other competitions for spectators to participate in.

We will be talking with CCP to find out if access to tools such as their current tourney UI will be possible.

Sponsorship:

To start, the prize pool for events will be limited to in game isk and items, however we are hopping to be able to offer cash prizes for season championship tournaments. The viability of this is going to depend on availability of sponsorship and potentially on ad revenue from the match streams. SCL will be looking to work with EVE and gaming related partners in order to raise in game and out of game funds for prize pools.



The SCL is being brought to you by the same group responsible for the Syndicate Alliance Tournament, which has been the longest running and most successful player run tournament to date. We are very excited to be able to expand on out previous format, and look forward to seeing just how far we can push player competition in EVE. Expect to hear more information regarding the SCL following the holidays, and we are going to be aiming to start hosting events sometime around February 2013.

As a lot of the specifics of the format is going to depend greatly on the level of interest and participation we get from the community and especially the number of teams competing, we would greatly appreciate if anyone considering participating as a team captain would contact us in order for us to get feedback. We want to make this a collaborative effort with the teams involved.

If you are considering participating or feel that you would like to contribute to the task of running SCL events please contact me in game or at SyndicateCL@gmail.com

For general feed back, please use this thread.

I assume limited edition ships like the Adrestia and what not will be banned cause they're easily available on the test server?

Well you have my interest.

Badass.

Registering interest... make this happen!

This seems like an interesting venture indeed.

If you would like any assistance in anyway regarding this contact me please.

Sound very interesting, i think team DeepWater will take part.

First of all I want to say that I really enjoyed all the EvE tournaments I have wathced so far and what you are trying to pull off with this tournament league is awesome.

Some friends of mine and I where wondering what kind of entry fee you would take into view and what types of groups these tournaments would be aimed at. Do you want this to be more of an entry level tournament league for people who maybe in the future want to take part in the alliance/NEO tournaments, or do you want this to be additional tournament training for the already established and experienced tournament teams? Or maybe both? And what kind of controls do you envision to ensure that it will not just be established teams roflstomping newer contestants, in case you want to involve newer players into the tournament environment?
Lets say suppose there was a group of 8 players, realtivly new chars, with limited fiscal possibilities, rudimentary understanding of game mechanics and pvp tactics and very little pvp experience but a wilingness to learn and improve. Does such a theoretical team have any chance of becoming established in this, or do you need a bunch of at least 5 year old chars to be competetive?
I can understand if the tournament league is aimed at older players with experience, but looking at the long term goal of such a tournament league, creating hurdles so that only people that already have years of pvp experience in 0.0, LS or W-space can be competetive, will slow down the establishment of the league itself. PvP in each area of new eden is different from the other areas. If you could train in a tournament environment from the beginning of your PvP career you would become better at tournament pvp faster than training in 0.0, LS or W-space.
I guess what I am aiming at with this overtly complicated rabble is, whether you will only provide hosting for tournaments or whether you will also engage in the surrounding areas of training people for tournaments.

TL;DR:
Will you just be hosting tournaments (basically just saying: "we meet at XX:XX and rules are XXX and Fee is XXX and price is XXX) and everyone has to see for himself how to do the rest, or are you willing to put the extra effort in and REALLY create kind of an e-sport league of EvE tournament style PvP by also providing the surrounding services.

PS: With surrounding services i do not only mean possible organised Tournament training, but also for example keeping contacts with sponsors, maybe engaging in dialouge with CCP and Own3d (from the OP i guess so), providing a place for opinion exchange and other such community fostering services.

I'm certainly interested! Not sure how, but somehow. :)

With regular tournaments held on the test server to reduce the ISK cost for teams participating you will have a lot of practice fighting against other teams in an actual tournament environment. On top of that there is nothing preventing you from doing all your training in between the tournaments on the test server, and what I really want to see is teams contacting each other for scrims. Testing out new setups and possibly testing some tricks while not showing their full hand should they have to face them in the tournament.

I think the best venue for practice for each team is against other teams, it will make you more adaptable to different ways of flying and in the end benefit both teams.