EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

I'll try to dig up the bracket from my camera's SD card. Your bros won their first match of the day, but got knocked out later.

First day mostly went off without a hitch -- although there were a lot of silly matches in the first round. Lots of strange comps, lots of piloting errors and boundary violations. Second and third rounds were honestly pretty good to watch.

I don't know if the Thursday matches were being recorded; I hope they were, as Shadoo's commentary was pretty hilarious at points, and Zastrow did pretty well. The final match is a best-of-3 between Team Sperge and Expendables on Saturday morning, and I know that's being broadcast on EveTV.

Awesome thanks for the update Namamai, hope some footage surfaces at some point.

I'm not sure. I personally wouldn't have minded 30 plex and some free beer.

All in all it's been a great tournament (so far), some close matches and most importantly explosions. The first match of the day was a highlight for me, truly epic.

My team was hell naw, perfect tie for third place. The free beer is ****.

I was a part of The Fourth District team and the experience was somewhat disappointing- I get the impression nobody actually sat down and made sure everything was set up correctly or even had reasonable thoughts about what is needed (you would have thought after 9 years of doing this...).

First, there was a reasonable suggestion that the teams be sat diagonally rather than opposite each other (there was long table with 10 computers on either side, grouped into 4 teams). A few minutes into the 10 minutes allotted to configure our ships, we were informed that there were technical limitations and that we had to sit opposite the team in order to fight them and thus were moved.

One of our team's character did not have corp roles to access the corp hanger and it took additional time after moving to sort this out. I recall a man announcing we had 3 minutes remaining (so 7 minutes had elapsed) before this was fixed. It's rather annoying that nobody told this man that there were issues and somewhat stressful to be hearing that, even if people are reassuring you that there will be extra time.

For some reason, instead of using a market with items sold for 100 ISK each and a generous wallet (as done on the Test server), we were informed that 'everything we needed' should be in the corp hanger. Not everything that should have available in the corp hanger was there and we had to make on-the-fly adjustments to our fits/implants.

Upon undocking, we were told to warp to our beacons. There were no beacons. It took a few minutes to work out what the issue was- apparently we were in the wrong system, had to redock and be moved (at which point I had drifted 44km off the undock ring and had Shadoo berating me for clicking approach instead of dock while everyone waited for my Hawk to MWD back to the station :D).

Thankfully, this derp gave a little time to realise that the overview was default, that auto-target was set to 1 and the client was on basic factory settings (for a while, I was worried that my overview was misconfigured and I just couldn't see the beacons). I'm accustomed to using overview packs, so trying to make it remotely useful was a challenge, especially under the tight time pressure. If I recall correctly, I managed to get the right columns I needed added on and at least my own fleet filtered out, but I was at a loss how to get drones on there (given the setup we went up against, this could have been vital information).

On top of all this, we had headsets with mics, but the sound quality was terrible and we couldn't hear each other. We couldn't just shout at each other over all the noise either, so we had to chinese whisper/shout orders down the line.

Apart from that, apparently one of our Vindi pilots had issues with his ASB refusing to overheat and his Invul being set to auto-repeat off, at least, that's what I've been told. I've heard, anecdotally, that other teams had issues with modules not cycling or repeating properly.

Not to say that were didn't make our own mistakes too. We had 2x Vindicators, 2x Hawks and 1x Vigil up against a Rattlesnake, Gila and Tengu. Call was made to primary the Tengu out of fear it was logistics (later it was pointed out that you can inspect the ship for turrets to check... maybe next time). Tengu was pretty tanky while the Vindis whithered under the combined fire. Don't know if a different primary would have gone any differently... possibly taking out the Rattle first (probably 50% of their DPS) may have given us a chance, but ultimately it was a 3 vs 2 battle with our frigates being mostly useless and only applying TPs and Sensor Damps from afar.

So, what can be done better next time? Maybe turn the rooms' speakers on, simulate the noise and sit down some CCP employees the night before and see if they can duke it out satisfactorily first. That would have probably avoided or at least highlighted the headset issues, the seating issues, being in the wrong system, the corp roles + hanger shenanigans, and all other practical issues along those lines.

I'd strongly question the 10 minute setup limit. It's highly inflexible to problems and I don't see the point of it- this isn't a speed-fitting challenge, it's a PVP tourney. There was enough computers to allow the next pair of teams on a full 30 minutes to fit up, get into space and ensure all is working to their satisfaction. Instead, we get matches where people undocked without ammo- while good for a quick laugh, it's annoying to not see a proper fight that would have occurred if they hadn't been pressured into making such a mistake. A generous setup time ensure both teams should be happy going into their fight and that things can kick off on time.

Kind of a given, but stick to the rules you set and offer the modules/implants that you indicated would be available in the rules.

Record the fights. People want to see these fights and it helps highlight any shenanigans- seems rather boneheaded this didn't happen at all.

The ship fitting was like a minigame in itself.

I know that T1/Meta is often better, we chose to limit it to T2 for the dust tournament as an experiment in forcing different fitting choices than you'd see on TQ.

Yup. We (expendables) had shopping lists and fits for all our setups on our phones, so it was just "buy X items, fit all to ship, double-check fit, fill up cargohold" and then spin ships for 7-8 minutes.

Actually, during the first day when everyone could walk behind us, I spent most of the ten minutes fitting up decoy ships, and then switched to my real ship at the 1min announcement.

Didn't mean you, was the explanation we got from one of the guys on the floor when we asked if T1 could seeded. Didn't really detract from it though, just meant some wild last minute revision of gobbin's tissues which was kinda fun.

Would be nice if more ammo could be seeded next time though, 10k isn't really a lot if you are all flying the same type of destroyers and potentially going to be losing a lot of them/fighting for a solid 10 minutes. Although i guess that does add another level to consider.

I don't think ECM was that viable given max skills- we put ECCM on our vindis just in case and the sensor strength is ludicrous, so anything but fully boosted ECM would have been a huge crap-shoot.

If CCP were that bothered about shoulder-surfing, you wouldn't put the teams in the middle of a busy PVP floor. Crossing over can be bypassed with phones, or radio, or whatever (probably more subtle too).