Alliance Tournament VI Begins

This weekend marked the beginning of the Sixth Alliance Tournament for Eve Online, returning after a year.  When I was at FanFest, the lack of any more tournaments after last year's was one of the big things people complained about during the Dev panel.  While I think a lot of people understood the problem of spending almost a million dollars on it, the tournaments have become one of the biggest in-game events over the last few years, and a lot of people really liked the EveTV coverage.

When they announced the new tournament just a few weeks after FanFest, a lot of people were surprised; however, I suspect a lot of the devs loved the tournaments just as much as we players did (well, especially since a lot of the new devs are former EveTV experts).  The new format is a bit lower budget, with only the last elimination round having live video coverage, but all the qualifying rounds are getting live audio commentary via a number of Eve internet radio stations (Eve Radio, Split Infinity Radio, and New Eden Radio among others), and video is being posted to CCP's Youtube channel the day after the matches.

We're pretty excited to be participating again this year, and I think we have a strong chance of getting to the elimination round at the very least.  We had our first match yesterday against Veni Vidi Vici, an alliance we (and I think most people) didn't know too much about.


We won quite handily, but the day (and the match) were not without their snafus; I was nervous as hell for most of this weekend, as Marc can attest to, and I spent about three hours Saturday just practicing my jamming on the test server since I haven't flown a Blackbird in ages.  Then, just prior to the match, Neco Furyan, who was supposed to pilot the other Blackbird, had to bow out due to problems with his connection.  While we got a very capable replacement, it wasn't really the sort of thing you want to be juggling 15 minutes before you need to be ready!  We also made a last minute decision to put sensor damps on our Ishtars and Cerberuses (Cerberi?) an hour or two before the match -- a decision that probably saved us a world of hurt.

When the match started, I was a little slow with the jams, and as you can tell, that didn't bode well for me -- the first missile volley hammered my shields away and my armor down to about 30% before I could lock the Drakes down while our Ishtars damped the Vulture and Ravens to hell.  By the time that happened though, I had a flight of light drones heading towards me.  With nothing to really defend myself with (my high slots were totally empty), it was only a matter of time before I was going down.  But considering I thought both Sarendra and I would be down within 30 seconds, the fact that I survived for over a minute and him for over four probably was a big contributor to our victory.

The only loss that was probably avoidable was Ayari's Ishtar loss; he resisted abandoning his sentry drones until too late, which meant the three Vigils and a handful of light drones were able to whittle him away.  If we had kept the medium armor repairers on the Ishtars as we had originally thought, he probably would have survived, likewise if he had abandoned his sentries and switched to lights earlier on.  Still, two Blackbirds and an Ishtar were a fair trade for a complete victory against our competitors.

Next week, we look to be fighting Pandemic Legion (despite a ranking snafu that originally had us going up against the Interbus Initiative), who will be very tough.  We've fought many of them before while we were in Pure Blind, as a number of them were formerly in Triumvirate., who beat us in the last tournament during the group round (and went on to be runners-up in the tournament overall).  If we can make a good showing, though, we should be able to make it through, and I have no doubt we'll do so.  The new rules that ban remote armor and shield repairer modules have really eliminated the all-or-nothing fights that were very common in previous tournaments.

If you want to see all the tournament fights, you can get them from CCP's Youtube channel; I especially recommend the Otherworld Empire Productions vs. Ushra'Khan fight and the 24th Imperial Crusade vs. The Interbus Initiative fight, both of which were really exciting to listen to (and see).  And be sure to tune in next week for the last round of qualifying matches!