Alliance Tournament VI - The Final 32
Well, apologies for the tardiness of this post, but I have been waiting for CCP to post the videos of our fight on Saturday before I wrote my blog entry on this one. They finally went up today, and though the HD version of our fight doesn't appear to be up yet, I suspect it will be coming soon. So, on with the show.
This weekend marked the return of Eve TV's live coverage of the tournament, with in-studio commentary hosted by CCP Soundwave between all the fights. I'm one of those people that really misses the weekly Eve TV shows from last year, and as nice as the radio broadcasts the last two weeks were, it would have been nice to see them live again too. That made this week the highlight of the tournament for me, and really made the tournament something unique you just don't see with any other MMOs, a real worldwide sporting event -- with, at its highest point during the finals on Sunday, over 12000 viewers (Eve itself reached a new peak concurrent user record of over 51000 pilots online at the same time).
Our fight was at 1900 GMT on Saturday, about midway through the last half of the day's fights. Our opponents, Ev0ke, had beaten us in the first elimination round of last year's tournament and then gone on to take the championship, and were widely believed to be one of the favorites for this tournament. Our fight ended up being one of the best of Saturday, according to most viewers (though Sunday had a ton of matches to rival it).
This weekend marked the return of Eve TV's live coverage of the tournament, with in-studio commentary hosted by CCP Soundwave between all the fights. I'm one of those people that really misses the weekly Eve TV shows from last year, and as nice as the radio broadcasts the last two weeks were, it would have been nice to see them live again too. That made this week the highlight of the tournament for me, and really made the tournament something unique you just don't see with any other MMOs, a real worldwide sporting event -- with, at its highest point during the finals on Sunday, over 12000 viewers (Eve itself reached a new peak concurrent user record of over 51000 pilots online at the same time).
Our fight was at 1900 GMT on Saturday, about midway through the last half of the day's fights. Our opponents, Ev0ke, had beaten us in the first elimination round of last year's tournament and then gone on to take the championship, and were widely believed to be one of the favorites for this tournament. Our fight ended up being one of the best of Saturday, according to most viewers (though Sunday had a ton of matches to rival it).
The Fourth District vs. Ev0ke
The Fourth District: Nighthawk, Drake, 7x Caldari Navy Caracal, Caracal
Ev0ke: 5x Dominix, 2x Vigil
Our setup wasn't totally out of the box, as missile-heavy teams have been fairly common in the tournament, and Ev0ke was doing a slower, more heavily armored version of the Ishtar sentry drone setup. A lot of people have wondered why we went with a Nighthawk, a Drake and a standard Caracal instead of a Nighthawk and two more Navy Caracals; the answer is that we wanted to be able to use two different gang mods, a siege (which toughens up our shields) and a skirmish (which gives our ships more speed), so we needed either a Vulture or two battlecruiser-class ships. We didn't really have anyone who could use both skirmish and siege gang mods, so using two ships was pretty much our only choice.
You can see from the video that going in, we were the underdogs -- understandable, considering who we were going up against. However, after a minute or two into the match, we managed to start hammering the Dominixes and were really putting some hurt down on the Ev0ke team. Our strategy was basically to use dampeners on the Caracals to keep the Dominixes from being able to direct their fire (which requires a lock) while flying around at high speed with MWD to evade the sentry tracking. For a while, this worked pretty well, and we were cutting the Dominixes down while we were just slowly getting nibbled to death.
Unfortunately, we ran into some trouble as the match wore on. The heavy armor of the Dominixes meant that we couldn't kill them very fast, which gave the sentries more and more time to work on us. It also meant our MWDs were eating away our capacitor. Eventually, that meant that our ships capped out -- no more capacitor meant that they lost the energy they needed to move fast and run their dampeners, so eventually the Dominixes and their sentries started to wear us down. The one thing that didn't happen was the boundary violation the commentators called -- that was actually on one of the Ev0ke players. What happened to that Caracal was that it was too slow, and the sentries managed to get it in their sights -- and the volley just decimated the poor thing.
In the end, the fight was down to the wire, as our Drake took down the last Vigil and second-to-last Dominix all on its own, before falling to the remaining sentries. I'm not sure what we could have done better, aside from not having that Drake and focusing our fire a bit better at the beginning of the match there. Just barely losing to the finalists is hardly something to be ashamed of though! Here's what the commentators had to say after our match:
Nothing really for us to be ashamed of -- we're already looking forward to our next tournament outing when, hopefully, we won't be going up against such a tough schedule -- if you watch the rest of the tournament matches, and I highly recommend you do, you'll see that Ev0ke got to the semifinals, where they lost to Pandemic Legion. Pandemic Legion went on to defeat RUR for the tournament championship -- and they were the team that beat us in the second week of the qualifying round. You'll also notice that we had the best outing of anyone else against Ev0ke, aside from Pandemic Legion.
Day 6 doesn't appear to be up on CCP's YouTube channel yet, but when it gets put up there, I highly recommend checking it out. As I said above, Sunday had a ton of really close matches with some awesome displays of piloting, and anyone at all interested in Eve really owes it to themselves to check it out. This year's tournament rules were really condusive to these sorts of excellent fights.
The Fourth District: Nighthawk, Drake, 7x Caldari Navy Caracal, Caracal
Ev0ke: 5x Dominix, 2x Vigil
Our setup wasn't totally out of the box, as missile-heavy teams have been fairly common in the tournament, and Ev0ke was doing a slower, more heavily armored version of the Ishtar sentry drone setup. A lot of people have wondered why we went with a Nighthawk, a Drake and a standard Caracal instead of a Nighthawk and two more Navy Caracals; the answer is that we wanted to be able to use two different gang mods, a siege (which toughens up our shields) and a skirmish (which gives our ships more speed), so we needed either a Vulture or two battlecruiser-class ships. We didn't really have anyone who could use both skirmish and siege gang mods, so using two ships was pretty much our only choice.
You can see from the video that going in, we were the underdogs -- understandable, considering who we were going up against. However, after a minute or two into the match, we managed to start hammering the Dominixes and were really putting some hurt down on the Ev0ke team. Our strategy was basically to use dampeners on the Caracals to keep the Dominixes from being able to direct their fire (which requires a lock) while flying around at high speed with MWD to evade the sentry tracking. For a while, this worked pretty well, and we were cutting the Dominixes down while we were just slowly getting nibbled to death.
Unfortunately, we ran into some trouble as the match wore on. The heavy armor of the Dominixes meant that we couldn't kill them very fast, which gave the sentries more and more time to work on us. It also meant our MWDs were eating away our capacitor. Eventually, that meant that our ships capped out -- no more capacitor meant that they lost the energy they needed to move fast and run their dampeners, so eventually the Dominixes and their sentries started to wear us down. The one thing that didn't happen was the boundary violation the commentators called -- that was actually on one of the Ev0ke players. What happened to that Caracal was that it was too slow, and the sentries managed to get it in their sights -- and the volley just decimated the poor thing.
In the end, the fight was down to the wire, as our Drake took down the last Vigil and second-to-last Dominix all on its own, before falling to the remaining sentries. I'm not sure what we could have done better, aside from not having that Drake and focusing our fire a bit better at the beginning of the match there. Just barely losing to the finalists is hardly something to be ashamed of though! Here's what the commentators had to say after our match:
Nothing really for us to be ashamed of -- we're already looking forward to our next tournament outing when, hopefully, we won't be going up against such a tough schedule -- if you watch the rest of the tournament matches, and I highly recommend you do, you'll see that Ev0ke got to the semifinals, where they lost to Pandemic Legion. Pandemic Legion went on to defeat RUR for the tournament championship -- and they were the team that beat us in the second week of the qualifying round. You'll also notice that we had the best outing of anyone else against Ev0ke, aside from Pandemic Legion.
Day 6 doesn't appear to be up on CCP's YouTube channel yet, but when it gets put up there, I highly recommend checking it out. As I said above, Sunday had a ton of really close matches with some awesome displays of piloting, and anyone at all interested in Eve really owes it to themselves to check it out. This year's tournament rules were really condusive to these sorts of excellent fights.
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