The Tournament, So Far

So the EVE Tournament’s been going now for two days, and is scheduled to keep going tomorrow, and Friday-Sunday next weekend. How’re things going so far?

I wasn’t able to tune in much on Friday, since the tournament was running while I was at work, but I had the streams running and overall from what I saw things were going pretty smoothly from a technical perspective. Things weren’t so smooth today though, with some annoying buffering issues happening throughout the day.

So far the action in the tournament’s been a mixed bag. Ridiculous fleet setups were fairly common on day one, which isn’t much of a surprise. A lot of teams seemed to be testing the waters of the new rules this year, and the changes proved to be interesting for some teams. As the tournament progresses I think the silly setups will fall away in favor of balanced teams.

The commentary this year has been pretty well top notch, with EVE TV handling the overall production of the tournament presentation, bringing in PVP experts from the community. While the commentators know what they’re talking about, there’s somewhat of a lack of … I don’t know, interesting banter between the commentators themselves. It’s fairly robotic, I suppose. And there’s somewhat less in the way of commentary that might be beneficial and helpful to brand new players to EVE, or players thinking of getting into the game. Just a bit more “what the hell we’re talking about” asides, maybe.

You can’t have a tournament without some controversy of course. Nebula Rasa wigged out on the forums as well, pissed off that they lost to The Mercenary Coalition. Look, the match was a borked at the start thanks to people on both sides losing connections. Folks on both sides came back online, and folks on both sides were removed by the GMs for repeated crashes. The match started, one side won. Can’t people lose gracefully?

And today, Goonfleet showed up with a fleet whos total point value was over the maximum allowed by the rules. The max is 100, Goonies showed up with 109, and they were forfeited by the GMs handling the events. Voila, a rabble thread on the forums was born. Personally I think that step was a bit too harsh by the GMs, they could have just asked them to pick a ship to be dropped from the team and moved on. Instead we were left with the studio commentary team awkwardly try to stretch out some sort of discussion to fill up the 20 minutes of match time.

Overall the tournament’s working out well this year, and as we go forward and the teams start dropping away, the action will no doubt get more and more interesting.