The 4th EVE Alliance Tournament’s first weekend is over. You’ll hear some brief comments of mine on the Warp Drive Active podcast this week (due out today/tomorrow). Overall the action was good, there were some snores in the form of fights which were simply full of turtle logistics, which while effective is pretty much the worst thing to broadcast live for people to watch. Commentary was uneven, but on average was the best of any tournament so far. The effort taken to enlist several PVP experts from the community to talk about the fights has paid off.
Fallout from the tournament continues even now after the fights have finished. A big one happened today, with the announcement that Mercenary Coalition is pulling out of the tournament. You can read the announcement on this thread, along with the replies of the community. Seleene explains things in a bit more detail on page 2, while some of the replies serve more to justify the decision than anything else.
The situation this year is kind of strange. We have a really well produced tournament, with CCP and EVE TV doing an amazing job of putting on a good show for everyone to watch. It’s free. It’s for us, the players of EVE. There are a lot of people in Iceland right now working hard, long hours, to bring the action to the masses.
So why is the EVE TV forum turned into a complete sewer, filled with sad examples of poor sportsmanship, alt trolling, and a general harassing tone towards the event organizers?
I don’t know what really to say about this. I’m not surprised the obtuse viewpoints of some will fail to realize the reasons behind the MC’s decision, even when it’s explicitly laid out for them in a forum post. I feel bad that my alliance’s team won’t continue on, but I understand and support that decision wholeheartedly.
I’ll continue to watch the tournament and see who wins in the end, and we’ll see what kind of sensible debate can be had about the subject in the WDA podcast’s half-time cast coming soon.
Winterblink 