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.

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.