Warp Drive Active #135: A Solid Win

Linkage

Well the 4th Alliance Tournament is over, and the winner … *drum roll*… is HUN Reloaded! Congratulations go out to them, it was definitely an excellent win with a superb setup and team which worked very well together.

I don’t think anyone expected it to go that way, and personally I love it when this kind of thing happens. It was refreshing to have a tournament where the sure thing didn’t win, which should serve to prove to all the alliances out there that you don’t have to own have the map in EVE to be able to compete in these things. Overall the production of this tournament was top notch, with no streaming issues to speak of. This let everyone watch the matches live, and the inclusion of free streams of the prior days’ matches let you recap what you may have missed. Definitely a worthy feature.

The commentary for the final weekend was excellent, save for a few way-too-drunk moments on Sunday. 🙂 And the “CCP vs EVE TV” fight was a riot to watch, especially to see CCP mop the floor with the EVE TV crew.

For the final day’s matches I was lucky enough to be brought over to the tournament system to snag some screenshots. On a whim, I decided to do a bit of virtual photoblogging, putting up a bunch of shots from the tournament in near real-time on Flickr. If you’re curious and want to see what happened during the fights, venture over to my EVE 4th Alliance Tournament photo set and check it out.

A special thank you from me to the GMs who helped organize the event and the fights themselves, and allowed me to attend it in person. 🙂

Wilhelm Naked No More

A while back on Warp Drive Active podcast #5 we did a contest involving sci-fi quotes. We picked a winner, and as a prize he got himself a t-shirt with the comic of his choice emblazoned on the front. Being lazy, I didn’t get around to blogging about this, but here’s a link to his blog about it, including pictures of the shirt.

Congratulations once again Wilhelm.

EVE Tournament, weekend followup, controversy

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.