Tag: tournament

Tournament Blogging, Podcasting Madness

Tons of Missile DamageWith the EVE 5th Alliance Tournament coming up at the end of February, I figured now was a good time to speak on some plans that are being hatched.

First up there’s some goodies Urban and I want to do on the podcast. Nothing is fully set yet so I can’t give any details, but watch this blog for some updates as things progress.

One of the things which ended up being more successful than I’d ever thought it would be was my photoblogging of the last tournament’s finals. The pictures I took are still up on my Flickr site, so knock yourself out with those. This year I hope to do more of the same, photoblogging as much of the tournament matches as I can. This should be especially interesting given the new engine, and it’s my hope the shots I can take will out-do the ones from last year. Plus, I hope that the community enjoys the addition to the tournament coverage that will be available everywhere.

Again, watch this space for more news as the Tournament approaches. 🙂

In other EVE news, we’ve got the inaugural episode 0 of The Drone Bay, a new EVE podcast from Crovan, CrazyKinux, and the new guy whos name I can never remember. The show’s amazing, with an great chemistry between the podcasters. It’s been a blast helping these guys out the last couple of weeks to get started, and I can’t wait to listen to future episodes!

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.