EVE's Alliance Tournament VIII kicks off today

Today marks the start of EVE Online's eighth annual Alliance Tournament. Each weekend for the next three weeks, teams from 64 alliances will face each other on an even playing field where strategy and execution are the deciding factor. Using expert commentators sourced from the EVE community and live video streaming of the event, CCP Games do their best to make the tournament a great spectator sport for the average player. For those that enter the competition, it's a chance to prove that their alliance has what it takes to come up with winning tactics and execute them flawlessly. The first qualifying round is already underway and you can tune into the matches through CCP's live video stream.
The first round continues through today and tomorrow, with the second going live next weekend. In these two qualifying rounds, the 64 teams will be drawn against each other in a knockout-style tournament. 32 teams will make their way to the finals on June 19th and 20th, where they'll clash in a bid to prove their alliance has what it takes to win the big prize. For match schedules and details of how you can tune into the matches live via CCP's video feed, visit the official Alliance Tournament 8 website. If you've missed a fight you'd hoped to see, CCP will be uploading high definition match videos each week as the tournament progresses.

As with previous tournaments, the recognition of making it into the final matches will be matched by an equally impressive prize fund. In addition to a gold medal for winning and 50 billion ISK in prize money, this year's first place winners will go home with fifty limited edition "Adrestia" Gallente heavy assault cruisers, which are sure to be worth a lot on the black market. The team that joins them in the final match will receive silver medals for second place, 25 billion ISK and 50 limited edition "Utu" Gallente assault frigates. The third place winners will receive 25 billion ISK and a bronze medal each, and the fourth place team will get their hands on a still-impressive 10 billion ISK.

Reader Comments (27)

And of course, you can't forget to mention the inevitable ransoms; Hydra Reloaded already pulled one in the second round.

what does that mean?

i don't play eve, so, just a little clarification on that.

That was epic. I'll be writing a roundup of the first weekend's matches and that particular event should make it an interesting article.

For those that aren't that familiar with EVE, the HYDRA RELOADED team completely thrashed the Agony Empire squad and beat them down to their last ship, an expensive proteus (Tech 3 cruiser). They tried to ransom the proteus, who then offered them 3 billion ISK (a lot of money) to self-destruct their whole team and throw the match. They agreed, partly for the 3 billion ISK and partly because losing means in the second round they'll face a weaker opponent (another team that lost their first round match). It's a very interesting development!

Agony didn't take the ISK.

Genos had probably placed bets on themselves losing the fight and collected more than 3bn out of it.

Plus - they get nice forum threads to troll in. Trolls and drama queens as they are.

CCP ended up looking utterly stupid though, which is funny.

Interesting. They did also end up getting the maximum points they could for a loss, more or less. So if they pull a strong win in round 2 they could be in a good position for the finals.

The "ransom" plus the Battle Badger and the reluctant Daredevil have made this some good watching. Couple of them didn't go the way I thought they would.

Is that legal? (ransoming)

Yeah, legal and encouraged game mechanic, so nothing wrong doing it normally on Tranquility. There's no rules against it in the Tourney either.

Well, it isn't stated to be illegal.

Sweet. we(Atlas) appear to have smoked IRC, killing 3 t3 ships and a commnad ship in the process. :) No ransom here, jsut die, die, die!

ARE THOSE CUSTOM SHIPS?!

The reward ships are usually just reskinned frigates and cruisers. Occasionally small changes are made the models (I think the Minmatar frigate from the last tournament had modified solar panels on the wings?).

I wonder are these the same models but with additional customisation data to place the gallente federation logo on them. If they had a system for attaching extra components to a ship model at draw-time, it would be easy to let people embed their corp logos into ships. I'd sure as hell love to see that happen!

Oh that's poopy. They really need to get on top of ship visual customization.

Meh.
Visual customizations are fine for special ships as these, but in normal game play - who cares about the models, you're hardly ever zoomed close enough to see the ship model anyhow.

It would help further immerse the player within the universe because lets be honest, in what universe would people NOT customize their ship's appearances in addition to its performance? It's like people with cars in the real world... CCP pays such great attention to detail so one would think this is an idea that wouldn't be as overlooked as it is.

In a fight, I don't think I'd want to have to load 20+ customized ship models when I warp in.

Passing all that information back and forth would put a lot of load on a server that's already performing poorly.

It wouldn't necessarily cause a massive FPS dip as it wouldn't be 20 customised ship models. If the logos could be applied at draw-time, we'd be talking about drawing the ship model as normal and then drawing an additional simple square block using the same transformation matrix times a specific translation matrix depending on the ship's hull type to put it at the correct location.

The block could be textured with the corp logo (which takes very little time to generate currently) and an edge embossing effect could be created using a normal map distortion based on the logo. The whole system could be built into EVE's current level of detail system so only ships right near the camera would have it drawn or it might only draw it on your own ship. It could also be disablable from the escape menu.

There'd be no info passing between the client and server except once to look up a tiny string of digits telling it what components the corp's logo is made from. That's how it currently makes corp logos when you do a show-info on someone, they're passed to your client as a tiny string of digits and then your computer renders the logo. So it's definitely feasible to do without any significant impact on game performance. It's a matter of developer time and priorities, really.

Show info currently takes a lot of time though. To test, I just showed info on a couple of people passing through system, and corp logos took about 2 seconds to load initially. Once they were loaded and cached, requests on members of the same corp were almost instantaneous.

There's a similar delay attempting to load character portraits in chat channels.

These times are in a system that currently has no lag. I'm sure you know that show-info or loading portraits during a large fleet fight is a good way to lock your client for a short time.

Jumping into a gatecamp in the area where I operate, I can expect pilots from 3-6 corporations. That delay will put me at a significant disadvantage. CCP really shouldn't be forcing additional server calls on us until the server can handle it in a reasonable amount of time.

Performance issues aside, the last time CCP made a new place to display corp logos (Eve Gate), they screwed up. My own corp logo still doesn't display the correct components on Eve Gate.

There are so many ways to screw it up, and so many better things to do. I'd like to think it's low on the to-do list, but CCP has never been known for rational priorities.

That's what I'm talking about, a few seconds for an entire corp and only the first time you see their logo isn't that much. Most of the showinfo time is currently in getting other info from the server like corp history and generating portraits, which takes a comparatively long time.

Realistically, layering three or four 64x64 bitmaps together takes in the order of milliseconds or microseconds so the delay on generating a corp logo is likely due to CCP's content loader and cache saving mechanism rather than the actual logo generation process. That's a fair point though, especially if it does it automatically while you're in the middle of a fleet fight and have forgotten to disable it (or if a gang gets the jump on you).

I think more people would appreciate little customisations like having their corp logo on a ship than you realise, though. The issue comes up quite regularly on the forums and has done since as far back as I remember. It's even been pushed to the CSM a few times. The idea of being able to customise ship appearances is clearly as intoxicating for a great many players as a lowsec criminality revamp might be to you and me. Remember that the majority of EVE players live in highsec where the drawbacks you discussed aren't such a big deal.

I'm sure it's low on the priority list as it's been on there for years and there has consistently been something more important to do, but I wouldn't be surprised if it snuck its way into an expansion some time.

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EVE's Alliance Tournament VIII kicks off today

Reader Comments (27)

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 1:07PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 1:12PM BrianH said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 1:40PM Brendan Drain said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 2:17PM SgtBaker said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 2:30PM Brendan Drain said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:42PM Orvidos said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 2:17PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 2:21PM SgtBaker said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 2:23PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 3:03PM TacosWLove said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 3:47PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:07PM DrewIW said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:23PM Brendan Drain said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:11PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:17PM SgtBaker said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:38PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 4:53PM DrewIW said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 5:23PM Brendan Drain said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 5:54PM DrewIW said

Posted: Jun 5th 2010 6:16PM Brendan Drain said

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