mcgreag

@Jef Reahard There are also a consequence that you will lose sec status. If you keep doing it you will eventually get to the point where the npcs will shoot you just for entering high sec.

@Maseno They tried to do that around launch (don't remember if it was axed already in the beta or shortly after launch) and it was a disaster. People would go afk with something heavy on the F1 key to train afterburner and similar stuff.

And there there are all those skills that are not tied to an active action, like stuff in Corporation Management and fitting skills like Electronics and Engineering, or do you suggest that people should kick out alts from corporation and have then rejoin constantly while sitting and adding and removing modules from the fitting screen 24/7.

While it might sound good on paper it just doesn't work in practice.

@ScottishViking He can be maxed out in the areas he find interesting.

@ChrisDin Well I am 100m sp player and I found myself in an ospray not long ago because while I do have a lot of skills none of those are in mining. So then I wanted to help some newer players with mining the osprey was the obvious choice.

I have also used condors and vigils and shuttles with microwarpdrives plenty of times.

And there have to be stepping stones. Even if isk is easier than ever to come by not everyone can afford a T3 or even a BC after a few weeks.

@ChrisDin There are almost 200 ships in eve, of course there are going to be ships with less usefulness than others, anything else would be a miracle.

That said going through the list of ships I can only find a handful that have little to no real purpose or usefulness.
Looking at the Caldari ships we have the standard Badger (not Mark II), the Bantam possibly and then the railgun line of ships (moa, ferox, eagle, rokh) might be slightly questionable but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they have no real purpose.
So out of 40 or so ship at most 6 but more like one or two have no use.

@JohnD212 No there are no "direct" control, but remember that the smallest ships in the game are the size of jumbo-jets and the largest ones are the size of cities. It wouldn't make sense to have the kind of direct control you are asking for.

@Wizardling At least we got to see ships explode. The BoB vs ASCN final in Alliance tournament 2 or 3 (don't remember which) where they both sat at 50km and not managing to kill a single ship was worse IMHO.

@(Unverified) Agree the Buzzard looks great. And I must agree with the cheetah being ugly eve with it being the ship I spend the most time in. I much preferred the look back while it was based on the Vigil, but buzzard was the best looking one back then too.

@(Unverified) Eve record is 63k not, 36k.

@Verus The tournament are played on the regular server and all ships and modules used have to be obtained by normal ingame means.
The purpose of the tournament has never been to show who is the best pilots but who is the "best" alliance. That's why it's called the Alliance Tournament and not something else.

Also note that "best" here does not have to mean the best combat pilots but who is best at the combined effort needed to win, this includes funding, logistics, training, spying and finally meta gaming.
But in the end meta gaming is just one of the many components to make a good team. It would mean nothing if someone brought a good enough team to beat them. Fact of the matter is that no other team where good enough to beat them.