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EVE Online PVP Tournament Streamed Live
infinitevalence writes "Every few months the good Viking programmers of the north organize and present one of the most geeky e-sports out there. Thanks to them, for three weekends in a row we get to watch player-controlled spaceships fight it out for accolades and unique in-game items available only to the first, second, and third place winners. This year CCP has all of the content live online and streaming in HD for your viewing pleasure. So find a drink, whip up some snacks, watch the shiny explosions, and listen to the soothing words of player experts as they walk you through the action!"
Day one's battles have already been posted on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/CCPGAMES#g/c/29BA4E251AA2A6F8 , in 720p HD for your viewing pleasure.
I'm surprised more game companies aren't taking advantage of streaming and even static online video. If you look around youtube, most of the game videos are "Let's Play's" or other fan material, not official content. Maybe they don't think it's worth the effort.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
I'm glad to see this. I've been playing EVE lately, but I just can't get into it. The things that make EVE stand out to me are the single player-controlled universe and the lack of XP grinding. But (and I'm not trying to troll, here) I find the user interface to be excruciatingly bad, and most of the time I am wondering what I should be doing. You could argue that a user interface and having a supply of fun stuff to do are two cardinal properties of a good game. It seems EVE is calibrated for players that have been at it for a long time. But for a new player, I'm really frustrated.
EVE players hate it when people compare their game to WoW, but I think there's a lot to learn from other massives like that. When you get a fresh WoW account you're off to the woods killing Kobolds or whatever right away, and maybe it is not totally challenging, but there's always something to do, somewhere to go, and pretty things to look at. But in EVE the first few *days* are mostly doing boring agent missions where you don't really even do anything (at least in WoW you have to click on the damned Kobold) except fly around and learn to use the maddeningly bad UI. For good chunks of time, I set it on autopilot to do some 6-jump mission, go clean the kitchen or play with the dog, and come back in 20 minutes and I might be at the destination, where I will then need to set autopilot to go back to where I came from once I've dropped off the shipment.
But it is interesting to see this tourney going on, because the PvP really does look fun and full of lots of aspects: advance planning, massive social coordination, and straight up pvp videogame carnage.
"So find a drink, whip up some snacks, watch the shiny explosions, and listen to the soothing words of player experts as they walk you through the action!"
no.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
EVE online has many critics with very valid points, but never in my life have I had a PvP experience like in EVE. I've been gaming for over 20 years and never before EVE had I had a genuine fight-or-flight adrenaline rush. The terror of combat and the thrill of victory are unmatched outside actual combat. I've since quit the game, but I always look forward to watching the 10 man tournaments.
For those of you unfamiliar with the epic scale combat can reach, I suggest you look at the EVE Dominion trailer. It's a moderately accurate depiction of an alliance battle, or at least what it would be if the servers didn't get borked every time 100 ships jump into a system (one reason for quitting).
So less than your average South Korean shovelware MMO then.
From http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
Player statistics
Currently online: 55,783
Max today: 60,453
Current record: 60,453
It seems the tourney and this slashvertisement is doing them some good.
When you die, you lose your ship right? What on earth would compel a team to enter a tournament unless they were sure they were in range of the top 4 spots? How isolated are these tournaments? Can random people just fly in and start messing stuff up? Can you run away if you're about to be killed? What are the limitations of the team? What's to stop a really rich team from having a better loadout? Or a really big team? Can you have a large team of cheap ships? How many human players are involved in a battle. Don't you think for streaming purposes they should remove the red/blue overlay which makes a cool space battle look like just a bunch of squares standing around if you don't know the game?
These would be fun to watch if they had decent announcers. They are just saying "Team A is doing a lot of damage to Team B's (insert ship name)" and stuff like that. Even someone who has never played the game could look at the screen and tell you that. I wouldn't listen to a baseball announcer who just said "It's the 3rd inning, and the guy in the middle is throwing a ball at someone holding a bat. Look! He hit it! Now the scoreboard shows Team A scored."
Instead, they need to be informed of the loadouts ahead of time so they can say "Team A is using speed tanking to prevent missile damage by the (insert ship type here). This loadout is weak against smart bombs but works great against Team B's choice of long range missile damage."
I haven't played in years, and it is hard to make the action of a bunch of icons interesting without someone giving relevant background. It's too bad: the game is so highly tactical it really would add a lot of value to have people who know what they are talking about.
What I mean by that is you're constantly button mashing while you watch your model ship circle around your target shooting at something. When eve players talk about "skill" they're talking about it in the same sense as WoW players do, knowing when to mash the right buttons and when to run away.
Actually, no. When those of us who actually have it talk about skill we take things into account such as:
- Should I focus on trying to take him down asap or should I destroy some of his drones to reduce the amount of damage I'm taking myself?
- What distance between myself and the target is the most ideal? This varies from ship to ship(and there's well over a hundred different ships) and loadouts.
- Does he have any help coming in? Are any of the other people in the area interfering in the fight?
- What is my opponent trying to do? Fight, flee, stall, what's going on inside his head?
Add to that managing the supplies of the various kinds of ammunition, the status of your own ship etc...and then consider that this is just for a situation involving 1 ship on each side and now extrapolate that to 10 vs 10 where ships take on specialized roles.
Ow...and one of the skills in EVE is to prevent other people from running away...heck, it's probably the single most important one in PvP ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Too bad they're not showing the hundreds or even thousands of hours worth of mining that went into making the largest ships.
Or the 2 years worth of subscription that went into getting the ability to pilot the more advanced ones (learning skills is on a clock using real life time).
Yes, I've played EVE in the past: left when I came to the conclusion it's too much like work, only slower.
EVE has a lot of grassroots advertising above and beyond what it's size would seem to justify because it is fun for the small group you've been there for a long time and belong to one of the player Alliances that control the space with the rarest minerals. It's not really fun for newer players - addictive perhaps, but not fun.
Because of how skills are learned over a period using real-life time (u need not be logged-in for the time to count) a new player can never catch up on an older player.
Also the economy is based around the mining of minerals (used for making ships), the most common (least valueable and used in larger quantities for ship making) are found in safe NPC controlled space while the least common are found only in player controlled space (where if you don't belong to the right group you'll be shot on sight).
Somebody has to spend hours and hours mining all those low level minerals needed for making the largest ships for the players in those player Alliances that control "unsafe" space and who beter than newer players (who cannot go outside safe space without being shot) who are suppose to "work" before they get to have fun in PvP?
It is in the best interest of the estabilished players to get as much fresh meat as possible into the game to do the mining.
If you have several years of EVE under your belt and are in a player Alliance you're probably having some fun fights once in a while (a lot of time is wasted in other things and you still have to do some mining of higher level minerals), but if you're not one of those then the game is much lot less interesting than the fanboys portray it.