EVE Online PVP Tournament Streamed Live 101
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!"
Missed Day One? They're up... (Score:5, Informative)
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Did they got rid of wobbling? I'm somehow reluctant to turn those videos on otherwise.
Really, this was one thing destroying the immersion for me, when I watched EVE videos the last time - really nice views generally, but eventually some massive object showing up that inevitably wobbles when hit, when it couldn't possibly wobble like that. If you want to, have in the close-up view a visible blastwave going through the structure (could be merely approximate), jets of plasma and debris through ports of presuma
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It can start small, just approximations. Say, an underlying gouraud shaded model, "visible" (normally quite dark) through transparent parts (of main textures) showing some "net" of structural borders and/or ports; when under heavy attack - lighting up a bit (gouraud...PS1 was doing it easily) in one of few predetermined fashions / sequences, representing waves of destruction expanding throughout the structure. Coupled with dozen particles spewing out of some predetermined locations; quickly lighting down an
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I was thinking more about the "shake" of gargantuan vessels...
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Re:Missed Day One? They're up... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm half expecting the narration to be in a somber, journalistic tone:
Then the sports commentator tone comes in:
It's kinda surreal in a weird way.
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It's especially funny when you consider that according to their canon, each one of those ships is crewed by hundreds of people.
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One thing that I find extremely irritating is how much TV time is spent televising sports - half the news programs here are about sports, there are many hours of TV time dedicated to sorts, not to mention whole free to air sports channels.
After discussing this sad fact with my girlfriend just this weekend, we came to the conclusion that the reason why there is so much sport on TV versus say, coverage of computer games etc, is that of course sports events offer advertising agencies huge amounts of revenue, w
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Agony vs HYDRA (Score:1)
Why don't more companies post video content? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Really, the thing is lack of centralization. Aside from MMORPGs, game companies won't be able
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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.
Check out the Just Cause 2 "Anatomy of a Stunt" videos:
#1 of the series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc38RBNz0xI [youtube.com]
Just Cause 2 user channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialJustCause2 [youtube.com]
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Except that these videos become a useful recruiting tool. Both for potential customers that happen to stumble into the videos, and also for existing customers who want to show their friends without having to be at their own machines. What's easier? "Hey, I found this great game! Download a gig of stuff, sign up for a trial account, log in, find me, and I'll show you around.." or "Hey, I found this great game! Check out this video of actual game play! *link to youtube*"
If you haven't already gathered,
Good to see what EVE is like (Score:2, Insightful)
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 h
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Re:Good to see what EVE is like (Score:4, Interesting)
It's lots and lots of grinding for money so you can experience a battle for a few minutes and then you're back to 10h of grinding. It's hard to find a fair player, most of them will try to scam you in any way possible. Honorable players are rare. It's next to impossible to [find] a fair fight. There are definitely great moments in game, but the amount of negativity is overwhelming and that is the reason so many people leave after trial runs out. Even those who have full accounts take breaks and often complain of boredom. It has a very low ratio of fun/"time invested".
sounds strikingly similar to my life.
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Learning to PVP isn't that hard. EVE University and Agony Empire both offer classes to anyone who can pay the (very small) fee. The UI should be easier, but it isn't by any means impossible.
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Re:Good to see what EVE is like (Score:4, Informative)
It's lots and lots of grinding for money so you can experience a battle for a few minutes and then you're back to 10h of grinding.
Then you're doing at wrong. When your character is still young and you're still inexperienced you should be flying cheap crap. Especially if you join a corp(like mine) that specializes in pvp you can still make a contribution even in a simple rifter with a total cost of less than 1 million, and any corpmate can have a 100 of those for you in 2 mouse clicks.
One mistake a lot of EVE players make is to assume that bigger is better. Each and every ship in the game fills a particular niche, and the tournament shows this off quite well.
Still, in my line of work we sit on gates for hours waiting for someone we don't know is actually at his computer to undock his ship. I guess you could call that grinding as well ;-)
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> Still, in my line of work we sit on gates for hours waiting for someone we don't know is actually at his computer to undock his ship. I guess you could call that grinding as well ;-)
As someone who does not play EVE, I don't even know if you mean real work or EVE stuff.
> People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Pro tip: Delete your sig.
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Still, in my line of work we sit on gates for hours waiting for someone we don't know is actually at his computer to undock his ship. I guess you could call that grinding as well ;-)
IRL, I used to fly hang gliders. The problem was the "hang waiting" where you sat on a cliff and stared at the sky for hours, waiting for the wind to turn. It was much like playing Eve: sitting at a gate waiting, like you say. The first few times it was exciting - a real battle, real money at stake. Then... time to go to bed. It's 3am and I just wasted my evening for nothing.
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Don't run highsec missions unless you like doing them. Get into a corp asap. Personally I'm loving living in wormholes.
Perhaps check out Red vs Blue, Eve Uni or Faction Warfare for fights asap in cheap fun ships.
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Check out PlanetSide:
Pure PvP FPS
133 vs. 133 vs. 133 players per continent. There are several continents.
No grinding, you fight for something and level up as a result.
No economy, trading or currency (thus no gold farmers, no twinking, no gold selling, no economy to corrupt)
Cert systems means no noobstomping and shallow power curve (my 6 year character can't just one click kill your 1 day character)
Huge maps, but not huge in the same sense as EVE. You can get from anywhere to anywhere else in a few minutes
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The UI is horribly bad. This is universally accepted by the player base. When in doubt right click.
erm.. (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
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You mean I actually have to play the game? No, thanks. The only thing better than playing a MMORPG like Eve is watching someone else play it. Better yet, anyone have a live stream of themselves watching the live stream? Don't want to get too close to the action my heart may explode LOL!
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They at least need to be tested to see if they know how to pronounce the ship model names... no, you don't pronounce the 'C' in Scimitar!
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Re:erm.. (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't play the game, the commentary is hilariously incomprehensible. If your drink is alcoholic, or your snack is pot brownies, that alone is pretty entertaining. It's also done over some sub-Skype crappy VOIP system.
Of course the images are equally incomprehensible.
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And the commentary is even more incomprehensible if you do play the game... wtf these player 'experts' came from is beyond me and anyone I know in-game...
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I agree. I watched the commentary and I expected a lot more then just describing what I could see with my eyes.
Rather then describing the action, "Oh that Scimitar is taking damage." "The Scimitar is down."
How about why it is taking damage, what is being used to make it take damage, and how is it part of the teams strategy to go after that ship first? How about a description of the abilities? How about anything besides what a 6 year old could tell me by looking at the health bars?
It left a bad taste in my m
The most exciting PvP experience I've ever had (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com].
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CCP are doing their best to prevent the lag or failures of nodes when big battles happen. For one, you can send them a message ingame ahead of time saying "In system XYZ we will be attacking the other faction tomorrow." and CCP then dedicate a much stronger server for that time to this system. Then you can have battles of 500+ ships with moderate success. For spontaneous events I believe battles of under 200 do not cause much problems anymore.(apart from some lag)
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And before before that spontaneous battles of 100 players were unplayable. Yes, it is a step back, but it's not like over two hundred people fighting at once is something to be sneezed at. Cut CCP some slack or just don't play the game if it's so bad. I'm sure dozens of new players will happily fill in the void your corp leaves after you go away in protest.
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I think this video gives a better flavour of EVE Online: The Butterfly Effect [youtube.com]
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If you think it's fun slash nailbiting to watch, try participating!
(Dystopia Alliance)
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SLEEEEEP (Score:1)
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In EVE, you aren't flying fighters, you are flying frigates, cruisers, battleships, and the like. You want EVE game to behave as though you were piloting a TIE Fighter when in actuality you are "piloting" the equivalent of Star Destroyers.
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To dumb it down it's basically world of warcraft but in space. 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.
If you go in thinking this is a game of flying or shooting skill similar to elite prepare to be disappointed.
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To dumb it down it's basically world of warcraft but in space. 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...
Hardly. In Eve you'll notice a lot of combat involves ships circling around each other in orbits whereas in WOW tournaments the arenas are close combat and involve line-of-sight tactics. Example
SK Gaming vs TSG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFo2yObhOS0 [youtube.com] (HD video)
Re:Eve combat (Score:5, Informative)
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 ;-)
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Yeah, it's kinda like poker. It may look like it's just random cards and luck, but it isn't really.
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Not only that, you have to figure in tracking speeds of your turrets, overheat status, engaging drones (and if you are using ECM drones, the ol' "attack, withdraw" tactic that you constantly have to do), explosion velocities, getting webbed/ scrammed, etc. If you are a kiting ship, then keeping distance, minimizing/ maximizing transversal (depending on ship size), and manual flying are you're bread and butter. I convinced all my roomates to get back into EVE several times after deactivating their accounts
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Replace drones with mages, ship with character and you've basically described every other MMO such as Warcraft Battlegrounds or even guild wars.
I know a lot of Eve fanboys modded you up but what I said still stands. The kind of skill you're talking about isn't flying a ship, it's communicating, assessing a situation and applying tactics which you have to do in every game.
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If you want a first-person dogfighting multi-player space game, my first suggestion would be (free)Allegiance (http://freeallegiance.org) which, while not actually an MMO (the world isn't persistent), is an incredibly strategic and tactical experience where an individual game or match can involve over a hundred players and last for hours. Dogfighting skill is definitely critical in Allegiance, and you're not generally fighting NPCs - aside from fixed defense turrets, all armed units are manned by at least o
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Right now, the player count shows 56556 players, with an all-time record of 56817 players.
Stats here: http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility [eve-offline.net]
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http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1331799&page=3 [eveonline.com]
"The new record is 60,453 pilots online at 19:53 GMT on 6 Jun 2010."
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Keep in mind this is a single-universe game, where everyone can interact with everyone else.
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From http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility [eve-offline.net]
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.
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Newsworthy, because this time they stream also the qualifier rounds live (again), whereas last tournament, they put those on YouTube the day later and only showed the final round live. Also newsworthy: (working) HD stream this time.
Actually... (Score:1)
If you change your user agent string accordingly, you'll see that most of the examples work fine in Chrome, just not the first (video doesn't play) or the VR one.
/wrongchan (Score:1)
Damn... I blame Slashdot RSS/Google Reader for that.
Are they for real? (Score:2)
Can someone who plays explain some things (Score:2, Interesting)
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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?
Ships are not irreplaceable. If you play Eve, you WILL lose ships.
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?
The GMs move the teams to a specially isolated system where there is no way in and no way out. If you leave a certain radius from the center of the arena you are automatically destroyed. You can't return to the field after fleeing, so there's never anything to gain from running before doing as much damage as you can.
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?
Different ships are assigned a point value, with a hard point limit imposed on each team. You can have a few expensive ships, q
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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?
The point of an alliance tournament is not to make a lot of money. It is to show yourself and prove yourself in the eyes of the community, to earn some respect and achieve something only a few people have achieved before. The prices for the top 3 are very high this time, but I am quite sure that the alliance tournament would not be less popular if there were no other prices than just the title itself.
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?
The arena is in an isolated area of space, unaccessible to normal players. Running away is not an option, th
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Terrible announcers (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I watched a few more... they got better as they went along.
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Missing the other bit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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God, again with the complaints about mining!
I have 4 eve chars, totaling almost 200 million skill points, and I've mined a total of 3 hours in over 4 years of playing.
The oldest, richest characters in Eve make their money on industrial stuff: Purchasing, trading, producing from valuable blueprints, etc. Value added kinds of stuff.
A lot of people (me, in my earlier days) just went killing NPC pirates for bounties. You can make enough to buy even the most expensive ship fielded in the tournament (probably o
Re:Missing the other bit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of EVE game mechanics. It's either complete ignorance or pure slander.
All skills in EVE are on a 1 to 5 scale. For example you can train Large Projectile Turrets to level 5 in a month. You can train it to 4 in about 6 days. Training from 1 to 4 takes 20% of the time as training from 1 to 5. In 20% of the time you can be 80% as good as that multi-year player.
This isn't a traditional MMPOG like progression where a level 30 is completely incapable of touching a level 60. A one month old character can take out a multi-year player no problem.
Old characters aren't better they're simply more versatile. Say you can max your projectile skills in 4 months. They're maxed. They don't get any better. If you're 4 months old with maxed projectile and they're 24 months old with the same exact projectile skills how exactly did you not catch them?
Sure that 24 month old player can also use lasers really well. But that just gives him options. It doesn't make him better. You have the exact same skills. You're just as good.