EVE - Alliance Tournament 9

[Marc]

Pandemic Legion are goooone! FIrst time they have lost in 5 years? Darkside even saved Shamis until last and stopped shooting him so they could smack talk in local. Awesome!

Watch live

Watch Live

 

[Punishment]

Lol 2 vindis and a bunch of keres this should be good

 

[taB]

Before Hydra

The planning for this started back when Genos was in Pandemic Legion. The alliance was talking about the alliance tournament and discussing how multiple teams should be fielded because we had so many capable pilots. Genos were new to the alliance and we knew that if we stayed we would be relegated to having maybe only Garmon flying on their A team (Shamis choosing only pilots he knew) and a few of us on the B team.

Having lost to PL under the Hydra ticker in the previous year Genos wanted another shot against PL but with Gobbins having taken the active Exceed members with him to PL we weren't sure if we had enough people to even practice. In addition, after Genos left for PL all of the Hydra corps went their own way and we didn't know if they'd come back. We had a thread discussing what we should do on our corp forums and a lot of our members told us not to bother and to throw our lot in with PL because we didn't have a chance with the current state of our inactive corp and Hydra not existing.

The voices that wanted to give this a shot eventually prevailed. Last year was our first time and we didn't know what we were doing besides Gobbins. Gobbins had taught us and we learned from PL's spying and meta-gaming. We were going to do this as Hydra and we were going to do it properly. We approached PODLA, Euphoria Released, The Deliberate Forces, 0utbreak and The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels about a tournament run with Hydra. They all agreed and came back to the reformed Hydra.

Logistics and Setting up Testing

Last year PL spied heavily on our tests and provided the teams we faced with intel on our setups. We didn’t want any attention from them this year. We planned to do this in two ways. First we setup a wormhole to do all our testing and second we told everyone involved to not get involved in any public discussions about the alliance tournament and make it seem that we weren’t taking it seriously and instead busying ourselves playing other games like HoN, Tanks, LoL, etc.

We can’t be sure how effective we were in making people think we weren’t busy testing when we were but we did what we could. For example: EVE Search - GENOS OCCIDERE WINS VS PL IN HONOR FIGHT

The wormhole thing was definitely effective though. However, setting up testing in a wormhole isn't trivial. You have to find an appropriate wormhole without any effects so you can perform accurate tests (can take hours of probing). You need a wormhole that has a static empire exit for manageable logistics however this also means that nothing bigger than an Orca can haul (20+ Orca runs were done multiple times). You need to set up a POS with multiple corporate hangers and ship maintenance arrays. You need all the characters you are testing with to be in the same corp with director roles so they can use them. You need to fill the hangers with all the ships, implants, scripts, charges and drones for every setup as well as every module you could possibly need. In addition we needed to get all of our characters into the wormhole securely without being followed knowing that at the very least PL would be interested in getting intel on us. Every time the test server was mirrored this entire process had to be repeated all over again. We ended up repeating this process from scratch 5-6 times over the course of our testing. Each time setting up a wormhole could take up to 12 hours of constant logistics on the test server from finding an appropriate wormhole to setting it up. In once case the server was mirrored twice in a period of 3 days and our logistics guys had to CTA from work and school to setup the wormhole in time for the scheduled tests.

We started testing immediately after the rules were announced at the beginning of April and continued testing for almost 3 months straight 2 or 3 times a week and in the last two weeks we tested every single day.

It also should be noted that our team consisted of people from all over the world in different timezones. We had people from Australia, Russia, Germany, Finland, the UK and the rest of Europe, as well as Canada and the US. All of these people adjusting their schedules and making sacrifices to routinely meet at the same time to practice over a 3 month period. From the Aussies waking up at 3am to the Canadians and Americans taking time off work and school just to PRACTICE on singularity for this tournament.

0utbreak splits from Hydra

For the first week or two, participation was just barely good enough for us to get 20 pilots onto Singularity to test. Most of the people who said they were interested never showed up and a lot of the more well known names in Genos were completely absent from any testing and ended up not being a part of this.

Participation dropped off in the following weeks and we were cancelling tests because we didn’t have enough pilots show up. We had to think of something to get people showing up to tests. With the actual tournament seemingly so far away there needed to be some motivation. We knew PL was planning to enter up to 3 teams so we thought why not get 0utbreak into their own alliance and have them enter as well? This would cause more 0utbreak pilots to be interested because now instead of 2 or 3 flying on the Hydra team a lot more of them would be able to participate in the tournament.

This was the key. Numbers shot back up and we were able to test with just over 20 people now showing up to test on a regular basis.

It’s worth mentioning that when 0utbreak joined Hydra it was picked up on in their Failheap recruitment thread and many correctly guessed it was for the tournament however Raivi who was PL’s spymaster last year also commented on 0utbreak then leaving. This made us nervous that he would guess what was happening when we wanted to keep things quiet.

Testing Continues

Now we also had to test for 5v5 setups as well as 10v10. Often we would not get enough numbers immediately and we would use the time to test 5v5 setups until people trickled in from all the different time zones to give us 20 people. This really helped our morale as well as there was something to do and people weren’t wasting their time waiting for people to show.

Our base line setup for testing against was the Minmatar Rush. We lost to it last year and we decided that any setup that we came up with needed to beat it as well as be good against other setups or it was scraped. We tested against Minmatar Rush so often that we became extremely good at flying it and we came to understand it better than I believe even PL does.

Since Minmatar Rush was such a good setup we could only come up with four or five other setups that could beat it and weren’t simply hard counters but were also good setups within themselves.

Over the course of our testing we came up with 40 unique setups not including variations and tested about half of them against each other and against the strongest setups from last year.

Spying

PL started testing for their five man matches about a month after we had. As soon as PL started testing we spread covert alts all over Singularity and had a spy team monitoring the map for activity outside the main testing system 6-C. We had one or two guys actively monitoring in most time zones and constantly checking for any tournament testing activity from PL or anyone else. We didn’t want to miss anything significant from anyone who took the tournament seriously.

We recorded everything we saw. The teams that concerned us the most were PL’s B-team Goonswarm, PL themselves and Darkside.

We saw only a single singularity Darkside test very early on before they did the same as we did and moved into a wormhole. After that Darkside was pretty much completely off the radar and we couldn’t get any intel on them. However their green online status lights would often serve as a reminder of their presence during late nights while we monitored other teams as they continually tested like us.

PL’s B-team Goonswarm tested 5 man setups with some regularity. Initially we only intended to use the intel for ideas or to be prepared in case they were matched up against 0utbreak who also needed to qualify.

PL’s main team began testing soon after in FDZ. We were surprised that they weren’t hiding their tests at first and with everything we were doing ourselves there were even some suggestions that PL was completely one upping us and that everything we were seeing were fake tests for our benefit and that the real tests were happening in a wormhole somewhere. The effort required to do this made it a pretty foolish notion but I thought it worth mentioning because it was kind of funny with how paranoid some of our spies were.

In one incident one of the PL members Nestor told the Black Legion team captain ookke that they’d be testing and we had logged in a covert ops character at the same time (ElectricEye) oblivious to this exchange to find PL testing. This made PL believe that the character belonged to ookke and as soon as we found out they thought it was someone else we scrambled to get in touch with ookke and get him to play along. Were not sure how long they believed this but for a while at least they believed it was Black Legion spying on them and not Hydra.

We began disrupting their tests within the rules of singularity at first by ship scanning them during testing. Things escalated and we ended up using throw away characters that we didn’t mind having banned as a result of their actions to disrupt tests in more annoying ways. After a few days we stopped doing this and just went back to monitoring their tests.

Sometimes they would titan bridge away and we would have locators on stand-by and multiple coverts stationed around geminate to get there quickly while watching the map for active cynos. Other times they spammed loads of ships into the system and tested in deep safes making them difficult to probe down. We responded by getting in system early and scanning the existing ship results and ignoring them before they logged on to test.

We took detailed notes and fraps of their tests and people joked that we knew what was going on in their tests better than our own. By the end we had about 10 pages about PL’s tests and 5 pages on all other teams combined.

Meta Gaming Begins

With the preliminary stages starting we saw that PL’s B-team would be up against the NC alliance WI. With what was going on in TQ with PL marauding through NC’s space we thought that they’d be willing to listen to our advice on how to approach their match with PL. We had a very good idea of what PL would bring with their Mini Minma Rush being tested frequently against various other setups and suggested to WI. that a similar team with Tengus instead would fare well against the Minmatar team. We didn’t expect much at all and it was just one of those “might as well do something with this intel”. To our surprise WI. flew the setup well enough to shock Goonswarm and come out of the match with a win. Good job WI.

The majority of 0utbreak and Hydra had no idea that this intel was given to WI. Gobbins and fmercury who were both former Hydra members and now part of the Goonswarm team were teased relentlessly on our forums (they still had access) and asked how they could possibly lose. The few of us in the know felt a bit bad about this and tried to defend them but we couldn’t reveal that we were behind this because we were still trying to keep a low profile about how much we were preparing.

This encouraged us and we stepped up the spying because now we had a chance to knock out one of the teams we were worried about before they even got to the group stage. To their credit Goonswarm adapted well and came up with a setup that would beat all of what was seen on the first day. Unfortunately for them it’s not difficult to make a hard counter once you know exactly what you will fight. We explained to Majesta what they would face and how we felt they should approach it. We got WI. to vouch for our trustworthiness so that they would believe us. We gave them a very conservative setup that might not win but would for sure ensure that Goonswarm could not score the points they needed. Majesta completely ignored us and fielded Mini Minma Rush against the Goonswarm Tengus. As soon as we heard the line up over IRC those of us involved facepalmed. How could they bring something that would lose so horribly to Tengus knowing that they would face it. Majesta had other plans however, they didn’t want to simply stay alive and deny Goonswarm points. This was another NC alliance that wanted revenge for the political events on TQ even though they had no chance of advancing. They brought an active tanked afterburning scimitar that negated the majority of the heavy missile damage that they expected from Goonswarm and took the match.

It should be noted that even though both teams knew exactly what they would fight Goonswarm made both the fights very close and still could’ve won. Those of us who helped make it happen felt bad about having done this to Gobbins who was a big part of the PL B-team because he helped us so much last year but we were in the tournament to win. Hopefully he can forgive us. We still love you.

On the other hand 0utbreak managed to beat both of their opponents convincingly. We had no intel on either of the teams we faced here because we never caught them testing on singularity so we just had to bring solid setups and do our best. We were glad that no one spoke much about 0utbreak and that they remained a dark horse over these two weekends.

The Group Stages Begin

We see the groups and at first we are surprised we are in the same group as PL but then we realize this means we can’t meet until the finals when we see the brackets. We also notice that 0utbreak is in a bracket with the two Serbian teams who fixed their qualifying match to ensure both would get spots in the group stage. We quickly determined that with the way the bracket was setup the only way to avoid meeting 0utbreak until the final match was for us to leave the group stages in opposite positions (1 and 2 or 2 and 1 but not 1 and 1 or 2 and 2).

Unlike the other teams we had 1 set of setups for two teams. We had to hide our affiliation as long as possible or else teams would have twice as many setups to look at to determine what they should field against us.

Our first weekend in the group stages was crucial for both teams. We could not afford losses or we would have fewer options for group manipulation later on to ensure we ended up on opposite sides of the bracket. This served as warm up for most of our team as well because both Hydra and 0utbreak were essentially full of pilots who had never participated in an alliance tournament before except for the very small core from Hydra who came back from last year.

0utbreak could not lose because we knew the Serbians would fix their matches for maximum points at the first opportunity and Hydra could not lose because we could not guarantee victory against PL. During each broadcasted match this week we tried to give people a show as much as possible and we gave everything we had. This includes having Hydra being the only alliance to successfully field a flagship as well as it being worth 30 to 40 billion depending on the fit. We had an armor format with two tobias webs which we didn’t get to unveil and the riskier shield format that had 6 chelm’s neuts and a setele smartbomb.

We tried to feed intel to Unaffiliated for their match against PL. We told them that PL would likely switch it up to keep opponents guessing and might just bring Minmarush against them and wouldn’t likely bring ECM again. We told them to use Minmarush themselves but to drop the ECCM for more tank to give them an edge. We were hilariously wrong about our prediction unlike in the qualifying stages. Thankfully Unaffiliated didn’t listen to us at all and brought some random setup with ECCM. It didn’t work but we still felt pretty bad. I think they probably thought we were working with PL after that.

After the dust settled from first weekend we could see that in 0utbreak’s group Razor would not make it past the groups unless they beat 0utbreak with a handicapped setup or unless they brought full points and whitewashed 0utbreak. Both events were unlikely. We decided to approach Razor to make a deal to get them out of the group stage in exchange for helping 0utbreak get out of the group stage on the opposite side of Hydra depending on the outcome of the Hydra vs. PL match.

At first Razor declined the offer. The next day however they reconsidered and asked if it was still open. They did not trust us very much however. We brokered a deal with Chribba to put collateral on the line to secure the deal. We did not have much isk so we gave Chribba an Utu and our Flagship fittings while Razor gave a collateral of 30 billion both to be returned if 0utbreak and Razor both held to the terms of the agreement. We did the math multiple times for all the possible outcomes in this group and petitioned for a response from CCP just so we could be sure we had our numbers right.

During the week we kept testing our setups over and over to give the pilots that would be flying them all the practice they could get. However PL was testing too. Up until now they had nothing that concerned us. All their setups seemed manageable or things they already used last year. While everyone on the forums was talking about the joke match PL vs Hydra would be we both knew it would be as serious as it could get. We had complete intel on PL and none on Darkside and would rather have faced PL in a knockout than Darkside. As far as PL’s feelings on the match I think that they feared Darkside more than they feared us considering the performance of each of our teams against them last year. It seemed to be clear to no one but our respective alliances that this match meant a lot.

While PL were testing they were trying their best to get an Adrestia setup that worked well and most seemed mediocre up until this point. They finally cracked it in the final week and came up with something fairly good. They showed us something else too: a Caldari rush team that started with HAM Tengus and Moas. It seemed laughable at first to us we didn’t understand how it could possibly be any good. Then we saw it evolve into HAM Tengus and Gilas. In PL’s tests it beat Minmatar Rush. Then it beat Heavy ECM. Then it beat their Damp format. What was going on? How was it winning?

We were worried. We had tested dual eccm Minma Rush against our ECM format and we had beaten it. Then we tested our ECM format against this and our ECM format got destroyed. We couldn’t beat it reliably. We mentioned the setup to ookke and he said how it seemed tailored for Hydra with 28k ehp heavy tackle worms to counter the arty sleips we were bringing and to protect their logistics which was their lynch pin. This was a couple days before our match with them.

We then tried different setups against it and at one point we made a variation of PL’s Caldari Rush in preparation to beat them with it expecting them to use it against us because it was their best setup and we knew they didn’t want to fight Darkside. It got to the point where we even bought it and the implants as well.

Then in an emergency test on Saturday the day of our match vs. PL we CTAed our members in all the random timezones for one last test and logged in to the wormhole on singularity 6 hours before the broadcast started. We continued testing all the way until the first match. We decided to test Minmatar Rush against it even though PL’s tests showed it could beat it. Surprisingly we beat it! There must be some mistake we thought. So we tested again and again until we were sure that it could reliably beat it under different circumstances.

We started to get paranoid. Was PL running fake tests for our benefit and was Caldari Rush a fake setup? Or was it a real test and had they made a mistake flying their Minmatar Rush format. We had seen them test Caldari Rush for most of the week so we had to assume it was real. We decided to go with Minmatar Rush. We also tested Minmatar rush against their Adrestia format and while much more difficult to beat, flown well, Minmatar rush could also beat it.

We went into the match very nervous. The match meant a lot to us and we didn’t want to lose. We saw the Amarr rush with dual curses and we were surprised. We very much expected the Caldari Rush that PL ended up bringing for Darkside. As Creamster from Darkside mentioned on the Russian forums he felt that the same Amarr rush they used against PL should be able to beat the Minmatar rush when commenting on the DarkSide match against 0utbreak. Despite them having two curses and somewhat of an anti-rush format we were still hopeful we could win. Things worked out well for us and we took the win putting us first in our group. The self destruct and offer for isk was just a joke in reference to the events in the White Noise match immediately before. 126mil was actually transferred to me but I returned it since we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain by not self destructing.

Next up was 0utbreak pre-emptively preventing the Serbians from going through by working with Razor. CO2 and Wild Boars no doubt intended to match fix themselves as we saw from the setup they brought before they saw what 0utbreak and Razor had brought. By fixing our match with Razor to finish second in the group this allowed us to be in the opposite bracket as Hydra and getting Razor out of the group. It was a pretty straight forward affair. Again some people suggested we fix the match by doing a conga out of the arena or bringing haulers but we didn’t want that. If we had to fix the match we wanted to show some explosions for the audience. 0utbreak killed the points they needed in seconds and immediately self-destructed so as to not drag things out.

Things were going well. We had gotten the placements we wanted going into the final day and we hadn’t shown any more of our setups. Afterwards we were scrambling to get our Flagship mods back from Chribba so we could use them the next day.

The Final Day

We had a couple guys from 0utbreak and Hydra doing logistics for both teams and since we expected to go fairly far it meant we had a lot of matches to play and so we had to buy and fit twice as many setups.

We each fielded our ECM format right away in our first matches to give the teams later on something to think about and keep them using ECCM in their mids or lows. It wasn’t anything we had used before and we felt it would be good to change it up from arties, damps, neuts and straight rush. The first two matches were fairly straight forward for us.

We saw the PL match and while we wanted to see PL lose I think deep down we wanted it to be us that did it not Darkside. This is especially true because we were much more comfortable with facing PL than we were with Darkside who were a massive unknown. Ironically Darkside brought PL’s exact setup that they used against us in the group stage with crusaders swapped for maledictions. While PL brought their strongest setup (from their tests anyway) in the Caldari Rush. It was a stalemate at the start until Darkside correctly went for their lynchpin and then things fell apart for PL.

The next match was Black Legion being ookke’s team against 0utbreak. We knew this was a solid team and we were wondering what they would bring. Having talked to ookke and with him mentioning that the Caldari Rush seemed like it was tailored for Hydra it made sense when we saw it warp in to fight 0utbreak. Ookke knew from the start that 0utbreak and Hydra were the same team pretty much. I think most people who knew about the Caldari Rush expected it to beat Minmarush but 0utbreak flew well and took the match.

Hydra fielded our flagship again to remind people about it in the match against Paisti so they wouldn’t forget and we managed to take out their ECM format.

Then in the next match Voltron was upset by Razor to, I think, everyone’s surprise. We were pretty happy for them that they were able to take advantage of things and go from not making the final day to ending up in the final four.

This next match was going to be the toughest one and as far as we were concerned it might as well have been the final match in the same way the PL vs. Darkside and Hydra vs PL in the groups could’ve been. Darkside and 0utbreak have some history for those that don’t know. I used to be in 0utbreak before joining Genos and both groups lived very close to each other in Curse and for the most part Darkside usually got the best of us (0utbreak) with their drake gangs as we refused to fly anything but vagabonds.

This was an important match for 0utbreak not just so they could make the finals to win the tournament alongside Hydra but also to score one against their nemesis from Curse, Darkside. Personally I think this was the most intense and closest high level match of the tournament. This was the exact same match up as PL vs Hydra in terms of setups.

In the PL vs. Hydra match the warp in was very good for Hydra and we could get to the PL logistics immediately without going through the Legions. In this match between Darkside and 0utbreak both teams were directly opposite to each other and the warp in was as bad as it could’ve been for 0utbreak. The match started and from listening in the 0utbreak FC had called for a wait and see what Darkside do hoping that maybe they’d separate to give them an opening. Darkside had similar ideas resulting in an epic stand off for the first 30 seconds of the match until 0utbreak decided to anchor on a sleipner and move together into position until the huginn was closer to the 100mn AB Guardian and in a line to the logistics that didn’t force them to burn through the legions. Darkside let 0utbreak get into position and 0utbreak overloaded in and went for it.

The guardian went down slowly and the 0utbreak scimi was almost caught but survived just barely escaping. The Darkside curses did a great job at controlling the 0utbreak commandships and almost had full control before 0utbreak desperately tried to get rid of them managing to only get one down after the gaurdian. With the legions roasting the destroyers from 0utbreak and their range control huginn going down things were swinging the other way in Darkside’s favour. 0utbreak manages to get most of the Darkside frigates down and a legion losing one of their commandships in a back and forth exchange. It was intense.

While this was going on we had 0utbreak and Hydra guys frantically running to Jensius to get ships for Hydra’s match vs. Razor as we decided to switch our setup at the last second and needed the ships.

With the remaining ships left 0utbreak was able to get back in control of the match by forcing legions in close with TDs from the claymore and managing to get scrams on the remaining ships by burning the ship Darkside was primarying away forcing Darkside to come close and in range. Darkside was doing the same thing near the end and breaking through scrams and getting away. Eventually 0utbreak managed to put it away and seal the victory although it could’ve gone either way.

Next up was Hydra using the Rush against the Razor setup which was the counter to it being an anti-rush setup. I think all the practice paid off for Hydra and despite fighting the counter to our setup we pulled it off.

At this point in both our minds the tournament was over. We had won. We still had officially one more match and we wanted to make it good for everyone watching. We had no plans at all for what we would do if we fought each other. After the first rounds someone made a thread on our forum mentioning this possibility with the intention of discussing it and we told everyone to shut up. We said that we need to focus on the task at hand or we would never get to the final at all. Over 3 months we prepared immensely but we didn’t prepare for this all.

Everyone on the forums was talking about the lack of Gallente setups and how they’d like to see something different. We had tested a Vindicator team that had very close results against the Rush team. However the rush team was worried they would die too quickly for anyone to see anything so they fitted extra tank in place of eccm. Conversely the Vindicator team planned to only activate half their guns.

In our testing the Rush support beat the Vindicator support but the Vindicators decimated the commandships if they warped at 0. The match started with both of us in different channels on the same teamspeak to simulate an actual fight closely.

It completely fell apart and I guess we are horrible actors. 0utbreak felt that the Hydra alliance should officially place first even though it didn’t matter technically so they stopped firing and allowed the remaining Vindicator to finish them off.

Yes it was staged but we wanted to put on a good show. We could’ve more easily had 0utbreak fly something Caldari or Minmatar that would be countered by another Caldari or Minmatar setup and in hindsight maybe we should’ve just done something safe like that. We wanted to bring out something cool for the final and we screwed it up instead. We don’t really feel great about it.

Despite that I think we prepared more than I’d say the majority of the teams in this tournament combined. Our private tournament forum for this year has 214 threads and 2884 posts from the just under 40 people who were involved. We sacrificed a lot for this and we gave it everything we had. We beat both the other two top teams in the tournament on different occasions in matches that mattered. We have a lot of respect for Darkside and Pandemic Legion who both put in a lot of effort into this tournament and especially Pandemic Legion from whom we got the motivation to do all we did in an effort to end their streak.

This is Eve. Meta gaming, back room deals, scamming and pvp are all equal parts of it. I think we are deserving of having won both first and second in this tournament. To all those who say otherwise you are welcome to put in the effort we did this year and try to take our titles away.

Fascinating stuff - good job!

 

[Marc]

Aye saw that, fair play to them and good on Shadoo. Did an awesome job of commentating even though is alliance got the shit kicked out of them by Darkside.

 

[Ctuchik]

I'm just slightly sad that there can't ever be a tournament without a few teams setting up matches.

It takes all the fun out of watching it because you never really know if the game was honorable or not unless one of the teams just gives up.

 

[Marc]

To be fair though, Outbreak and Hydra kicked the shit outta everyone else so both teams were deserving winners regardless.

 

[Ctuchik]

Sure, but we will never find out who REALLY deserved that win.

I mean, the final game is supposed to be the most epic fight ever, and they ruined it.

Would you for example think the same if it were the world cup finals in football and the two teams met up beforehand and decided who should win?

Or any other team sport?

esport will never ever be taken seriously as long as this kind of crap is allowed... :/