Comment Re:Can someone who plays explain some things (Score 3, Informative) 101
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, the entire arena is a large warp disruption zone and if you leave it you're ship will be blown up by a GM.
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?
A team can field 10 ships max, this means 10 players. Every single ship class (frigate, assault frigate, bomber, cruiser, heavy assault cruise, recon, battleship, battlecruiser, etc) has a set point value and a team can field maximum 100 points worth of ships. This means you can either go with a few big and expensive ships and spend the few remaining points on some small ships or you can go with a full set (10 pieces) of medium sized vessels. There are also limitation on what modules you may use: the super expensive stuff is prohibited as it would put a lot of smaller teams into disadvantage.
How many human players are involved in a battle.
Maximum of 10 per team, so 20 per battle. Most of the teams used 10.
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?
The alliane tournament is both for new and veteran players. While new players (or outsiders) are amazed by the graphics, you can experience that any time you just sit down and play the game. The really interesting part about the tournament is the tactics, and even with the squares on its still very difficult to tell whats going on. Without the squares it would be totally impossible. Imagine looking at a chess board where every piece is white. The general approach followed by the camera team was that they were trying to show a more strategic, "squary" look of the fight when there were a lot of things going on and the outcome would not be obvious yet... and go for nice, more cinematic shots when one of the teams started winning and the match was mostly decided already.
