The Teams for the upcoming Alliance Tournament have been announced. You may have noticed that A Band Apart is not among the participants.
One of the primary reasons we formed was for the opportunity to play in the AT. It has been one of my desires since I started playing Eve to get a chance to fly in the Tournament. And we've been hard at work making our preparations since the end of the NEO Tournament. So why are we not on the list?
Eventually I had to make a command decision, with the support of the Alliance leadership, that we simply were not ready yet. And, in every sense of "being ready", we are not ready. We could have accumulated the funds, prepared the fleets, the fits, the support, and all the other things needed to participate - but that wouldn't have meant we were ready. We already had the team assembled and had been at practice, we had several comps prepared for testing, and the coffers were being filled.
But, in my opinion, participation is about much more than simply showing up to play. While I am a huge proponent of the casual approach to my own play-style, the Alliance Tournament is another thing. In order to hit it as hard as we needed to hit it, we'd have to sacrifice some basic attention that our young Alliance still needs. And that our pilots deserve.
The Alliance needs more time. Our pilots need more time. And so we decided that the AT could wait another year. When it came down to it, I was worried that the effort of preparing would be too much for our young Alliance to deal with. I'd much rather have a strong, unified, powerful Alliance than play in the Tournament - no matter how much doing so means to me personally.
We need more experience together and as individuals across the entire Alliance. We will participate again in the next NEO, to give ourselves even more experience at Tournament play. And be that much better prepared for next year's AT.
It was not, in any way, an easy decision. But I still feel like it was the best decision. In the end, we don't play Eve for Tournaments, we play for each other. There will be an AT again next year and many other opportunities along the way. We'll be better organized, more experienced, and better prepared in another year.
We don't want to just play, we want to win.
So we'll be sitting out this year and watching from the sidelines once again. I'm ok with that. For now.
Onward and upward.