Alliance Tournament XVI

Go Team!

Our first match is Saturday against Centipede Calliphate. You can see and follow and predict the entire bracket here. If you aren't flying in the tournament be sure to catch the action on the CCP or Eve-NT Twitch streams on Saturday and Sunday. The AT is going to be worth watching this year, the rules changes alone should result in some amazingly close matches and some historic upsets. Trust me. This AT is shaping up to be unlike anything we've seen before. Time will tell if that will be a good thing or not.

All I know today is that our team is ready. All of us are well practiced, confident, and ready to face the field. After the timer starts anything can happen. Hopefully Bob will shine on us and we will be competitive, lucky, and fortunate enough to smash our way into the final weekend. I'm not an idiot however, I also know the other teams want the same thing. After a 14th and 11th place finish in the last two Tournaments, I'm hungry for more. But literally anything is possible.

The thing experience teaches you is that the thing that will eventually be your undoing is something you don't know about right now. All you can do is try and work any potential issues into the ground and mitigate them as much as possible. Our team is different this year, but even more experienced. While we lost a few members over the past year, we also managed to pick up a few veterans (and friends) from last year's PFR team. PFR was one of our regular practice partners the last two years, and we ended up losing a match to them in the Tournament the year before last. So we already knew them well. Those guys have been a great addition to our team and have fit right in.

Other than that I ain't telling you nothing. Everything else is OPSec for now.

On the Streamfleet stream the other night Apothne called us, "Aggressively mid-tier". Which is up from "A bunch of nice blokes" or "Barely mid-tier" from previous years. Despite finishing in the top percent and earning automatic bids those two years. I shouldn't complain. I prefer to be the underdog, the over-looked. I get it. We have a lot to prove. We aren't a shiny null sec Alliance hiding under someone else's skirts. We're nobodies. Built up from nothing on our own. Beholden to no one. And damn proud of it.

And yes, that last paragraph was written for my team to read. I gotta motivate them. At least this year I won't have to throw a fish at Ithica Hawk since he was nice enough to point out that the panel shouldn't overlook us. Wouldn't it be great to see us up there on that last weekend? Sure would. But first we have a lot of matches to win.

Let's see how that goes. One match at a time.

Oh baby, it is Alliance Tournament time again! Brace yourselves.