Streamfleet Tournament: Match One

Last night I not only logged into TQ but I also undocked to find some PvP action. Which I did to varying results. That marked 27 days since my last PvP action in Eve. Not counting practice for the Streamfleet Tournament. This started out as a small break and ended up being much longer than planned due to this Tournament popping up along the way. Combined with several real life business trips... well, sometimes time just gets away from you.

Anyway. This past Saturday was Round One of the Streamfleet Showdown Invitational Tournament. Eight teams from around New Eden battling it out. Originally the entire thing was to have aired live on Streamfleet but technical issues with the Thunderdome server and the Tournament Tool set delayed things. So it was decided the best course of action would be to go ahead and have the matches, then have the commenters record after the fact. They wouldn't know the outcome beforehand and they'd have access to the fits of each opponents comps on hand. The video above is the first of these that will be released over the next week or so. It features Stay Frosty and Templis Calsf in the very first match of the day.

Go ahead and watch the match, then come back for my thoughts.

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This is a classic example of one team getting totally outplayed by another team. As you saw, our compositions were almost entirely the same. But what you can't see, is just how different our fits and the philosophy behind each comp is from one another. Same ships for the most part, but totally different.

Our comp was built around active and speed tanked Rapid Lights with the Drake being the only Heavy Missile ship. Their comp was built around prop-less passive tanked heavy missile ships with target painters from the Vigil. We obviously didn't know this going into the fight. So we did what our comp called for, we stayed at range and tried to keep from getting scrammed. That turned out to be the wrong call obviously. We did realize this, but by then half our ships were dead.

I knew something was wrong simply by how much damage my Drake was taking. I knew that even under a full team of Rapid Light missile damage I could tank until my charges ran out, I knew this because we had practiced it several times. Shut down the mwd and go into overheated boost mode, kill the other team's dps and survive as long as possible. But in this case the incoming dps was too much for my tank to handle. That was very concerning. So concerning in fact that I actually died with a charge left in my ASB. Which is just horrible. And I feel bad.

After that the fight was over. Could we have won? Perhaps. If we had remembered to actually check the launchers before the fight started we'd have seen the Heavies. Which would have made the Vigil make sense and it would have become primary as we all rushed in to engage a propless enemy that couldn't escape. But we didn't.

Total props (see what I did there?) to Templis for subverting the composition in a way that wasn't obvious. It worked just long enough to screw up our expectations and get us out of position. And secure the win. Nicely done.

The rest of the day would end up going better for us, but I'll save the details of those two fights until the videos are released. Suffice to say we battled our way into Round Two, which will be held on May 11th. So we are still in the running.

Stay Frosty. We might die, but we never give up.