Saturday is the first round of the Streamfleet Invitational Tournament and our first match is against Templis. If you are looking for information, check out this blog from CCP regarding all the details. Lots of prizes available not only for us competitors, but also for viewers! Which is pretty awesome. You should plan on watching, these matches are going to be good. We can't fly the same ships over and over, and there are no logistics on the field. So that should make for some insane PvP action.
If you do watch, which you should, please root for Stay Frosty. As in seemingly every case, we are once again fighting from an underdog position. We only got into this process two weeks ago, as other teams have had much more time than us to prepare. We are not treating this like a disadvantage however, we prepared and submitted our comps on time, just like everyone else. And we've managed to carve out some good practices to prepare. As Low Sec Pirates we are used to fighting under horrible odds, so nothing new there.
Jin'Taan has done an excellent job of setting this Tournament up and making the rules as interesting as possible. Each team has five fleet compositions that they must submit ahead of time for each day of the Tournament, and each day has its own requirements. In those individual days you can't bring two of the same ship in any of those comps. So that forces us all to be creative and not over-reliant on any specific "meta". One of the downsides of this, for the teams, is that it creates even more of a "rock, paper, scissors" situation. So extra consideration has to be given to bans and what comps to bring to each fight. Because once used, they can't be brought again. Even so, I suspect a few fights will be blow-outs on Day1, but I'm not sure how you can avoid that. Overall however, I do believe that the quality of fights will be solid and a lot different than Alliance Tournament fights.
As always I won't be making any predictions. What I do know is that our team and our pilots will preform exceptionally in each fight, as they always do. I never have any worries in that regard. Our team is experienced and many of our pilots are the same ones that have flown in our AT teams. We do have one pilot experiencing their first Tournament and that has also been awesome. He has brought some new enthusiasm and energy to us crusty old veterans, which is appreciated.
Lots of Tournament experience in that team. Some of us go all the way back to the NEO days.
As always we are in it to have fun. Whatever happens after that will happen and we will ride the results as far as they will take us. Flying in Tournaments is one of the most fun things to do in Eve, at least in my opinion. And I look forward to flying with my friends again this Saturday.
Best of luck to all the teams.