New Eden Open - Finals

A tad late to the party today. Joined the stream while match three was in progress. Though, according to @erlendur on Twitter, I missed something important from CCP Greyscale. About the only thing I'm currently really annoyed about from Greyscale is the lack of persistence on the new PvP Safety. So I'll assume he announced that they will be implementing that shortly after Retribution. Hopefully the first point release, if not sooner.

(Apparently this is not the case. Greyscale only talked about why safety persistence did not make it into Retribution's first release. And whether persistence will make it into the game anytime soon is still up in the air. I'm not going to spend any more time bitching about this here, as I've done a tonne of it on the forums already.)

I was certainly glad to see there were no blowouts and sweeps today. Which meant lots of matches, lots of commentary, and lots of CCP guests talking about Retribution. The double-elimination format worked well, and it was a bonus that the final day was a best-of-five for the top two teams and a best of three for the third and fourth place teams. It created excitement only having these few teams battling it out over and over, to witness their versatility match to match in the face of opposing team ship bans, not too mention the pressure of the day.

I was sad to see that the Retribution trailer did not premier during the tournament (apparently it is coming Monday). Maybe a not-so-highdef stream is not the place to premier a high-quality 1080p trailer, the argument being that you want people to experience it at the best possible quality on their first viewing.

The stream maxed out at 4335 viewers. Nowhere near Alliance Tournament levels, but blame this on the fact that these teams are harder to connect with, than alliances are.

CCP Dolan (Michael BoltonIII) was really quite excellent today. He was easily on par, and held his own, with CCP Fozzie (Raivi). I'm glad he found his way into the role, it was a good mix of the knowledgeable and the humourous. And it looks to be that Dolan will be a benefit to all future EVE Online tournaments.

I am getting used to the new match health bars, though having the bars slowly turn from white to red might be the better idea, rather than directly white to red at some percentage of damage. I'm still mostly ignoring the defense, attack and control bars; I look at them at the start of a match, and they seem meaningless afterwards. I would still love to see a capacitor level bar per ship, and perhaps lines connecting players on each team, to show who is currently the primary target of each player.

I did enjoy the banter between CCP Soundwave, CCP Dolan and CCP Fozzie. Especially during the tournament delays. They were able to keep the conversation flowing, and keep it interesting. Which isn't an easy thing to do during unexpected waits. The easy rapport between the three was the key to this.

The third and final match between Goggle Wearing Internet Crime Fighters and Expendables was quite exciting. The Expendables were put at a huge disadvantage in the opening two minutes when Helen Connor flew out for a boundary violation. I feel bad for the dude, that's not the kind of mistake you want to make in your final match of the tournament. The Expendables seemed to have the stronger set-up, but the loss of Helen's Scimitar was a huge blow to their chances. That said, the Expendables were able to still make it a close match, but if they'd had their Scimitar it would have been no question who would have won.

For all the Goonswarm-CCP conspiracy theorists. Soundwave talked about possibly removing alliance maintenance fees. This seemed to be prompted by the recent closing of Red Federation (which may or may not have been due to ISK being in the wrong corporation wallet and the maintenance fee not being paid.) So, for all those people who feel that most mechanics changes are due to bad-things-happening to Goonswarm. Not the case here. So start up the RvB-CCP conspiracy engine. (The maintenance fees are dumb, and there has to be better ISK sinks CCP can create.)

The fourth match between Asine Hitama's Team versus Ronin and Pixies was a nailbiter. Ten minutes with not a single ship loss, extending into sudden death. Asine takes the match with a Merlin kill about two minutes into overtime. They become the inaugural New Eden Open champions, winning the $6000 prize (not too mention a crapload of PLEX.)

I'm not particularly disappointed that I didn't catch any of the previous weekends of the tourney, but am glad I caught the final day. It was a good show with very strong matches.

As for CCP. They're probably happy with the tournament, for the most part, the process, the commentating, the production. If they're disappointed in any particular area, perhaps viewership, which was consistently about one-third of the viewership the Alliance Tournament draws. Chance of this returning next year? 40%.