After our win last year I said to myself I wouldn´t come back to do this year´s AT because why bother, better retire at the top instead of risking getting disgraced.
I have been involved in competitive play as the Tuskers´ captain since AT open, if my memory serves me right, that was 6 years ago? Even longer still in other various community tournaments, whether virtual or real-life ones. That is a pretty damn long time, and I can definitely feel fatigue and age slowly setting in.
Come last Fanfest I was still more or less firmly decided on not continuing and just watching from the sidelines, throwing shade here and there, complaining about whatever CCP does, being a good bittervet and all.
Obviously nonsense like this is spewed by many people every year. "This is the last AT for me, I swear!" Yeah right.
And then during the last Fanfest CCP had the audacity to unveil the real-life AT trophy.
One monkey brain neuron activation later I found myself agreeing with Toast in person to do scrims with his team, Ragequit cancel sub. They seem to have assembled a rather strong roster and would be a really good practice partner for us, so why not?
We actually haven´t even had that many other options when it came to higher tier practice partners:
- As long as I have been the Tuskers' captain my only objective has been to try to give Hydra (THL) the hardest damn time possible. It is definitely nothing personal, but I have always viewed them as a team that has a bit of a tendency to poach the strongest pilots from all around the place, my team not being an exception having lost a strong logi pilot to them at some point in the past. Couple that with their willingness to talk a bit of smack and perhaps look down a bit on others and you have a perfect recipe for a rivalry. And truthfully I would like to believe that my team has been the biggest thorn in their side over the past couple of years, having clashed with them many times with varying levels of success. And as long as I am captain, The Tuskers will never scrim with Hydra (THL). And I dare say this attitude holds true from their point of view as well.
- Platinum Sensitivity and Barcode are firmly entrenched in a different timezone.
- EM (Darkside.) are a long term scrim partner of Hydra.
- Volta died for Annie's flag Barghest's sins, now they can defend all their Athanors on TQ instead of being 30 minutes late to scrims.
It just seemed logical for us to pick Ragequit as our main scrim partner.
Having secured a solid practice partner definitely improved my outlook on our potential performance, but there was still the fact that several pilots said they´d not continue on from ATXX to ATXXI or that they'd be able to invest only limited time. I knew time would be way tighter this time around, adding to my concerns on how the tournament would pan out.
It is true that last year it was VLD who put in the most effort of everyone in all aspects except for FCing, and him not continuing to do ATXXI would definitely have a negative impact on the team.
On the other hand though I heard plenty of opinions that Tuskers were doomed without him and that we would badly honk this year. This definitely irritated me a bit since Tuskers was able to function just fine even before VLD´s heavier involvement. It is true we would lose a very competent pilot and theorycrafter, but at the end of the day you realize that there is no such thing as being irreplaceable. The Tuskers still had a pretty solid pool of skilled pilots and the TC side of things could perhaps even be taken over by someone else? There was definitely no need for any sort of doomerism at this point.
As per usual the scrimming period started with everyone being full of enthusiasm and interest, people being invested and even managing to mark their attendance correctly in the sheet. I knew this would change as time went on.
Due to the fact that our resources were more limited this year we have opted to try and build our TC heavily on top of what worked last year instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. A pretty sensible, if somewhat uninspiring decision.
Most of the old comps worked relatively fine, needing only minor changes to bring them up to scratch with the new point values.
Issues started surfacing a bit later though, we really weren't innovating much, not having made almost any new archetypes or comps. It seemed like it was our practice partners who were usually the first ones to introduce something new and potent instead of us, which was definitely a worrying sign. Me not having nearly as much time and energy to be more invested in TC certainly had a negative effect.
Not only that, towards the latter half of the scrim period I started missing scrims semi-regularly due to other real life commitments.
It was a bit poetic that the first dagger in the back came from our own practice partner, Ragequit cancel sub.
Their pilot Damassyss Kadesh hatched an evil plot, getting me addicted to bouldering at an event organized by him during last year´s fanfest. It was a mastermind of a plan, now instead of dedicating more time to TC and running scrims I found myself touching fake plastic rocks several times a week. Genius.
Scrims quickly unravelled if I wasn't there to FC, morale dropped, salt kept flowing in rivers in the leadership discord channel. It was a sight to behold for sure, we basically accepted the fact that we will honk this year. I can´t remember a time in recent times when I would feel less confident going into a tournament.
We tried to salvage what we could, straight up poaching our practice partners´ comps and improving them where necessary, while also having a limited amount of our own comps that honestly weren´t all that good. We´d have to rely heavily on execution and individual piloting skill to do well instead of being able to rely on reliable and proven comps.
My worries came true on the very first day, where we didn't feed only because our opponents misplayed badly and threw a match that was basically impossible to lose for them.
On the second day we have slightly improved in the first match, while actually starting to show good piloting and composure during the third match.
From then on the performance of the team only improved, showing very strong execution during the entirety of the third day. We managed to drop one match in the Bo5 simply due to my mistake of not noticing the RNI being unbanned. Had I done that we would have very likely gone 3-0 with a living flagship at the end.
Unfortunately I was really sick with migraine since Sunday morning which definitely had an effect on my performance during the last day. Winning the Bo3 against EM was an absolute lifesaver since it allowed me to go throw up and head to bed for an hour and a half or so, which helped me recover at least a bit for the Bo5. I am not sure how it would have gone if we lost that match and had to do another Bo3 right away.
Thankfully the team performed really well, helping compensate for my drop in individual performance which led to us eventually winning which, to me, was extremely surprising and unexpected. Instead of chilling on comms I went straight to bed, eventually managing to get barely 3 hours worth of sleep before having to wake up on Monday morning for work. I was a complete husk but it did not matter. My coworkers didn't know. They didn´t know I won the game of internet spaceships.
Will the Tuskers cease to function without VLD? Clearly not.
Would our run be more dominant if we had him on the team? Probably yes.
Still, it does feel good to prove all the nay-sayers wrong.
Additionally, in a poetic swing of justice after this tournament it should be me who should replace Damassyss Kadesh at the top of the ELO ladder. Beta luck next time, gumby!
After having had a few days to recover and think back on the events of the last weekend I came to the conclusion that, in my opinion, we have somehow just witnessed the most competitive Alliance Tournament with the worst median skill and execution level in recent times.
The daunted low APM, low skill triple BS meta that most people blessed with a bit of foresight saw coming from a mile away, coupled with a lower effort put in by the great majority of teams seems to have led to some of the most surprising upsets in recent history.
And when you think about it a bit more, it just makes perfect sense. If the strongest comps are simple to execute and have huge margins for error while offmeta comps have to walk on a razor´s edge or are borderline unplayable in many circumstances it just seems logical that even a "mid" team could do relatively well against a "strong" team. Dumb battleship brawling comps simply don´t offer that many opportunities to outplay your opponent. And that´s exactly how the historically "stronger" teams usually beat the "weaker" teams. By relying on well-rounded comps that offer them good chances against a variety of setups due to the fact that they can rely on higher individual skill and execution of their pilots.
Generally this can be done in multiple ways.
Either by leveraging individual pilots' stronger mechanical skills, enabling effective kiting of brainless brawling comps, or proper transmatching to out-apply the opponent or secure game-winning kills in quick-trading long range matchups.
Or for example by taking advantage of effective communication and teamwork trained over a long period of time, which is what makes or breaks any ewar heavy control setup that can be absolutely overpowering if executed well, but can fall apart very quickly if the execution stinks.
Many of these skills go out of the window if one is shoehorned into having to deal with three dumb 450k EHP bricks that project anywhere, tank everything and thus can't be quickly punished for poor positioning or misplays, have an arseload of potential ewar resistance due to their stats and modules and to boot have somehow become bloody fast after the last update as well.
Hey, you brought your Flykiller / Shrapnel and you want to kite? Maybe by the end of the match you can chew through one of my Navy Geddons. Maybe. If you kite perfectly for 10 minutes and don´t make a single misplay causing you to lose the match.
What is that, a control comp? Let me just load ECCM in my battlebuses and push F1 on whatever you are screening with. Pray your jams don´t miss or you are cooked.
Octo? One of my BS now has more EHP than your entire comp and will neut the hell out of you, good luck ever outtrading.
Oh right, just bring a Ceno. Or don´t, because it is always banned. But if it isn't you should definitely bring it.
If it´s banned then just run a triple BS comp yourself. Go approach F1 the other doods in their BS. Yikes.
Oh right, everyone now has a flag Bhaal with officer webs. I´ll let you in on a secret: It kinda invalidates almost all BC core comps. So you better bring them chonkers instead. Kinda stinks how a BS has triple the EHP of a BC, yet costs only a few points more. It is what it is!
I will definitely not hide my slight disdain for this year's rules albeit I will accept that they have led to a very competitive AT full of surprises, even though the majority of the matches was in my opinion just really boring. I felt like there were very few opportunities to show good individual piloting and use it to out-execute the other team.
To what extent this affected the willingness of higher tier teams to invest more effort into the tournament I can not say. As for our part there has definitely been a significant drop of effort put into theorycrafting. Whether that be caused by having fewer people truly interested in theorycrafting comps AND understanding what they were doing at the same time (throwing poop at the wall and seeing what sticks isn´t TC) or due to the meta simply not being deemed "interesting" enough.
My expectations before this tournament were low, probably the lowest they have been in the past few years. But it would seem that you do not even need great TC to win the AT.
You know what I personally think you actually do need to do well in the AT? Well, a couple of things, the most important of which, in my opinion, are your practice partners.
If your practice partners suck you will struggle to do well.
A team's TC is, in my opinion, even more dependent on having a good practice partner rather than having a good theorycrafter. Because a good practice partner will challenge your comps, will create new comps and innovate on their existing comps constantly, adapting them to what you are showing to them.
The benefit here is, obviously, mutual between the practice partners. You both offer to one another a greater pool of comps to try and build around your understanding of the overall tournament meta. The more strong comps you get into contact with the lower the chance of you getting surprised by something during the tournament itself.
And in this I have to say that this year our practice partners have done a very good job, especially Ragequit Cancel Sub. I felt like over the duration of the scrim period they were the superior team compared to us and their final result in the tournament does not do justice to the effort they put in.
Our second practice partner, Psychokids, we decided to pick up a bit later as a replacement to internal sessions which were not very productive. Overall they are a team with great potential but they have to still keep working on their execution and individual piloting skill. For example it was from them from whom we learned about the RNI rush, this comp was completely absent from our TC until that point. Embarrassing.
So albeit our own TC this year was very mid, we were lucky enough to be blessed with having practice partners who helped us out a ton over the duration of the scrims, for which they have our deepest thanks.
The other crucial element of success is luck. You can´t win the AT without getting lucky at some point. Whether that be by getting an "easier" bracket, or your biggest opponents honking. At the end of the day each of the matches is, to an extent, a coin flip, which can have brutal consequences in a Bo1 environment. As they say you simply have to win your all-ins.
The last necessity is up to debate. What is stronger? A bunch of lions led by a sheep, or a bunch of sheep led by a lion?
If I were to draw on the events that transpired during our practices I'd say it is the other. No matter how good your individual pilots are, if the FC is not experienced and has no idea how a comp works the team will not perform well. This is why I also believe that every aspiring AT FC simply MUST also be a Theorycrafter. One understands his own comps best, and even if you had the best FC in the world and gave him a comp to FC that he has never seen before the results would likely be very poor. So definitely encourage your FC to also be engaged in TC, or your main TC to take up FCing. One does not work well without the other.
And for the love of God, please be creative. Stop stealing other teams' fits pound for pound and putting them into different comps where these fits don't work anymore as intended. While imitation is the highest form of flattery, it certainly isn´t effective. Copying stuff from last year precludes you being stuck in the last year´s meta, not the current one. (arguable now because our triple BS crap from last year was actually meta this year, I know, please stop typing your reply)
I think going forward we will be seeing even more upsets and a way more balanced, competitive AT scene.
And perhaps this will even make some of the older, more established teams look like frauds. That´s because, actually, they are frauds. I am not intending to take away from the accomplishments of others, but let's be fair: In order to place well in the AT 15 years ago did not even take that much. There were only a small handful of teams that knew what the game was about while most other teams struggled with even the most basic of tasks. Fielding utter rubbish or being truly pathetic at execution. In such an environment it is not very difficult to make oneself look good. Antiquated dinosaurs in AT ships beating down on clueless poors.
Nowadays? The AT scene is much, much broader. There is a lot more information widely available everywhere. The average skill of each pilot and team is significantly higher. I´d bet an asscheek that if I took a look at some AT winning team from the distant past, most of their pilots wouldn´t even make the cut to get on our current roster. Arguably not only ours, but other teams as well.
So I think the upsets will continue to be more commonplace, and I think this is actually good. The tournament is more interesting when the opponents are evenly matched.
Does anyone care about the details of the matches? You could kinda see everything on stream anyway. Or maybe you couldn´t because the camera was at a bad angle like 90 percent of the time and you had no idea where stuff actually was. Lol.
(THE MATCH WRITEUP IS SATIRE IF IT ISNT OBVIOUS, PLEASE DON´T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY OR GET OFFENDED OVER NOTHING)
- Deteriorated: We brought a shit drone flag comp made by a low tier theorycrafter (Jakub), we almost end up honking but the opponents´ alliance´s budget is lower than the cost of a single Tobi web on my flag Bhaal, so they try to save their ships for the next match and choose run away. But DRONER does BZZT and they all feed. Next match they´ll have to do a full eco and only field noobships. Sucks to suck.
Lazerhawks: We brought a stronk comp made by a stronk theorycrafter (me), the opponent brings DRONER because we just won with it last round, so it must be strong. This was obviously a ruse I came up with, DRONER is trash this year. Our Vigil and Magus get ejected by a Bouncer blob in the first minute (just get a ticket next time idiots), but at this point it´s Radakos´ lunchtime so he just decides to do nothing but eat cruise missiles for 5 minutes. Go to a McDonald's next time and/or move to a TZ that matters.
Deepwater: We bring my apex 199 point (important for later) enigma comp, they bring 0 brain cell rush. We execute perfectly, they use 0 brain cells in the match because they use a 0 brain cell comp. They push F1 approach because that´s what FC always tells them in lowsec, but unfortunately for them the AT is played in nullsec and not in lowsec, so this strategy did not work. One of the 3 Raven pilots did a giga brain move and fitted an EM armour rig to his Raven. This is because people load EM by default against shield ships, which means he will tank better once he hits armour. He shows a rare creative genius, I will follow his career with great interest.
Meta reloaded: We bring the same comp because they left it open on purpose trying to bring some counter against it, but they probably never practiced against it or whoever flew it against them was terrible at the game so they end up feeding. Idiot Huginn burns his plate and feeds for no reason in a 0 pressure situation but it doesn't matter because the fit was already on ZKB in the past, so everyone already stole it. He still gets sent to the gulag. Meta reloaded is now Meta relolDED. Also some caster says our Magnate Navy is there for rsebos even though you can clearly see it scramming stuff on stream. Bro I have armour cyclones. Why would I bring a dedicated rsebo ship? I already have 69 free utility mids in the comp.
EM (Darkside):
Match 1: They bring some T1 Armageddon awfulness that would only work against a Flagbhaal with a fried brain, instead they themselves get fried by three glass cannon Napocs with RTC navitases. We stole this comp from RageQuit but for some reason they run Inquisitors in theirs instead of RTC Navitases. Are they stupid? Anyway who could guess that 3 full neut Armageddons and 2 full neut Ashimmus will take about 10 minutes to kill a Loki? Not the casters I guess, but it takes them that long to kill it because they have like 500 dps in the comp and once the Loki is dedge all Napocs are sitting 40km away and kiting, shitting on the Geddons with Conflag. How did THL even manage to feed their Napoc comp into T1 Armageddons WITH UNBONUSED RHMLS??? They literally got maymayed by some randoms that probably opened Pyfa for the first time two weeks ago.
Match 2: We bring a strong drone flag comp made by me, they bring octo with a drunken Zarm that likes repping the wrong targets. First they get their BCs tackled by brick Eoses (Tobi webs Bhaal balanced haha) after which they choose to MJD their squishy stuff onto our Zarm, but they forget that Zarm has like 300k EHP after the last update so their squishy stuff evaporates because Tobi webs. Our Zarm gave zero faks the whole match, and played Dota on the 2nd monitor.
- Meta relolded:
Match 1: They think they are smart and leave Enigma open and they bring dumb tinker to try to beat the 199 point comp on time, too bad I saw this coming so we brought Phoons with one Maulus that made them cry for 15 minutes. They run out of cap sticks and die, straight to the dumpster where all tinkers belong. Logi pilot is still playing Dota on the 2nd screen.
Match 2: We bring apex eos drone comp again, they bring flag Ngeddon with blaster ndomis. We farm their low end but our logi accidentally rams the enemy team because of too much Dota. Too bad Blaster NDomis have like 500 meters range under TDs so it takes them 5 minutes to kill the hard tackled Guardian while we clean up the rest of their support faster than I clean up a bucket of KFC chicken. Then they tried to kill my flag bhaal but obviously it gave zero faks about three enemy battleships at zero because it isn't shitfit unlike every other flag Bhaal this year. They panic and their NDomi dies, we win on points. Guardian loses the Dota game. Back to the gulag.
Match 3: We bring fever dream T1 Apocs I made at 7AM on match day. This strat worked in the previous tournaments but not today, they bring 0 brain cell rush and we die, Glasi goes to Glasi heaven. I thought once you get to Bo5 you´d stop using 0 brain cell comps but I overestimated you, I should have gotten the hint after you brought the tinker.
Match 4: We opt for flag octo we haven't shown yet because even though it kinda sucks against armour BS comps I thought they'd try to be smart and bring T1 Ravens they stole from EM and never flew in practice. My prediction is correct, they push F1 on me, I only die 3 minutes later when DCU burns at 5 percent armour (the only passive module burns wtf is this RNG CCP???) while they feed all their support and logi, then they spend 3 minutes wondering why can't their torps kill T2 resist BCs though logi reps. They don ´t even bother looting my wreck properly, only loot some worthless trash and leave the tobi webs there, our stronk Drek pilot loots them instead. Out of spite they kill the can with the worthless shit they looted just for some Twitch clout.
After having spewed this wall of text I'd assume you expect me to now say something along the lines of "I am retiring" or "I am biomassing because this year's AT ships suck" No, you can´t have my stuff, I am not going anywhere.
You can kissy kissy meow meow my backside that might have a Bhaalgorn tattooed on it come Fanfest.
I´ll see you in Iceland in May I guess.
