A Bone To Pick With The Prime Tournament

I'm actually pretty angry right now and I dislike writing while on tilt, but I don't really care in this case. The changes to the Prime tournament over the last few days have been an embarrassment to watch unfold. There were a number of issues, such as being forced to sign up to a third party website and needing to dedicate 3 weekday evenings every week for a month. But this isn't about that, it's about the format and roster changes.

When the tournament was first announced, the format was a 16v16 Skirmish. This was fine at the time, it's a decent format and the last few tournaments used the same one. Apparently people weren't really in favour of this though and signups were slow. CCP then decided to change the format to 8v8 Domination to lower the barrier of entry and it seemed to work. People were signing up and rosters were filling out, but the 16v16 crowd were pissed off.

It seems the outcry worked because now the end result is them changing it back to it's original 16v16 format. This has left all the smaller teams who signed up out in the cold now. As we're unable to find that many people to fill out the roster needed to play the required 3 times a week, all that's left is a feeling of emptiness. I should point out that I still get to play in the damn thing, EoN is setting up a corp for Europe so we can stop Cronos getting a free pass. I'm now left outside a corp I want to be in and feeling bad that they probably won't get to join in.

At the risk of burning some bridges, I'm disappointed with Han's response to them changing it back. I should have done a better job letting him know about what this meant to us, but didn't expect them to change it back. The CPM is mostly made up of people who's corps can field teams of 16 people, so I guess everyone dropped the ball on this. Despite that though, it should never have gotten to the stage where that was even an issue.

So now here we are, with people outside corps they want to be in, with teams that probably won't even play. According to Kane, there are maybe 3 or 4 teams in Europe who have the numbers as of this post. Those 128 players now get to decide what the name of a planet in New Eden will be.

They should just have gotten Iddon to do it again, at least he knows what the fuck he's doing.