Tournament Ramblings

I've taken the opportunity this year to watch the AllianceTournament XI.  It didn't interest me much last year because it's PvP and this time last year PvP was not something I considered.  While I was a little disappointed in the results last week, this week is turning out to be much more entertaining.  I enjoy watching E-Sports because it pertains to my area of interest.  Physical sports aren't really my thing and I've watched quite a bit of tournaments  involving Starcraft II, League of Legends, Dota II, various shooters, and other odd games that somehow made it onto the tournament scene.  The metagame involved in all of these is different, but one thing they need to provide is entertainment.

While the teams/players participating in E-Sports tournaments have made a huge investment in time and perhaps money, their goal is to win.  This sometimes results in a tried and practiced method being used over and over, which may eventually be adopted by other teams.  I do not find seeing the same thing over and over very entertaining.  CCP whether they knew or not has helped negate this trend by including bans in this tournament.  From what I understand this is the first alliance tournament where bans have been introduced and I hope they consider keeping the format in the future.  Also when I look at the fitting restrictions for this year's tournament it appears they are also eliminating or restricting modules which also cause boring matches.

From what I've seen so far it seems to be working.  While bans weren't introduced in the first weekend there was still a nice variety of team compositions.  Some of which did not do very well, though this may be the result of the matchup they went up against.  There were also a few teams I would expect to have done a lot better than they did.  Most of last weekend seemed to have been very one-sided and when an important ship is lost it looks to go downhill from there.  This weekend has proved to be far more entertaining and I believe there were a lot more matches hanging by a thread than there were last week.

Several games I have seen tend to do a stagnation as the life of the game goes on.  Starcraft II can be very entertaining to watch when a few of the players develop new approaches, after which it stagnates where most end up doing generally the same thing until a new innovator comes along.  While I understand they are trying to win, that is not what's going to keep me watching. 

So I'm interested to see how this alliance tournament will turn out and whether I'll continue to watch it.  I wasn't able to find the rules for the older tournaments and so I don't know exactly which new rules were added for this one.  But who knows I may go back and watch the VOD's of some of the older tournaments.