Eve-Online has its World Cup, go watch it

The World Cup is over but Eve-Online decided to organize its own version and host an official tournament involving the best alliances in the game and done through 5 Vs 5 battles.

I don’t think it’s the first tournament they have, but what’s new and cool is that this time they launched an “Eve TV” that is streaming all the matches. Complete with commentators durning and after the events.

My bet for the final is Lotka Volterra Vs Band of Brothers.

More useful links:
The rosters for the tornaments ordered by date or group and with all the results.
Finals (I think they should have staggered these more, to build some hype and wait, and also to let people to download, follow and discuss the matches instead of rush everything in one day)
Some recorded battles to download.
Torrent files for the full three days. (go, go, smart use of pirating resources)

I think the only thing missing are the replays. The action is actually quite confused, the videos a bit blurry and it’s kind of hard to figure out the dynamics. But it’s still incredibly interesting and I’m quite addicted.

It also makes me wish, as it always happen. I don’t think that what they are doing is the very best way to present that type of content. Official touraments are a great idea (and one that I’m suggesting from a few years) but they need a different execution to be really enjoyable.

Idea for an Eve-Online TV client

Think for example to an “Eve TV client”. As a standard Eve-Online client to play the game, but modified to be public and become just a front-end to watch the matches.

You would have the option to stream the matches as they happen, or download them from players’ repositories and then load in the Eve TV client to watch even while offline.

Not only you would solve the problem of the blurred image and confusing action, since you would see directly in a perfect client, rendered by your PC. But you would also have the possibility to replay scenes from different points of view, watch a full match from the perspective of a particular ship and even “enter” one to see the modules that are being activated. So that it would be easier to figure out and learn the tactics that are being used.

Streaming a match in that way would also spare a *huge* amount of bandwidth because you would only need to send the movements and actions of the ships, plus maybe the voice commentary. But it’s still something quite manageable and even on this site I could easily host for download the whole tournament.

It would be a great idea, and also a wonderful way for CCP to publicize their game.

Guild Wars has the support for something similar (the “Observer mode”). You can watch the most important matches directly with the game client, but the limitation is that there’s no way to save them to watch them later. So you can often just see one once, shortly after it happens, and then it’s over.

Developing that sort of technology is easily doable, even if it would take some time. So it’s just about deciding the convenience of taking some resources from the actual game to make this possible. I think it would be worth it, and it would even contribute to the popularity of the game.

Better than waste those resources to found new mmorpgs as unnecessary replacements, in my opinion.

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