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Category:
Culture

Those Who Are About to Explode, We Salute You: Gladiators of Alliance Tournament XI

There are mortals, there are heroes, there are gods. Then there are foaming-at-the-mouth, raging lunatics who are really good at spaceships. You decide.
Image of Mat Westhorpe
Mat Westhorpe
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Published: Jul 26, 2013 07:34 pm

This article is over 11 years old and may contain outdated information

EVE Online is all about the players. In the New Eden gameworld, players are considered the primary content, the creators and the destroyers.

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In the yearly Alliance Tournaments, the participants ascend to a higher status, taking centre stage in a prestigious eSports event that will give them the opportunity become heroes or villains as all of their peers look on.

For tournament participants, everything is at stake. The pilots are the best of their alliance – player organisations sometimes thousands strong – and they have the weight of expectation on their shoulders.

The first weekend has already passed and we have seen desperate struggles, noble efforts, and match-losing mistakes. After months of preparation, a pilot’s single moment of madness in a high pressure situation can leave months of preparation in tatters. We can only guess at the team reaction to a mistimed armour repair, an unplanned boundary violation, or a poorly executed manoeuver.

For the participants, The Alliance Tournament is their Hunger Games, their Gladiator, and their Lord of the Flies all in one.

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Author
Image of Mat Westhorpe
Mat Westhorpe
Broken paramedic and coffee-drinking Englishman whose favourite dumb animal is an oxymoron. After over a decade of humping and dumping the fat and the dead, my lower spine did things normally reserved for Rubik's cubes, bringing my career as a medical clinician to an unexpectedly early end. Fortunately, my real passion is in writing and given that I'm now highly qualified in the art of sitting down, I have the time to pursue it. Having blogged about video games (well, mostly EVE Online) for years, I hope to channel my enjoyment of wordcraft and my hobby of gaming into one handy new career that doesn't involve other people's vomit.