I can see how some developers are excited at the prospect of all Open teams having more ISK to put on a better show when the tournament begins. Also, the entry of EVE into e-sports is an great step to attract and introduce more users into EVE Online.

However, everyone should remember that every ticket in regular lotteries n Somer Blink has less expected value than what it costs to buy the ticket. Promotions put on by Blink only give back a fraction of the massive profits they make.

Put another way, every player that plays Blink is a loser in the long run.

I'm not sure how encouraging the taking of ISK from a huge number of players, a lot of whom do not know any better, and creating wealth for a single entity is conducive to the health of the player base in EVE Online.

I can see how some developers are excited at the prospect of all Open teams having more ISK to put on a better show when the tournament begins. Also, the entry of EVE into e-sports is an great step to attract and introduce more users into EVE Online.

However, everyone should remember that every ticket in regular lotteries n Somer Blink has less expected value than what it costs to buy the ticket. Promotions put on by Blink only give back a fraction of the massive profits they make.

Put another way, every player that plays Blink is a loser in the long run.

I'm not sure how encouraging the taking of ISK from a huge number of players, a lot of whom do not know any better, and creating wealth for a single entity is conducive to the health of the player base in EVE Online.

That aside, I've put about 2.5b into blink ... [truncated]

.

Yes this will make the Open tournament more interesting and better for the teams involved, however Somer Blink has considered the profit possible to be made off of the eve player base by having their name in the login screen news on a regular basis, and it far exceeds any "donation" that they have made to the community.

Any profit you have made off of Blink is because you are lucky. I have made a lot of money off of people like you at poker. Please keep on playing like you do.

They do not lose even when they do not win because (presumably) they had fun. You pay for EVE and make nothing off of it, it's a game, you play it for fun -- not to make money. Blink is no different.

now if people can stop meta gaming to cheat just to push the Iwin button like the alliance tournaments usualy show, this could actualy be worthwhile watching unlike the alliance tournaments because the open will then come down to char skills and player actual skills :)
so looking forward to seeing the best pvp demonstrated and shown in this :)

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen.

Well each match matters in the double elimination format so match throwing becomes much harder unless you are willing to drop out of the tournament completely. I have a looming feeling that we will see some awesome matches this tournament!

The (double) elimination format does seem to solve some of the worst metagaming problems, but even if there is no match-throwing (which may still happen, although much less likely, IMO) there's still spying and interfering with practices. Hopefully you will be able to address those issues for the next tournament by giving each team a secure location to practice.

Looking into ways to allow people to test their setups in a secure environment is absolutely worth looking into for future tournaments (and we are actually discussing ways to do this already).

Simple, move a team or teams to a seeded station then explode all the stargates :p

Removing metagaming completely might actually hurt the popularity.

In a crowded eSports community it is sometimes helpful to have something that stands out.

Having secure practice locations is going a bit too far, IMO.

Removing cheating is one thing but if a team wants to do the extra research I don't see the harm.

If you could trust people to just spy it would be fine. But there are always idiots that ruin things for the majority.

For example, people probing down your testing arena then warping in on trainings and jamming everyone. That is not doing research, that is being an *******, and its because of those type of people that teams are wanting secure training.