Win at all costs

There's a disturbance in the Force....no, wait, that's the SWOTR blog I don't keep. Ahem.

There's been a gush of shit out the aft porthole of the good ship Alliance Tournament XIII after acrimony between conniving accomplices raised the possibility that the two teams in the finals  - Camel Empire and Hydra Re-re-reloaded....soz, Warlords of the Deep - colluded to fix the result of the whole fucking giant waste of space pixels. CCP suspended the prizes and investigated, and then....boom.

Bombshell. 

Kadeshi Princess is banned 4 lyfe. Poor dude. Now he's on Failheap with an exposee on the lengths that Hydra re-re-loaded goes to in order to win the matches.

Wading through the wall of text, the strategy boils down to;

1. Ruthlessly picking competent pilots who fly their roles rigidly and properly
2. Long periods of theory-crafting and grinding Pyfa setups
3. API scrapers and other methods of basically aggregating what should be inaccessible information on rival organisations' Singularity training camps
4. Pacts for cross-training between two competing alliances, where peak-level pilots form teams and iteratively refine their fits, tactics and piloting methods
5. Involvement at the highest level with employees of CCP 
6. Running two teams in parallel

This shows the lengths that the winners in an Alliance Tournament will go to to bag a set of rare ship blueprints. It is far beyond what  any other team bar, perhaps, goons or PL will go to in order to reign supreme.

The bombshell is that this wasn't match fixing, this was basically one organisation fighting itself. It was Hydra basically hedging its bets that it could get one of the two teams into the finals of the tournament, although they probably didn't expect to win first and second. This is a level of collusion that CCP cannot easily contain - how do you prove that a random Alliance which started 2 years ago is a pet of another? I mean prove - not just listen to mutterings in dark forum corners.

The other bombshell is the allegations of people scraping API killmail CREST info from SiSi. It would appear that there's probably still some of this going on with teams accessing SiSi for training sessions; you thought you had a sekrit setup and training session on the test server, but then someone can run a script pulling CREST and can piece together your fits and reverse-engineer the gang you were flying and put that together during their own tests and come up with a counter.

The punishment handed out by CCP is rather weak. Kadeshi Princess (the IRL person and his various toons) has been banned from all AT's going forward. Bob Shaftoes has got a 1 year ban. none of the other team members have a ban. Apparently, according to the logic of CCP, none of the other players in those teams are up for a sanction beyond losing the prizesand having wasted all their efforts.

This is interesting, because it does not address the problem of fielding two teams under different banners in the same tourney. This can probably be expected to occur in the future as PL will consider it a pretty smart move going forward; you just feed some ISk and hulls and pilots into an alliance for a year, apply into the tournament and see how you go. You can even swap theorycraft learnings in your secret forum fastnesses out of the EVE IT infrastructure so you field two teams in parallel working off the same play-book, just with different people at the helm.

The real question going forward is whether or not there can be an Alliance Tournament with any integrity whatsoever, given the inability of people to covertly train on Sisi with ships, teams and setups.

It also shows maybe some obsessive crazy-level bullshit gameplay limits that most people don't want to aspire to. But props to KP for his ridiculous level of devotion to gaming EVE's tournament for e-peen, I can only show amazeballs levels of respect.

So, if you are planning to go in to AT XIV next year, it's prett clear what you need to do:

1. Find an adversary of some kind to run mock AT training camps on Sisi with you, full-on, for 3-4 months before the tournament. 
2. Hit the pyfa grinder and seriously devote a lot of time to theorycrafting (and feed even your crazy ideas into the sausage grinder on Sisi)
3. Get your pilot skills up (what KP calls 'execution') 
4. Get to know a Dev
5. Put two teams in the tournament 
6. Cheat like a ratbastard

May the worst man win.