Beitrag von: Aura am November 26, 2012, 10:02:21 Nachmittag
So, CCP Dolan was out today as a commentator. In public, the reason is "to keep things fresh." Hm, OK. CCP Soundwave says Dolan will be back. But today, his replacement was CCP Falcon, the former Verone of Veto. alliance. In the interests of full disclosure, I'll remind you that VetoDOT was a Rote Kapelle ally until their alliance was disbanded. But Verone himself is before my time in Rote. I've never talked to the guy.
And that's a symptom of the problem. Falcon is clearly a smart guy, but he's just as clearly behind the times when it comes to the current in-game fleet metas, and it shows. A lot of my alliance-mates have come to the conclusion that you can't be a good tourney commentator unless you're thrown into the middle of training for that tournament, and I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that. That isn't to say that Falcon was bad... he was fine, as far as he went. But he's got a lot of homework to do if he's going to continue to be a commentator next week.
Specifically, I was reminded of an aspect of CNN's coverage of the U.S. Presidential debates last month. During CNN's coverage, they had a small focus group of voters watching both candidates with a little dial they could turn. When these voters agreed with what was being said, they could turn the dial up as high as +10. When they disagreed with what was being said, they could turn the dial as low as -10. CNN then showed their reactions in real time. Dolan's score on such a graph would probably vary wildly, from say -8 to +5. For me, Falcon never went all that negative, but I don't think he scored higher than about +3 all day. Dolan has lower lows, true, but he also has higher highs. As Falcon gains experience, he should get better. 'nuff said, moving on.
CCP Fozzie continues to be great, and now that he's not pulled off track by Dolan all the time, he gave the best commentary of the New Eden Open so far: incisive and informed in all the right places. Soundwave is back to being his old relaxed self, which was an improvement over yesterday. The green screen work gets better every day: the lighting on the table is good now, but the ghostly shadow was back, this time behind Falcon. Sound and video were also fine; in particular, I only counted one bad transition from lapel mics to headsets. So the technical aspects of the tournament are getting better and better: near perfect this time, in fact. Keep it up!
I do have one other technical suggestion: take another look at the code that fills the attack bar. I don't think I've ever seen it more than about 40% full, even when it was all-missile teams, or when Vindicators were fighting Kronoses at perfect range.
The day started at about 2000-2500 viewers, but peaked at a little over 3300 at the end of the day.
The matches today were quite good, I thought, some of the best of the tournament so far! Again, not a lot of rock-paper-scissors, which was nice. And a lot of really good flying was being shown on the screen, which was even better. I was particularly impressed with the flying of The Expendables team, and they particularly against Africa's Finest. I do have to wonder what the latter team were thinking when they brought Paladins, though. You're never going to sell me on that ship as a good tourney boat.
Much Crying Old Experts again had an amusing moment; they shared with me that they tried to ban the Opux Luxury Yacht during their second match. Much like trying to ban CCP Dolan, this request was denied. ;-) There weren't a lot of other funny moments today -- the proceedings were much more serious all in all.
Which brings me to those three Malices. What. The Hell. Was the XXXMity team thinking about. Wow. Those ships simply had no business being fielded with such a frigate-light team. When PL used them against Rote Kapelle in Alliance Tournament 10, they were protected in a variety of ways:
- They were supported by not one but two Bhaalgorns; and,
- they had a terrific logi pilot backing them up; and,
- they had significant defending assault frigates; and,
- PL wasn't relying on them as primary DPS; and,
- they had PL's best pilots aboard flying them.
EDIT (26/Nov/2012): I have issued a partial correction to this part of the post.
Finally, I'm told that the XXXMity Damnation pilot didn't turn on his five links. Kinda makes you wonder what he was thinking about, considering that a Damnation pilot has exactly one job...
Six teams left, I believe? Something like that? And one of them still has a Rote Kapelle pilot or two on it. On to day five!
Source: New Eden Open D4: Keep things fresh (http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/11/new-eden-open-d4-keep-things-fresh.html)