Alliance tournament: Captain's Report stardate 2015.08.05

It's been a while since my last report but that's not for any lack of activity.

Our main preparation is practice. We aim for 8 practice sessions a week with 4 in EU time and 4 in US time. We've managed to hold these sessions most times although we've cancelled a few sessions due to sisi problems or due to low attendance. Our best attendance was 17, our worst 2, from a squad of about 30.

Practicing really helps as we've improved a lot from where we started. Boundary violations are rare, people are adjusting to small gang style.

In small gang, unlike in the big nullsec blob fleets, FCing is much looser, with multiple different people able to call instructions. For instance a battleship pilot might call that he needs something tackled for him. Each pilot has to continually assess the fight, the positions of the ships, manage a complicated array of active modules (and their overheating), and see who's in trouble while piloting his own ship (and not flying out of the arena).

I asked one of our newbros tonight to explain his piloting choices and decision making and he responded with a barrage of clever and innovative actions he had done in his frigate while making a big contribution to a game we won against a really strong practice partner (CVA). After he finished I was like wow -I don't understand everything you just said but I can tell that you really get it.

There's nothing better you can do in Eve to raise your game to the next level.

Tonight's session with CVA was pretty awesome in a number of ways. In one match we were behind on points until 2 seconds before the end when a ship exploded just as the end of the match was being counted down in Local. I'd been looking at my 85% burnt weapons trying to decide whether to squeeze out one more overheat cycle (in the end I decided not to). It's all about those constant little decision points.

Sid Meier said a good game is a series of interesting decisions.

Lots of admin stuff as people drop out, a wave of people got recruited in, finance, logistics, attendance tracking, aar analysis, theorycrafting. We're coming up fast on a thousand posts on our AT XIII subforums.

And soon everyone will be able to see what all this hard work has produced. Brave's first two matches are:

15.00 Sat 15th August: Brave Collective v Easily Excited.
15.00 Sun 16th August: Brave Collective v Clockwork Pineapple or Phoebe Freeport Republic

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