Is there an arena style pvp in the game? A way to queue up single or team type pvp challenges? Generally trying to maintain some level of even matching?
Still love the rest of the pvp aspects of the game and all, just wondering if this exists or has been considered?
Was there until December 2022, then got shut down because it is a cancer to EVE.
I had fun in the I think 1-2 arena events I did. Got some great zkills, learned some PVP skills, most importantly I getting better at not freaking out when being shot by another player. 
(I don’t PVP much)
However, I do get the arguments for instanced gameplay and people abusing the system plus the questionable way of matchmaking. The cons really outweighed the benefits.
Yah… Matchmaking things like the arena did not even have a chance of taking off.
Alliance Tournament is closest thing we have now.
Try out public PVP fleets that do roams all across Sew Eden. I flew with Spectre fleet for a little and it was the best time of my life! Would attend if I had more time.
Ok, it seems like a reasonable idea. Cancer is bad. So, let’s skip it then.
Ehm, yea there was for few years. It had rough start, because at the beginning it was unrestricted when it came to fits/mods (you don’t want that…), but as time went by, it got polished and was amazing content for newbies in cheap formats and super tryhards in expensive arenas as well… but like half a year ago CCP “put it on hold” because they wanted to focus more on some narrative driven ■■■■■■■■. What a fail…
So now you can forget about any fair fights anywhere in New Eden. People might tell you… dude just do FW, but man it’s same nonsense as it always has been, ppl flying ■■■■■■■20bil T1/Faction everything mutated frigs, and dumpstering noobs. That’s a joke.
I really hope they bring the “new” arena back, took barely any time to set it up, once or twice a month. (btw there was also “old” arena, but that was even worse than FW, because you would get there via abyss gate, so if your average crab misscliked gate in abyss they would get put in arena with TheCurrupted sitting in his 20bil Ikitursa or whatever and just get slaughtered…)
If you’re interested what the “new” arena looked like I have plenty of arena videos : https://youtu.be/4oaGAkvHvGg
That’s not an option for any “normal” player, like I would do AT, but … how the ■■■■am I supposed to do it ?
That’s ridiculous amount of effort, and it’s available only for very very very few players and… on top of that when it comes to watching AT, you can’t see ■■■■anyway. You can look at the bars down at the bottom to see shiled/armor/hull go down and that’s about it. So from viewer perspective it kinda sucks also.
And if you’re about to say that the numbers are high on AT streams, then yea because people like gambling and getting free stuff. If there was no giveaways and gambling it would get 10% of the views.
Watching arena streams, you could actually see what was happening there.
Well, the idea wasn’t that bad at all. It was pretty nice in the beginning, it even was good content to watch on stream and often got hundreds of viewers (something most other EVE content can hardly reach). You really could learn things about fits, how to engage, keep range, break orbit, manual piloting and stuff.
But over time some players went in there with insanely blinged and specialized fits that 99% of all other players simply couldn’t beat any more. So it became a boring farming ground for a handful (really only like 5 players) in 10B+ ships full of A-Type, X-Type, max-abyssalmodded fittings that easily killed every other runner who dared to enter the PvP gate. And I really mean just “farmed”, there was not even a challenge any more. Less and less people used it and at some point CCP stopped it.
They did make some new approaches with Abyssal Proving Events where specified hulls could enter, having some event-specific boni to their hull or other mechanics and with some rules in place for fitting. However, these also were dominated pretty quickly by some rich vets that went in there mostly with perfect-booster rolls, a head full of implants etc. so you really saw only the same 5 guys at the top in every event.
This wasn’t the case in past year+
It’s kinda myth people kept repeating without actually knowing how it worked.
The arenas were restricted by meta level for I think 2 years or close to it.
Meaning for example in Meta 5 could do max T2 fit + Improved Drugs + Hardwiring Imlants or in the cheapest format - Meta 0 you could only do T1 fit (not even named modules) + Synth Drugs + Hardwiring Implants.
There was no “huge” advantage, it was fair fights.
I explicitly said
So, yes they tried to restrict overly bling. And for some time it even worked. There were still people who got a fresh +3% implant clone before every fight and rolled a fresh set of improved boosters (switching clones on a citadel back and forth) until they had no side effects. Add these costs up to the hull and then ask yourself why that isn’t affordable for a majority of the competition. Many streamers even said on stream that they basically paid billions of ISK and that the rewards hardly covered the costs. But, you don’t win enough if you don’t do it.
To put it short: We had arenas in the past years, CCP decided to stop them without any announcements or whatever. Just gone.
The last arena we had was a Navy BC 1v1 in January
CCP should bring it back
I don’t get why CCP just removes content when it gets dominated by a few players. By that logic CCP must also have gotten rid of FW when it is really dominated by few players with 10b T1 frigs and bot farmers. In the old arena behind the 2nd gate, I saw many cheap 300m Deimos fits killing 10B Ikis there. It was not all about bling, it was also about strategy and descision making. And so it was in the new arena too
That was not really the case. I never rolled drugs, took it in fight when I needed them (the new arenas, in the old it was different). If I got any negatives, I did not reroll and just went on until it ran out.
The worst part on all this is that it got stopped without any announcement.
Well thats nice of you, since it is more than a year ago I don’t remember if I saw you do it or not, some streamers definitely did do it to enter every match on max stats and the ones I watched were usually those competiting for the top spots.
I am even absolutely on your side that they should bring the PvP Arenas back and make them attractive for many players (in my opinion that means: max T2 fit, no implants, no drugs). I really enjoyed that content and the yearly AT always has a wide audience and even the private streams of the Arenas had a good viewer count. This type of content is a good way to interact with Empire Lore even, hard to believe that the Empires that are so proud of their militaries don’t host regular tournaments for different ship classes. And it offers countless ways to reward players with non-financial things, while creating destruction and demand for produced items on the other side which would help the industry.
I use to do the arenas until I got that one item I can sell for billions on the market. You had to win of course and hope RNG is on your side 
I am wearing one of the items in my picture right now.
It was ok at every start until the meta for the event sets in then anybody that did not have perfect skills for that ships and fits and spend some moola on implants and boosters would just not ever win a match.
There was no bling… it wasn’t about restricting “overly bling”, there just wasn’t bling for the past few years.
As for the drugs, it was proportional to the event. Like if it’s Battleships T2 event, or HACs or T3 cruisers or something, then there’s no issue with spending like 30mil extra on rolling Improved drugs. The argument just wasn’t there. Like someone pays 600mil for T2 Battleships and complains about spending 30 or whatever millions on drugs ? That makes no sense.
But like yea, if let’s say you were running some expensive event, and you just keep getting trashed, sure it will cost you billions, but at least you’re getting trashed in fair 1v1, not flying around for an hour to get blobbed by Vargurs or whatever, heh.
When I stared the arena, I was in the place of just loosing basically every fight, that how it always starts, nobody can expect to join pvp arena and be smashing people if they barely know how to pvp.
As for implants, yes, there was still ongoing discussion about whether even hardwiring implants should get restricted or not. I thought there’s no need for it, but that could be easily integrated and at that point basically nobody could come up with any excuse why it’s not fair.
The funny part about implants is that people thought they are loosing because they don’t have 5% implant set, but like… you could just check some of the battleships videos where I show 5 seconds or so of end of every fight and you’d see that like people did not loose by 1-2-3-4-5%, nearly in all cases it’s wins by huge margin. The harwirings were just kind of favorite scapegoat, because there was nothing else to complain about.
And of course nobody likes loosing.
It makes sense when coming to the Frig, Destroyer and Cruiser events. Hulls are cheap here and if you want to attract a wide array of players to this content, you have to keep the initial participation costs low.
Lets keep a it very basic, just “cheap drugs” and 3% implants:
That is not how it works. If your opponent can tank 500 DPS and you can deal 700, you can slowly crack his buffer with 200 excess DPS over time. If you boost your DPS with drugs and implants by just 10% (which is easily doable) you will exceed his tank by 270 DPS instead of 200, winning by quite a larger margin than 5%. Same goes for tank, just reverted. 10% better tank can mean you last 30% longer against his DPS. 10% better tracking can make the difference between to Artillery Hits or Misses that win you the match.
There were many cheap formats with the meta 0 (only synth drugs) and meta 4 restrictions (only standard drugs) .
As for implants yea, you could do 3% or 5% which nobody was doing in the super cheap formats. Because if you’re doing 1v1 rookie ships and you use 5% implant set and then get smoked in 2 wrecking hits from some arty Reaper then… that’s like 750mil lost for no reason 
It wasn’t really issue.
The numbers are exaggerated.
I’ve said this like 100 times but, I can explain it one more time. Everyone can afford 2% set… that costs basically nothing.
so the actual possible “bling” would be when someone would use 5% set, while the other guy had only 2% set, resulting in 3%, lets say it’s 3% on RoF and 3% on damage, yea sure it’s a significant difference which is why I would run 5% on many events, but the way the restrictions were setup, you could not tank the other guy, it wasn’t like people had 500dps vs 500dps tanks and man that 6% that was the dealbreaker why the few top people were doing much better than others.
I don’t think this is true at all, if you’re shooting against target x with angular y that you’re missing shots, and you increase your tracking by 10%, you’re still no hitting crap or maybe once in many shots scratch the guy. Tracking implant was probably making literally 0 difference.
But hey, fix for this, would be super easy anyway right ? And I don’t think many people would object.
Just add 2% implant restriction on meta 0 events, 3-4% implant restriction on meta 4 events, 5% restriction on meta 5 events. Relatively simple change.
I’d bet that if CCP made 1v1 proving grounds like big tournament, that would be also streamed in such format, and both players would have to stream and people watching would be seeing pilotting, module management, decision making of both pilots realtime, it would be more popular than the whole AT 
No they aren’t. Synth Exile + Hardshell + 3% repping implant easily increase your tank by 10%, even more, you might calculte yourself if you want it to be exact. 3% gun implant, 3% rof implant, Pyro → easy 10% more damage. Tracking implant alone might make no difference. Tracking Implant + Standard Drop leads to more hits that were misses without them. Sniper matches sometimes are decided on who can fire the first shot (I actually watched some of these), having just 5km more lock range or 5km more optimal or just that 150m/s more speed to stay out of his locking range is all it needs to win.
It all comes down to the simple point: These things do give advantages and these advantages add up when combined with higher skills, better piloting, longer fights.
But why argue? Your advice goes into the right direction:
Just remove implants and drugs from the equation, they are simply not needed in a competition of skill and they favor only the richer folks.
I’m just trying to say that in 99% of the situations, people cry about 2x2 or 2x3% difference compared to expensive implants, and saying that’s why they can’t win, while that is not the case. (it was only the case aganinst top/elite pvp guys, but those knew… and ran them also )
One of my arguments was that as the proving grounds got more and more restricted, the leaderboard did not change at all. And if they actually went nuts and just removed all drugs and all hardwirings (which would just suck… because of less customization options) then it would still not change anything on leaderboards, it would just be arena with less options.
Reason why I was often on top was because I enjoyed this content a lot, and didn’t really do anything else in eve at this point. And there wasn’t really many people willing to challenge the rank1 because… you know, you got nothing for rank1, or 2, or 3, or 10 (just ridiculous…)
Yea that’s exactly what I didn’t want. You don’t want loose the option to get like fitting implants and, different drugs to fly the ship differently and so on. You want as many options as possible.
For example you mentioned the Drop booster, someone might go Sooth instead and try to kite, instead of getting close and getting the benefit of better tracking… all that should be assesed by the player on the fly, because they don’t know what exactly is the other guy running.
Not even talking about what a â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– zkill is for arena, everyone being able to check fits immediately, that was the worst.
The arena with few tweaks, like stopping kill mails during the event, adding proper reward structure so players are motivated to get better and fight for the rank1 place, and doing maybe some last tweaks to the implant meta/restriction would make this 10x more popular.
Imagine, that there would be no reward for AT and no gambling/skins for watching… it would be dead content.
Interesting. Seems like it had great potential, and was even awesome for a period of time. It can be made pretty simple. To enter the arena, the character has to choose a type of ship, put up $x in ISK, no implants, or use your remaining ISK. Each side puts up the same amount. 25% of the total ISk from both players or teams goes to the victor with and the looted ship. Each player/team get 5 min to fit the ship/implants with the remaining money they entered with.
Even….steven, let the personal skill/understanding win at that point.
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