I know that in the past there was some kind of eve e-sport going on… I don’t know why it stopped, but would love if eve e-sport come back bigger and better then before.
It’s just an idea but maybe EvE would benefit from launching eve online e-sport events in form of arena style PvP (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, etc with different rules on ships and modules like current abyssal pvp events) for prizes to be won.
I mean why not? Would it be unfeasible or perhaps unpopular? Is there any reason why not go for it?
Why not? Well, Eve’s PvP isn’t really suited for arena combat as this current experiment shows. Further, a core concept of the game is that Eve is also a resource gathering game, and an arena kinda removes that element. The only way it sort of works is if you put a whole bunch of restrictions and rules in place to force some sort of balance (the Alliance Tournament had a crazy amount of these) and even then the meta will be solved in hours/days do you will need to either change it up very regularly, or make it a rare and special event like the AT was.
The bigger problem is that it seems unpopular. We are on our sixth arena weekend and the last four have had no more than few hundred players regularly participating. You can always say if the format was different more people might participate, but the reality is that there are not many people who care about balanced, arena-style PvP in Eve and the amount of work needed to make it entertaining for more than a weekend is too great, maybe impossible without rebalancing everything just for the arena.
Eve as an e-sport has been tried for a decade but it hasn’t caught on. You can blame the UI, or the unintuitive (to an outsider) game mechanics, or the PvP itself, but at its core I think the issue is just that Eve was built as an open-world, unbalanced PvP game so it is not very compatible with what the arena crowd is looking for. Some of that can be fixed with game design work, but it’s a chicken-and-egg problem so why spend the effort if only a few hundred people care?