First of: I get it. Eve is now 18 years old. And on your eighteenth birthday, some of you may have done something a bit crazy as well. Something chaotic. And putting eighteen meta-fitted T1 Cruisers into an Abyssal Arena can get very chaotic very quickly. Mission accomplished?
Well…
The Good
Chaos. I queued up five times. And it was a lot of fun to see people splitting up into little brawls and kite around, accidentially running into the scram-web Thorax and getting shredded by Blasters. Also “gf” to the Caracal that rushed in on my Arbitrator and just overwhelmed my Ancillary Armor Repper with Rapid Lights while I was distracted defanging Berserker Drones from a Vexor. That was just well played. It’s also fun to see the very different approaches to fitting and the market players in Jita surely earned some nice money off this event.
The Sad
When you put 18 people into an arena, you almost always get that one dude that plays it super careful. They will stay at the edge of the Arena and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. He’s only here for the daily skillpoints after all. Maybe they hope everyone kills each other and they can just leave this hell of a place. Sometimes they seem to be so distracted by the carnage around them, that they completely forget about the timer. But they suddenly realize that they will need to fight once there are only a hand full of ships left. Unfortunately, by the time they realize that they actually need to kill someone to get out of this situation, there is only one minute left on the clock. And that Maller pilot is 80km away on the other side of the arena…
Or you just get a bunch of Mallers shooting and tanking each other until the timer runs out, sprinkled in with full tank fits like these. Then a time-out is almost certain. 🤷♂️
In a smaller context, with maybe five ships in the ring, there can be enough time for the participants to get it done. To get rid – even of the meme-fits. But when you can have multiple of these, in the end hugging the opposite sides of the arena, there is no way to deal with it in the given time. At least not when you go in alone.
And that’s the other way the arena can go: Simple collusion. A bunch of friends queuing up together and going after the solo players. And in this scenario, I can’t really blame them. It seems one of the only ways to avoid the time-out situations. And that’s not even against any rules, if you don’t use alts but only your main account.
Because of the number of participants required for the arena to start, the chance for a group activating their filaments at the same time ending up in the same instance is pretty high as well.
Of course, a good enough pilot who happens to not be ganged up on by a group may actually pull of a win in this FFA arena as well. It can be done. But only when the stars align, and the Mallers aren’t sitting too far apart from each other.
The End
As someone who had hoped for being able to participate in a meaningful way as a solo pilot, I’m disappointed. I was motivated to throw myself into the fray to earn the skins and bragging rights – if there was a realistic way to do it. But I don’t see one that is worth my time and effort. To get into the top 50 you currently only need two wins. Solo, that would be a very frustrating grind.
Thanks, I’ll pass.
Skins for this event are: Sacrilege, Deimos, Slasher, and Condor.
These skins could have meant something before the Abyssal Arenas got introduced: They could have meant, that someone actually is a skilled pilot.
Sadly they never really did. With all the ways to game the system and get unfair advantages, it mainly means one found a way do just that. That’s not really bad in istelf, but kind of disappointing too, because it takes away a lot from the reward of getting such a skin.
What are your thoughts on the Abyssal Arenas? I always like to hear another opinion.
the greybill 