Header Art by Major Sniper
Editor’s Note: This Interview was conducted two weeks ago, before the first match of the group stage, and was delayed due to technical issues here at INN. Arrival has since exited the tournament after a fantastic showing, coming second in its group and placing joint third in the redemption bracket. You can watch back Arrival’s matches on CCP’s Tournament stream (vs. ONLY NEED THREE COMPS, vs. Fancypants, vs. Yamete Kudasai, vs. Ryba)
Who are you?
I’m Howling Wind, Arrival’s team captain for this year’s Anger Games. I have previously been co-captain on teams since the Alliance Open. I joined the corp right around the time of the Alliance Tournament being brought back from its hiatus so we formed an Alliance to participate and have been engaged with every tournament hosted since.
What do you enjoy about participating in Tournaments and what is your goal for Anger Games 6?
It’s a nice change of pace event and we find that every win is extremely satisfying. I think for most of our team it’s the most exciting part of playing EVE.
We don’t go into an event with a place goal in mind. For me personally, getting top 4 would be amazing but there is always tough competition so we’ll see how it goes. We try and maximum try-hard every match-up we go into regardless of the team or its pilots. We never know what can happen and we’ve had our fair share of upsets for and against us.
What have some of your past results looked like?
We have had mixed results. Our best placing has been getting top 8 (winning 4 of each frigate/cruiser) which we managed last AT. Our worst was only managing 1 win in the loser’s bracket before getting knocked out entirely which was quite disappointing
How do you approach this tournament and the fact that it allowed scripted EWAR from a theory-crafting point of view?
We figured from the start that it was going to be strong. Through scrims, we found that that turned out to be the case. We’ve put a lot of effort into coming up with counters or tweaking comps to be somewhat resilient to them. We also know from experience how to adjust once we are on grid in terms of positioning or target calling.
I think we have a love/hate relationship with EWAR being in the ruleset. It can be some of the most frustrating comps to play against but equally, they require a very high skill and coordination to pull off successfully. They also tend to be a little slower to watch as a spectator on stream but likely the teams are putting in more work than in you’re more standard brawl comps
What do you think will be amazing in this event meta?
We have seen how strong EWAR is in this format. The lower pilot numbers on grid make it significantly harder to fight against teams who are able to properly fly EWAR-based comps and have the patience and skill to hold out until the right moment to score a kill and win on points. It wouldn’t surprise me to see some slower matches toward the end of the tournament with heavy EWAR on both sides and some strong technical play.
What do you think the ‘Ship of the Event’ is likely to be?
I think it will be the Cyclone Fleet Issue. It slots nicely into several different comps but perhaps most relevant for us is the HAM rush for which we’re somewhat infamous. Good damage, good tank, and excellent speed. What more can you want out of a single ship?
Although my love for logistics ships is undying so I’d say Scimitar as a close second.
Are there any teams you would really like to take down this event?
We lost to HIDDEN NINJA LEAF last year in an insanely close game so I wouldn’t mind a little rematch if the brackets allow.
Who is your favourite team to scrim against?
Big shout out to Darkside who have been scrimming us for years now. They push us to work really hard to beat them – a very skilled team.
How do you do scrim planning and track what works and what doesn’t for ship comps?
We have a website that stores all of the comps, lists all upcoming scrims, and tracks every match we’ve played with the killmails where available. We also use Discord to discuss teams we are about to go up against in detail. Our website lets us find matches that happened years back that we might have otherwise forgotten. The first match we have records of is a scrim from August 2021 against FancyPants.
This is what our match history page looks like (this is from our only winning game of AT XVII)
Is there anything you think that a team or player who might want to get into the tournament scene should know to help them?
You don’t need a million comps to be able to do well. New teams should focus on nailing a few common doctrines with good positioning and communications which are far more important than comp depth. That can come later. Also, lose the mindset of self-preservation; in the arena, it’s often about good trades and getting the most out of your ship. If you burn to the arena edge to survive but your team loses because of it, then that’s no good. From my experience, it’s a tough mindset to escape for some, especially when it’s happening on a live server for the real AT.
Who is Arrival and how might people who are interested in joining on reading this make contact?
Arrival is a EUTZ wormhole corp primarily focused on roaming nullsec living out of a C2. We’re quite a small group just focused on the more relaxed PVP content rather than bigger fleets. We have participated in every tournament since the Alliance Tournament was brought back from hiatus.
We are recruiting: Looking for people who can click buttons good, who already know their stuff in small gangs, but are perhaps more interested in a smaller group with a relaxed environment. We have an in-game channel called Deliverance Pub where people can find out more about us.
