At 1500 UTC today (July 14, 2021), CCP dropped an announcement in a video posted to the EVE Online YouTube channel.
Prior to going live, the YouTube trailer had been subject to a timed “premiere” countdown of 24 hours, fuelling speculation across the EVE community. Potential topics under discussion ranged from a new Quadrant update to ESS Reserve Bank keys being released, or potentially the end of the current “Scarcity” era of CCP’s resource plans. There was even (among the community of tournament enthusiasts) discussion of a new Alliance Tournament, which was placed on hiatus in early 2019.
In actual fact, the YouTube trailer began cryptically, making references to “battles fought among blood-stained stars” and “tattered flags once proudly carried”, upon a backdrop of wrecked hulls. This was followed by a statement that “there is blood yet to be shed, and flags yet to burn”, leading this author to believe for a moment that this would be a new Sovereignty system announcement.
Instead, it was the long-hoped for, long-awaited announcement that the Alliance Tournament would be returning to our Twitch screens come November 2021. According to CCP Aurora on Discord, there will be further news coming on this later today via dev-blog.
INN will, of course, bring you that update as it appears, as well as further news on the Alliance Tournament XVII in the coming months.
