ATX - Reduced Time limits for matches

One fairly major change in the AT rules I forgot to cover in my initial post, match times have been reduced.

So previously each match lasted a full 15 minutes, but now that has been reduced to just 10 minutes.

Now I say "just" because 10 minutes seems like an awfully short amount of time to me. I remember many matches either going to "time" or close enough to it. Perhaps not in the qualifying rounds, but definitely during the finals. There were even instances of the match flipping on a dime in the final minutes, had those matches been shortened then that would never had happened.

I'm not sure what the driving motivation is behind shortening the matches, but it doesn't seem to make too much sense to me at least.

For clarification here are the exact words from the dev blog

"Match times have been reduced from 15 minutes to 10 minutes."

"Fights are limited to 10 minutes in pre-qualifying rounds and group stage, and to 10 minutes on the final day. If a fight reaches time, it will be stopped and whichever alliance has the higher total points value will be declared winner. See "Victory Conditions", below."

"Victory Conditions

1. During a match, a team scores points for each enemy ship it kills, equal to the tournament points value of that ship. The team that has scored the most points at the conclusion of the match, or that destroys the entire opposing team, is the winner.
2. If a team chooses to field less than 100 points, non-fielded points count towards the opponent's score.

• This rule applies to the 50 point limit during Pre-Qualifying, not 100 points."

While CCP has upped the team sizes, they haven't given the teams more points, so they seem to be encouraging bigger, faster fights (more DPS on the field means more ships die faster) but then didn't give the teams any extra points to field any mass of high DPS ships save for 8 tier 3 BC. Sure, that's impressive DPS but then doesn't it just come down to who dies first every time, no tactics, no strategy, nothing other than DPS, easily mitigated DPS as well.... Seems like a poor tradeoff.

Additionally, in previous years, CCP has invited the winners and some level of the "runners up" back into the tournament... oh hell, CCP Loxy (best loxy) says it best... 

"In the past we have invited the top teams from the previous tournament directly, bypassing the qualifying stage to guarantee we have some of the best and most respected teams fighting in the final weekend. We have made the specific decision this year not to do this. All teams must go through the same process."

Guess they don't want 0utbreak and Genos getting an automatic bid this year. Predictable rage later on in the thread, I felt the same way when Rote made it to the finals one year, and we thought that got us a guaranteed spot the next year but then we still ended up having to enter both the auction and random draft. We made it in, but that was after a full year of expecting to be in without issue. The rage of the top teams is well placed, but ultimately I hope it will be fruitless.

In any case, also in that thread, Inferno changes will already be in place pre-tourney, including Tracking Disruptors effecting Missiles, launcher changes, etc...

Qualifiers will be streamed, possibly without commentators. It was identified as a must have after they didn't have it last year... They might get streaming audio from Eve Radio or NER side by side with the coverage to provide some commentator feedback.

Some "intertwined" alliances that might have been affected by the no alt alliance rules, for example Red v Blue alliances (Red Fed and Blue, oh who cares about blues?), will be allowed to enter as two separate alliances. If there are questions or concerns about an alliance you can email the AT team at evetv@ccpgames.com

Next up, I go over the components I use to rate AT setups.