CCP Games announced the start of EVE’s Fourth Alliance Player vs. Player (PVP) Championship. The event will take place over two consecutive weekends, beginning August 31, 2007, and will host alliances from all over the EVE Online universe. The championship will be fully covered by EVE TV, which will broadcast the whole event on the Internet free of charge.

The Alliance PVP Championship will take place in a colossal in-game arena where more than 40 teams are expected to compete and demonstrate their elite fighting skills and tactical expertise. As with real-world sporting events, fans can watch the action online and support players.

Sixteen matches per day will be streamed from a studio near CCP’s offices in Reykjavik, Iceland with commentary provided by experienced EVE Online players. In the studio, veteran EVE combat pilots will be joined by the game’s developers, sharing observations and expert knowledge about the ships that are fielded, how they've been equipped and the tactics employed by the commanders of each team.

This is a multi-stage championship with eight brackets, similar to the Soccer World Cup. The 40 teams are divided into eight round-robin groups, with the top two in each progressing to the knockout phase, which involves four single-elimination rounds including the final. The final four alliances earn loyalty points, and the top three alliances receive medals, loyalty points and pilot bonuses.

“The Alliance PVP Championship is a highly anticipated event for the EVE Online community as it is their Olympics in combat and gives new and smaller alliances a chance to earn respect, a very valuable commodity in EVE Online,” said Lína Ingvarsdóttir, a producer at CCP Games. “The championship demonstrates everything that makes EVE what it is: extensive teamwork in preparation and execution, high-level strategy and planning and gut-wrenching PVP. With a new format and revised rules, the championship promises to be even more diverse and exciting than ever before.”

Previous tournaments have attracted close to 20,000 simultaneous viewers from across the world and have led to the creation of a weekly pay-per-view EVE Online show that features news, views, events and discussion from the massive EVE Online universe. The Alliance PVP Championship will be broadcast on EVE TV free of charge from 3:00pm to 9:00pm GMT. Both the weekly show and the Tournament can be enjoyed by logging on to http://eve-online.tv.

For details of the rules and regulations of the Alliance Tournament.

EVE Online is the next generation in massive multiplayer online games. Set in a world of galactic magnitude, governed by a hyper capitalistic economy. Your aim is to establish yourself as a major mover and shaker, trusted by your friends and respected by your enemies. Your main tools to accomplish this, apart from the whole panoply of sophisticated equipment, space ships and corporations will be your business acumen and social skills, Machiavellian thinking and cunning combat strategies.

EVE Online is now the largest single online game world with more than 5,000 solar systems connected by a series of jump gates. You can be almost anything you want to be, from pirate to military leader to CEO of your own corporation all depending upon your aspiration.

EVE Online players pay a monthly subscription fee to access the EVE World which is $14.95 (€14.95 in Europe) a month.