Tournament

Tournament runs the same nine-region, eighty-one-system galaxy as the MMO, as a Premium, one-hour timed season: harsher combat, faster respawns and a richer start, followed by a full universe reset the moment the clock runs out, leaving only a permanent leaderboard entry behind.

An hour is not enough time to be careful.

A Season, Not a Galaxy That Waits

Tournament access is part of Premium clearance, alongside the PvP universe, extra character slots and your full captain's log: access only, never a power advantage of its own. Every run lasts one hour exactly, then the universe wipes: your fleet, your experience, your quests, your reputation and your skill tree all reset to a bare start, though the belts and the station prices you left behind carry over into the next run untouched. What survives the wipe is the leaderboard: close out a run with enough experience behind you and your final standing is banked permanently, on a board the next reset never touches.

What the Clock Changes

Turn one hands you ten times the MMO's starting credits, enough for an armed gunship alongside the usual pair of mining tugs, so every commander starts able to fight rather than waiting to afford their first escort. Combat pays far more experience than mining or contracts do, since the leaderboard ranks on raw experience and the mode is built to let fighting decide it: a hunt contract or a raider kill is worth chasing far more than in the MMO, and Combat itself is where that experience is won. Killing another commander's ship pays double a PvE kill's experience, rolls extra loot off their wreck, and gets broadcast to every commander watching the dispatches board. Both the critical hit chance and the miss chance run higher than in the MMO, so any single fight swings harder either way, even though the extra swings average out over the many fights a full run contains. Ambient Corsair and Protectorate patrols return to a cleared sector about twice as fast as in the MMO, and there are more of them to begin with, so the ambient fighting never goes quiet for long, while making peace with the Crimson Corsairs takes far more standing than the MMO's truce, so raiders stay a real threat for most of a run. Quests still pay experience, only less of it, because Tournament is built to let combat decide the podium.

By the Numbers

Run length - 720 turns, one hour
Starting credits - 500, against 50 in the MMO
Combat experience - six times the MMO's rate
PvP kill experience - double a PvE kill
Critical hit chance - 15%, against 10% in the MMO
Miss chance - 7.5%, against 5% in the MMO
Minimum experience to score - 1,000 XP

Every one of these numbers resets with the universe. Only the leaderboard entry survives a run.