Thanks for the explanation but the game is what it is, I fail to see how that is any different than regular play since the HP update. Reworking my own ships still I go through the same decisions over armor protection vs the added mass. While no one is setting an arbitrary mass limit on me there is still one since the power, thrusters, etc...all the systems have to be balanced against what I expect the total mass of the ship to be.It makes starmade into rock paper scissors.
You can either have 1 block of standard armor (0.15), 1.5 blocks of systems like power, thrust or shields (0.1), or 3 blocks of basic hull (0.05 mass), or 15 blocks of miscellaneous items like circuits (0.025 or 0.01 depending)...
So, obviously people are going to stock up on shields for that all around protection and ditch as much armor as they can, with maybe some basic included. That means people will also bring more Ion weapons. Then a few people will bring armor tanks anyways to mix it up a bit, and everyone will pretty much pop once the shields go down, like the old days when you had core drilling and really tiny ships.
People with lots of ion weapons will have advantage over people with primarily shields for defense, and people with more shields than armor will beat armor tanks because they have more blocks overall on their ships, and people who have armor tanks will beat people tailored to kill light shield ships.
Also, this will probably make close range knife fighting more of a thing than you see in normal games, and the fights will be quick and simple.
I have a feeling that we will see some teams with tailored ships that you would never see serverside because they would normally suck.
Now I understand there are differences because this is more like a joust than "regular" warfare, but you're making it sound like armor is not worth its weight (which is the conclusion I been coming to lately anyway). While I would ditch as many "extras" that make the ship enjoyable but don't add to it's battleworthiness for an event like this, I can't really see myself designing the ship much differently (granted I am of the form follows function camp). I would think much of what is learned in these events influences general community ship design heavily.