The March EVE Online Economic Report and What Happens When CCP Announces Industry Changes

What do industrialists do when you tell them that you’re going to change up production and expect the market to be chaos for months thereafter?  They build whatever they can manage right NOW.  It is time to look at the New Eden economy again.

EVE Online nerds harder

CCP released the monthly economic report for March 2021 this week.  The last week of March saw the announcement about a significant update to industry that is set to shake up production.  The end goals may be a more rational economy and the uncoupling of capital production from basic minerals, but the short term means uncertainty at the reaction was a production boom in some key regions.

Mar 2021 – Production vs Destruction vs Mined

You can see the red line, the production line on that graph, surging upwards as the month headed towards its close and the announcement hit.  Destruction was down a bit and mining was up some, but production took off, climbing from about 3 trillion ISK in value on the 25th to almost 6 trillion ISK by the 29th.

While the announcement came at the end of the month, March still ended up with noticeably more produced, the total value in the regional data climbing from 104 trillion ISK in February to 127 trillion ISK in March.  The top ten regions for production were:

1. The Forge – 29.5 trillion
2. Delve – 9.4 trillion
3. Lonetrek – 8.25 trillion
4. The Citadel – 7.33 trillion
5. Sinq Laison – 5.31 trillion
6. Vale of the Silent – 5 trillion
7. Domain – 4.92 trillion
8. Fade – 4.89 trillion
9. The Kalevala Expanse – 3.34 trillion
10. Placid – 2.79 trillion

While Delve was actually down a bit, The Forge, Lonetrek, and The Citadel, which all server the Jita trade hub, were all well up over last month’s numbers.  I expect that the uncertainty over what is to come will continue to drive production up as the early April numbers… there is some bleed over in the data we get… will continue to remain higher than before the announcement.

Destruction

Things continued to blow up in New Eden, and while we’re still down from the record numbers of December and January, the result of the struggles over the Keepstar in M2-XFE, destruction was up a bit from February, rising to 42.68 trillion ISK from 38.43 trillion ISK.  The top regions for destruction in March were:

1. Delve – 5.51 trillion
2. The Forge – 2.2 trillion
3. The Citadel – 2.17 trillion
4. Vale of the Silent – 1.72 trillion
5. Lonetrek – 1.57 trillion
6. Querious – 1.42 trillion
7. Heimatar – 1.41 trillion
8. Sinq Laison – 1.35 trillion
9. Metropolis – 1.2 trillion
10. Catch – 1.08 trillion

Delve, the locus of the war, remains at the top to the list, more than doubling the usual peacetime champion, The Forge.  The Vale of the Silent was up from February as Fraternity consolidated its conquest of the region and the eviction of the small holders who had previously occupied the region.

Querious and Catch were also on the list due to the war, the former being Brave’s new home and the latter being their old.

NPC Bounties and ISK Faucets

NPC commodities remained the top ISK faucet into New Eden again in March.

Mar 2021 – Faucet end of the chart

As usual, the wormhole commodities led the pack.

Mar 2021 – Top Commodity Items Over Time

That said, NPC bounties did see something of a rebound in March, ringing in at 30.61 trillion ISK, up 5 trillion ISK over February.

Mar 2021 – Top Sinks and Faucets Over Time

The top earning regions for NPC bounties remain in the northeast of null sec, well away from the war.

1. Vale of the Silent – 3.33 trillion (PandaFam)
2. The Kalevala Expanse – 1.26 trillion (PandaFam)
3. Tribute – 1.21 trillion (mixed small groups)
4. Pure Blind – 1.20 trillion (mixed small groups)
5. Insmother – 1.16 trillion (FI.RE Coalition)
6. Fountain – 1.00 trillion (Imperium)
7. Tenal – 983 billion (PandaFam)
8. Metropolis – 922 billion (Minmatar High Sec)
9. Perrigen Falls – 891 billion (PandaFam)
10. Oasa – 865 billion (PandaFam)

Vale of the Silent again figures high as part of Fraternity’s seizure of the region and subsequent effort to raise ADM levels and make some ISK.  One high sec region remains in the top ten again this month, either a monument to how much mission running goes on there or a reminder as to how far the null sec bounty levels have fallen since the nerfs.

Mining

Mineral prices resumed their climb in March after having seemed to hit a plateau in February. This trend will likely continue as the industry changes and the rush to produce ships and modules before then drains more of the mineral reserves.  Expect another all time high in April I suppose.

Mar 2021 – Economic Indices

The ore mined totaled up to 24.43 trillion ISK in value, up more than 5 trillion ISK over February.  The top ten regions for mining were:

1. Vale of the Silent – 2.06 trillion (PandaFam)
2. Metropolis – 1.37 trillion
3. The Forge – 1.34 trillion
4. Domain – 1.10 trillion
5. Sinq Laison – 1.09 trillion
6. Lonetrek – 908 billion
7. Everyshore – 805 billion
8. Heimatar – 718 billion
9. The Citadel 699 billion
10. Tash-Murkon – 675 billion

There is Vale of the Silent at the top of another chart, again a byproduct of the conquest of the region.  The past few months the list has been dedicated to high sec regions where semi-AFK Orcas prowl the asteroid belts chewing up rocks.  Fraternity put in some effort to top the list given the limited about of ore now available in null sec space.

Meanwhile, for those interested in the consumer price index line on that chart, Angry Mustache has gone through and calculated what it looks like when you remove the PLEX and related items that are holding the index down at a time when the mineral prices are continuing to rise. (The MER thread on Reddit this month actually has a bunch of back story info in it and is worth a read.)

Trade

As with production, trade saw a spike in activity, one that is no doubt also related to the planned industry changes.  Prices rose as people grabbed up supplies from the market, speculating on what might soon be in short supply, and there was a drive to buy minerals for production.  That sent the value of trade in New Eden to 670.58 trillion ISK in March, up from the 583 trillion ISK in transactions recorded in February.  The top regions for trade were:

1. The Forge – 472 trillion (Jita)
2. Domain – 60.64 trillion (Amarr)
3. Sinq Laison – 21.29 trillion (Dodixie)
4. Delve – 20.25 trillion (Imperium/PAPI)
5. Lonetrek – 14.89 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
6. Metropolis – 12.53 trillion
7. Heimatar – 10.94 trillion
8. Essence – 5.27 trillion (Gallente High Sec)
9. The Citadel – 4.92 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
10. Vale of the Silent – 4.22 trillion (PandaFam)

The Forge, home to Jita, dominated as expected, with 65 trillion ISK more in transactions.  But all the top regions were up.  And it should be no surprise I suppose that Vale of the Silent nosed its way into this top ten list as well.  With all that other economic activity there was no doubt some trade needed to support it.

So it goes.  I expect that we will find April to be even more volatile than March, and there is no telling what will happen when the industry changes actually hit.  The charts should be fun that month.  But we’ll have to wait and see.

As always, all the data and more charts are available for download from the dev blog.

Northward for Structure Defense

There was supposed to be a big USTZ op on Friday night, but it didn’t come off.

That was fine by me as I hadn’t been on Jabber for a couple of days so totally missed the build up.  But on the Fireside on Saturday The Mittani brought it up, apologized that it  didn’t happen, but assured us that an op would be coming up at 02:00 EVE time in order to defend timers on a couple of Fortizars up north that are part of the coalition power projection network.

The primary doctrine was to be the Sacrilege fleet, which was hyped a few times during the Fireside and in pings as the day went along, so it was probably not surprising that when 02:00 came around and the ping for the evenings fleets went out, that is the one that filled up almost immediately.

Asher was our FC and while the speed with which the fleet filled might not have been surprising, the fact that we were all in the right ships, with sufficient mainline DPS ships, boosters, and enough logi did seem to surprise him a bit.  It is a rare thing for everybody to show up on time with the right fit.  I guess if you ping at us enough about getting ready for a fleet some of us pay attention.

I opted to go with the logi wing for this op, refitting a Guardian I had in my hangar in order to meet the changes that the Surgical Strike update made necessary.  And naturally I went with the  Frontier Safeguarder SKIN from the Generosity Celebration event.  I collected the whole set for subcaps as well as a couple for force auxiliaries.

Bright and flashy

I like those SKINs even more than the Emergency Response set.  They are loud and colorful and the red and blue lights flash and it is a pretty obnoxious package, which is what I look for in a SKIN.

Meanwhile Asher was having to tell people there was no room in the fleet.  We were at 256 and he needed space to get scouts in with us.  People went off to the Munnin fleet, which I might have done as well, but I always fly with Asher when I can so I stuck with it.

We later found out that somebody in a Sacrilege joined the Munnin fleet but stayed on our coms and somehow made it through the whole evening without realizing they were messed up.  John Hartley, the Munnin FC said the Sac just carried on with them, sometimes on anchor, sometimes not, but never seemed to be fazed by their predicament.

The Munnins filled up too and a third fleet, this time Jackdaws, was formed up to handle the overflow, and then a bomber fleet for people who wanted to go that route.  This was a pretty big form up considering it was well outside of EUTZ and well into Saturday night… though I guess people aren’t really going out on Saturday night right now.

Asher was especially happy with the fleet composition as it only had a single Vigil frigate.  The Vigil is a newbie friendly option that lets people target paint to help the main line apply damage.  But you only need a few and there are times when vets pile in with them just to go along for the ride.  But when you have just one Vigil in the fleet, that pilot suddenly becomes special, their ship is the fleet morale ship, and ends up on the logi watchlist, and so it was with M4X HEADR00M.

Pilot of our morale Vigil

Once important issues like that were settled it was time to undock and start heading north.  Our destination was Pure Blind and we were off down the Eye of Terror network of Ansiblex jump gates.

To the Ansiblex

The route, at least to the Pure Blind boarder in Cloud Ring is generally a quick run… it is only 11 gates or so… until you start pushing about 700 pilots through it at the same time.  There were a lot of us jumping through together.

Gate activation for a fleet, each line representing a ship landing

And things got progressively worse as we moved along.  Delve is always active and so gets processing resources assigned to it that meant we only saw a little time dilation kicking in.  Through Fountain, a quieter region, it was more noticeable.  And then we hit Cloud Ring and we were clearly stressing the system.

Tidi hitting us hard

That is the game slowing down to 17% of normal speed for us.  We weren’t shooting anything, we were just using gates to travel.  But loading into a system is a heavy task and with three fleets going though at once.

But we pressed on, getting to the Keepstar on the boarder.

Sac fleet in warp

It was about then that information began to get passed along about the disposition of the enemy fleets.  Pandemic Horde had put together a Harpy fleet with about 100 pilots, while NCDot had wrestled together around 50 pilots for a Munnin fleet, which meant that the likelihood of there being a big fight was about nil.

At that point the fleets split up.

The Munnins went off and found a Naga fleet to wreck, then headed back home.  I never heard what the Jackdaws got up to, but word was that the bomber fleet managed to get itself wrecked shooting a structure.  And so it goes.

And the Sac fleet, we stood to and watched over the repair cycle of the Fortizars that had been reinforced.  We saw Horde in their Harpies come by a couple of times, but they didn’t want to close with us and were more than quick enough to stay out of our way.  We sat on a gate hoping to maybe catch them, but it wasn’t to be.

Sprawled about a gate in Pure Blind

At that point Asher sought to entertain us with story time in fleet.  He asked people to x-up in fleet chat if they met certain criteria for a miss-spent youth then called on people who did x-up to have them tell their story.

I thought this was going to be the time to go to the no-chatter channel, as the average person has trouble keeping stories of their life short and to the point.  My experience in life is that when somebody finally gets to the phrase, “to make a long story short…” it is far too late to hit any definition of the word “short.”

But Asher was a pretty good emcee for this, and kept people from getting too far into the weeds.  And we all learned about Jason Padgett, who became a mathematical savant after somebody beat him up.  Only one person ended up saying, “…to make a long story short…” at which point several people keyed up to say, “Too late!” as the tale had already rambled into the weeds.

The Forts repaired themselves and the hostiles didn’t look like they had much fight in them, so we flew off to reinforce a Pandemic Horde Astrahus, just to leave a calling card.  The Astrahus hadn’t even been fit yet, so we were able to knock it down through shield and armor.  Meanwhile, the “describe your crime” show went on.

After that we went over a couple of systems and shot a United Federation of Conifers Fortizar.  This had been fit, but nobody was home so we just put drones on it.  Then somebody from the UFC flew in to gun the Fort, so people who were paying attention pulled their drones.  Those who were asleep at the switch promptly lost their when the point defense system, the PDS, was switched on, wiping them all out.  So it was on to missiles to set the first timer.

Sacs firing away

Meanwhile the gunner started launching bombs at us, which woke logi up as we had to start repping people as they took damage.  I got  a good look at the logi wing around then, and was happy to see that my cap transfer buddies were both using the same SKIN I had chosen.

Cap buddies represent

Apparently we were shooting this because Brisc Rubal said on the Meta Show that he does not like the UFC, to the point that he has a coffee mug in support of his statement.  I guess they shoot at him or have some TISHU refugees or something.

Brisc, who will be running for CSM15 I hear

That kept us busy for a while, though at one point, just as we were done, M4X HEADR00M veered off and took a lot of damage from a bomb or the PDS or something got him.  It looked like the morale Vigil might go down.

Vigil in trouble!

However, he managed to survive by warping off.  At least I think he did.  I checked over on zKillboard and didn’t find a kill mail.

After that Asher warped us to one of the Guristas sites from The Hunt event, not knowing that you needed a key to get past it and had to be flying a destroyer or a frigate even if somebody had a key.

The Gate to nowhere

That lesson learned, we turned for home.  With just out fleet coming back we put less stain on CCP’s servers and did not invoke as much tidi as before.

Back home through Cloud Ring

Once you get through Cloud Ring it is just a few gates and you’re back home in Delve.

The last gate home

Overall the fleet lasted about three hours, which was kind of long.  We got two PAPs for it, which was good for those who need more.  And we even had the swarm DJ spinning for us, if you cared to tune him in. KarmaFleet has a regular Saturday Night Swarm op that usually includes him, but that had been cancelled in favor this.

It would have been better if we had gotten a fight, but it wasn’t too bad and the story time was amusing enough to keep us going.  And, of course, our structures were saved.  Op success.

Capital Ships Battle in VFK-IV – What Year is This?

In the ongoing tribulations for Guardians of the Galaxy in the north, a director of Slyce Alliance defected and flipped a Fortizar citadel in VFK-IV to the Imperium.  Nice to see that EN24 can still get a scoop these days.

Fortizar in VFK-IV

(Screen shot from this Reddit post)

For those not paying attention or with short memories, VFK-IV was once the capital of the CFC, the staging system from which operations were launched back when I joined TNT and went to null sec.

Me, in a Drake, at VFK-IV station in 2011

It was the scene of the “VFK Headshot” against Goons back in the summer of 2011 which led to the tightening up of the then somewhat loosely aligned DekCo into the unified CFC.

It was also the location that ended up as the oft repeated catch phrase “VFK by February” back when White Noise Alliance said that Deklein would be free of Goons by then.

And, come the Casino War, it was a location we did not bother to defend.  Instead, we holed up in the Quafe Company Warehouse in Saranen to concentrate our forces and try to resist the invasion by chipping away at the invaders.  Eventually we packed up our husbanded resources and took the long trail to Delve to setup shop and rebuild.

The old station at VFK-IV

We lost VFK-IV almost exactly two years ago.  That feels like a long time ago.

VFK-IV Station Today, good through June 5

And then I woke up this morning to find that not only did we suddenly have a Fortizar in our staging system of old, but that a battle had developed.  GotG was using fighters to reinforce the Fortizar and we dropped dreadnoughts on those and GotG escalated with their own dreads, and soon a full on battle was going.  The battle report still seems to be updating, but the numbers look to be in our favor so far.

Of course, I missed the whole thing, but I thought it was one of those moments worth noting in the ongoing and seemingly escalating conflict in the north.

CSM 11 Announced Xenuria Wins at Last

This morning as part of the EVE Online keynote at Fanfest, CCP Seagull announced the members of the 11th Council of Stellar Management.

Turnout was reported as low for the elections, which clearly benefited organized groups.

CSM 11 looks like this:

The 11th Council of Stellar Management

The winners, ordered as presented, save for two exceptions:

1. Mr Hyde113 – Pandemic Legion (Perm attendance seat)
2. Aryth – Goonswarm Federation (Perm attendance seat)
3. Steve Ronuken – Fuzzworks Enterprises
4. Sullen Decimus – The Bastion
5. The Judge – Circle-of-Two
6. Fafer – Northern Coalition.
7. NoobMan – Hard Knocks Citizens
8. Jin’Taan – Curatores Veritatis Alliance
9. Kyle Aparthos – TheDivision
10. Innominate – Goonswarm Federation
11. Bobmon – Pandemic Legion
12. Nashh Kadavr – Pandemic Legion
13. Xenuria – Goonswarm Federation
14. Gorski Car – Pandemic Legion

So there are your new representatives… provided you’re in a null sec bloc in most cases.  As I said, a low voter turnout meant organized blocs won big.

For those of you keeping track, that GSF suggested ballot I mentioned back when the elections started ended up picking six winners, though clearly The Judge is a bitter victory on that front.