CCP Offers Up Broken Monthly Economic Report for December

We got the EVE Online Monthly Economic Report for December last week and I waited a while to write about it because what they put out was simply and obviously wrong in places.  At least more so than usual, so I thought they might go back and fix the most egregious bit.  I am ever the optimist.

EVE Online nerds harder

But, since no update appears to be forthcoming, lets look at what they gave us and hope for better next time.

Destruction

The flaw in the December MER is the destruction numbers.  If you pull out the regional data for destruction, the top ten regions are:

1. Delve – 3.23 trillion
2. The Forge – 2.1 trillion
3. The Citadel – 1.77 trillion
4. Lonetrek – 1.68 trillion
5. Catch – 1.47 trillion
6. Metropolis – 1.38 trillion
7. Sinq Laison – 1.26 trillion
8. Domain – 1.04 trillion
9. Genesis – 832 billion
10. Black Rise – 753 billion

The total destruction according to the regional data was 35 trillion ISK.  That put Delve down by more than a trillion from November, with overall destruction down by trillion.

The problem is that the number for Delve… and thus the total number for all regions… was very far from the actual mark.

With the war on and the huge battle at M2-XFE that started on December 30th and ran until downtime at 11:00 UTC on December 31st, many of us were expecting to see a huge jump in the destruction numbers for the Delve regional data.  The battle report showed more than 20 trillion ISK destroyed in that first fight.

Battle Report Header

That seems like a big miss.

I sometimes get a bit pissy about CCP and the MER because the numbers from one chart and data set do not line up with numbers from another chart and data set.  It seems like a summer intern project to write a little unit test to validate the data being pulled.  And this month is no different, but at least this time around another data set shows that the regional data is bad, at least for Delve.  So I will bring up the Produced, Destroyed, Mined chart.

Dec 2020 – Produced vs Destroyed vs Mined

This tracks the daily data game wide, with the thick line being the 30 day moving average and the light lines being the actual daily totals.  You can see there, at the end of December, the daily number jumps up off the chart, which has a top range of 6 trillion ISK.  Likewise, the 30 day average for destruction is pulled up, exceeding production.

CCP provides the raw data for that chart in a .csv file, so anybody can see what the actual amounts are.  The total destruction in the data for December is 74.83 trillion ISK, and the value for just December 31st, which covers the primary portion of the battle before downtime, is 23.26 trillion ISK.  (The second battle is in the data already, as it leaks out into the current date when they pull the report, and that totals up to 15, 4 trillion ISK destroyed on January 3rd.)

Of course, the data for that chart isn’t wholly accurate as well as there are three days missing, December 3, 4, and 26.  Still, they reflect the reality of the situation more than the alternative.

So the regional stats are off by a good 40 trillion ISK total, and at least the amount of that battle report for just Delve.  So a more likely ranking is:

1. Delve – 26 trillion (estimated)
2. The Forge – 2.1 trillion
3. The Citadel – 1.77 trillion
4. Lonetrek – 1.68 trillion
5. Catch – 1.47 trillion
6. Metropolis – 1.38 trillion
7. Sinq Laison – 1.26 trillion
8. Domain – 1.04 trillion
9. Genesis – 832 billion
10. Black Rise – 753 billion

Anyway, here is to hoping they’ll set things right next month.

NPC Bounties

Moving on to NPC bounties, which were the big story last month, we see they are still way down.

Dec – and Faucets Over Time

The numbers began to crash when the ESS and the Dynamic Bounty System were introduced to the game in November.

Total bounties collect in November were 39.3 trillion, which was down from 55.9 trillion in October, the last full month without the new systems.  December, the first full month with the ESS and DBS changes saw that number tumble to 22.8 trillion ISK.

Even with the ESS payments, which amounted to 6.5 trillion ISK, that leaves the total at a little more than half of the value paid out in October.  This is a big hit to income.  The top regions for December were:

1. Oasa – 1.62 trillion (PandaFam)
2. Vale of the Silent – 1.19 trillion (mixed small groups)
3. The Kalevala Expanse – 1.02 trillion (PandaFam)
4. Perrigen Falls – 996 billion (PandaFam)
5. Insmother – 918 billion (Legacy)
6. Cobalt Edge – 753 billion (PandaFam)
7. Tenal – 739 billion (PandaFam)
8. Metropolis – 737 billion (High Sec)
9. Branch – 711 billion (PandaFam)
10. Fountain – 699 billion (Imperium)

Of note is that a high sec region has entered the top ten, meaning that NPC bounties collected by mission runners are now likely a significant portion of the remaining bounty total.  There are no Forsaken Hubs in Metropolis.

Outside of NPC bounties, the sinks and faucets for December looked like this:

Dec 2020 – Sinks and Faucets

Commodities, which are drops from NPCs in wormhole space, Abyssal Deadspace, and the December holiday event (and maybe the bonds from robbing an ESS in null sec) and sold back to NPCs, continue be the largest ISK faucet into the game, ringing in at 40.59 trillion ISK.

After that there is NPC bounties, which are now in close competition with incursion payouts.  And then there is insurance, which if you look at the first sinks and faucets chart, saw a spike at the end of December, no doubt related to the battle at M2-XFE.

Production

Turning to production, the regional data shows the following regions as the top of the list:

1. The Forge – 21 trillion (High Sec)
2. Delve – 7 trillion (Imperium)
3. Lonetrek – 6.94 trillion (High Sec)
4. Sinq Laison – 6.25 trillion (High Sec)
5. The Citadel – 5.73 trillion (High Sec)
6. Domain – 4.51 trillion (High Sec)
7. Tribute – 4.22 trillion (mixed small groups)
8. Esoteria – 3.73 trillion (Legacy)
9. Vale of the Silent – 3.64 trillion (mixed small groups)
10. Heimatar – 3.07 trillion (High Sec)

The Forge, and the high sec regions around it, which support the Jita market, remain strong.  Delve, home of the Imperium, led the production outside of high sec.  The war has kept production going.  Legacy production remained ongoing in Esoteria despite claims that they were set to abandon the region.  Oddly, two regions of small holders, Tribute and Vale of the Silent, made the top ten, but PandaFam in Oasa fell to 11th and off the list.

The total for production in the regional data was 107.84 trillion ISK, though since I’m double checking things this month, the production/destruction data only shows it at 74.83 trillion ISK.  However, that is missing three days.  I am not sure those three days would make up the gap, so it shows once again that the data can be questioned.

Trade

Then there is trade value, where the top regions were:

1. The Forge – 429 trillion (Jita)
2. Domain – 51 trillion (Amarr)
3. Sinq Laison – 20.6 trillion (Dodixie)
4. Lonetrek – 16.25 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
5. Delve – 16.21 trillion (War Zone)
6. Metropolis – 10.9 trillion (Hek)
7. Heimatar – 10.1 trillion (Rens)
8. Essence – 5.55 trillion (Gallente High Sec))
9. The Citadel – 5.34 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
10. Tash-Murkon – 3.65 trillion (Amarr High Sec)

Everything was about in the same zone as November, save for Delve, which was down about 6 trillion ISK.  That is odd because with both sides now based in Delve there ought to be more buying rather than less.

Mining

Finally, there is mining.  After seeming to plateau in November, mineral prices continued their climb skyward as CCP’s keeps the starvation economy plan in place.

Dec 2020 – Economic Indices

The October peak was an all time high point for mineral prices and now the spike continues.

Mining remained largely a high sec occupation, though Oasa in PandaFam territory climbed to the top of the list in December.

1. Oasa – 1.27 trillion
2. The Forge – 1.17 trillion
3. Metropolis – 1.04 trillion
4. Domain – 990 billion
5. Sinq Laison – 824 billion
6. Lonetrek – 751 billion
7. The Citadel – 617 billion
8. Tash-Murkon – 575 billion
9. Perrigen Falls – 568 billion
10. Everyshore – 559 billion

Aside from Oasa, which is up slightly, numbers are down in every region on that list.  Since the value of ore mined depends on the price, that appears to mean that a lot less mining went on in December, even in Oasa.  The total mined from the region data was 19.9 trillion in value, down from 23.7 trillion in November.

Since we’re skeptical of the regional data this month, I double checked it against the Produced/Destroyed/Mined data which, despite missing the three days indicated above, shows 19.8 trillion ISK value mined, down from 24.9 in November.  That is within the usual margin of error between the different data collection methods.

So it goes.

Related:

• The Nosy Gamer

The Million Dollar Battle Hangover

Some things are better read about after the fact rather than experienced live.

Or watched live.

The timer has come and gone and the Pandemic Horde Keepstar in 9-4RP2 still stands.

I was hoping that CCP would do a Dev Blog about the fight.  They might still I suppose.  But so far all they have is a promotional video using the battle to sell the game.

What the video says is technically correct, but it really doesn’t express the nature of the fight.

One thing I would like to see out of CCP is an official number for people in local for the battle.  CCP has mentioned the number “6,000,” which has been picked up by the press, but the video description says “over 6,000” and CCP said “more than 6,000” on Twitter.

Over 6000 @EveOnline players are currently fighting in 9-4RP2 over a vulnerable Keepstar Citadel. https://t.co/VXiUZv3zCF #tweetfleet

— CCP Fozzie (@CCP_Fozzie) January 23, 2018

On the INN stream I heard them calling out the number of people in local, 6,700 being the number I thought I heard, since somebody expressed a desire to see it go past 7,000 at that point, so I don’t think I mis-heard “5,700” on the stream but I’m not willing to go listen to the stream again (which Matterall has posted to Sound Cloud).  And shortly after that the system dumped over a thousand people, so maybe local was wrong, messed up by the stress on the server.

Anyway, an official number would be nice.  We know it beat the 5,337 number for the M-OEE8 Keepstar fight a little over a year ago, but where is the bar set today?

The INN stream itself, which I listened to at various points throughout the battle, was interesting.  Or, it was interesting to somebody who knew the game and some of the various alliance personalities.  Watching the stream was… less interesting, and doubly so if you knew nothing about the game, as it was mostly just colored brackets on the screen.

Orange defenders waiting for the battle, blue attackers in the distance

With about 20 minutes left to go before the Keepstar timer ended, the group on the stream was ready to declare the citadel saved.  The Imperium had jumped in a Nyx fleet and launched fighters to attack the Keepstar, but they were so far away and moving so slowly in TiDi that they were not going to get there in time to hit the structure.  A command destroyer group that was supposed to use their AOE microjump drives to speed the fighters along failed, leaving the fighters swimming on their own towards the Keepstar.

And when the defenders launched space superiority fighter… anti-fighter fighters… to take on the coming blob, things seemed lost for the attackers.

But the Imperium dropped in sub caps, a Jackdaw fleet and a Machariel fleet, to start hitting the Keepstar, feeding in new ships as losses in those fleets mounted, allowing the fighters to arrive.

The Keepstar structure started to get whittled away, and by the time it was down to 70% the discussion on the stream had flipped and was now talking about when the defenders would have to start pulling out.  It was estimated that they would need to start withdrawing supers by the 40% mark to keep them from being massacred when the defending Keepstar blew up, removing the protective cover.

Then the Imperium attack began to run out of steam.  The fighter force had been removed as a threat and the sub cap fleets were losing ships faster than they would be replaced.  I was home by about that point and saw the calls for Jackdaws and Machariels to form up in Delve to be flown to our staging system and jumped in.  When the Imperium firepower waned the repair timer, which runs in real time and is not affect by time dilation, began to count down again.  Soon the battle was over, the Keepstar being saved.

Despite getting home about an hour before that point, I never got in system during the conflict.  The login server wasn’t having it and I just got errors every five minutes or so until the game finally reset me and made me try again.

I’ve been on hold for more than 30 minutes here…

Eventually I got on.  There were about 2,500 people in the system at that point and time dilation was still pretty heavy.

11% actually means the server is working

The TiDi was lifting though, and was gone before I logged off about 30 minutes later.  I undocked from one of our Fortizars and surveyed the scene.  I cloaked up and warped around looking for looters or MTUs to shoot.

MTU pulling wrecks with the Keepstar in the background

People were being paranoid… and rightfully so… so MTUs didn’t get left hanging about for very long.  I did get a shot at a Coercer once I saw he was fully armed with salvage beams.

Coercer salvaging

However once I decloaked my Purifier caught the eye of a couple of other hostiles and I had to warp off after a few salvos.  Maybe I should have let them shoot me.  It would have gotten me home more quickly.  Instead I docked back up and called it a night.

Looking at a battle report, the Imperium lost about 1,200 ships and fighters totaling up to nearly $300 billion ISK.  There were a lot of Machariels on that list.  Meanwhile the defenders lot about 800 ships, but they were mostly small ships and fighters, so they didn’t even pass the 40 billion ISK mark.

A clear win for the defenders.

Of course, as with any battle that doesn’t live up to the hype, a lot of people seem to be unhappy and there is no end of people those infused with the wisdom of hindsight willing to tell people what everybody should have done.

There is a group that is mad at CCP because their servers can’t handle that many players, though anybody paying attention knew that this was going to be an issue.  It always has been.

There are people mad because the fight did not entertain sufficiently.  Somebody is always mad when Goons refused to suicide their titans by jumping them into a fight.

And then there are the people who hate when null sec gets any attention.

Some of the press, who eagerly snatched up the whole “million dollar battle” theme that was the brainchild of one person on Reddit, followed up with sad trombone posts about how the game let them down by failing to live up to that promise.

• PC Gamer – Why EVE Online’s ‘million dollar battle’ was a huge bust
• Polygon – Eve Online’s ‘million dollar’ battle came up a little short last night
• Games Radar – That big million dollar EVE Online war happened… and only cost about $10,000. What happened?
• Massively OP – EVE Online’s ‘million dollar battle’ ends up a $3300 bust
• IBT – ‘EVE Online’ Battle Cost: Virtual War Damages Valued At $500,000
• MMO Games – EVE Online’s ‘Million Dollar Battle’ Thwarted by Server Issues
• Vice News – 6,000 gamers just risked $1M in a massive space fight
• PC Games News – Eve Online’s $1 million battle has set a new record for players in a single system

I like that we can’t agree on the alleged cost of the battle.  Over at The Nosy Gamer there is a calculation as to how much a titan costs in real world money using the spurious Dollars to PLEX and back again method.  Nothing being simple, he has four answers.  My own back of the envelope math says that, pulling from those headlines above, $3,000 is bit low, $10,000 is probably too high, and half a million is clearly from some other dimension of reality.  But it doesn’t matter anyway since no matter what answer you get, it was all virtual goods in the end, which we know lack any real world value.

And then there is the review of the game mechanics involved.  There is an interesting thread on Reddit, written by one of the defender, exploring how the balance favors the defenders in such battles.  That should actually make the Imperium happy, what with our “a Keepstar in every system, a Fortizar on every gate” plan.

Over at INN Arrendis explored the mechanics of the battle compared to B-R5RB and speculated as to how things could be mad better.  Maybe CCP will look into that.  They seem to like the attention such big battles bring to the game, so it would be good if they were not hamstrung by the mechanics when players show up in huge numbers.

A few people gave props to the Imperium for actually leaving fortress Delve to try to take down the Keepstar.  But not many.  As ever, Goons are bullies when they attack anybody and cowards when they don’t.  CCP says in their video that the “war is not over,” but I suspect that was the last fight over that particular Keepstar unless somebody has a plan that won’t collapse when more than six thousand capsuleers show up.  Instead, convoys of Imperium pilots have been shuttling they ships home since the battle.  We’ll see if GSOL slips in and takes down the Fortizars.  That’ll be the sign we’re not coming back.

Anyway, we all seem to prefer the static state of null sec currently, where we hunt each others ratters and miners but not much else, a scenario that has never dislodged anybody from their sovereignty ever.  I guess that meets the twin goals of safety and fun in some way.

Where the Hell is that EverQuest Successor Already?

A staple of MMO blogging is going on about the good old days, and no days were gooder and older at the same time than classic EverQuest.

I will stop for a second and define “classic” EverQuest as a time somewhere between late beta and the final days of the Planes of Power expansion.  Legacy of Ykesha changed the world too much in my opinion.  But if you’re down with Frogloks, the era was certainly dead with Lost Dungeons of Norrath, which made instanced dungeons a thing.

And in that time frame, the classic era, EverQuest was at its most popular, as millions of players passed through the game and as many as 550,000 were subscribed at once.  Most popular has to mean best product, right?  That number is how we know that we aren’t just suffering from selective memory that is editing out the bad bits.

So there have been calls to return to or recreate that era… probably since that era… to bring back all sorts of things like the harsh death penalty, simple classes, spells every five levels, mandatory grouping, open world dungeons, steep level curves, travel time, contested raiding, mobs that chase you right to the zone line, and probably dozens more that I cannot think of at the moment.

And yet, despite that, SOE quite deliberately moved away from that list.  It was as though some old school fans made a list of things that made the game great… that list I just started on myself… and the company said, “You like that?  Well, it has to go then!”  So we got instancing, easier levels, solo quests, a light death penalty, mercenaries, the Plane of Knowledge, and some of the most awkward looking mounts ever to grace a video game.

The time seemed ripe for a successor, somebody to get back the essential hardships that molded a generation of MMO gamers.  But who would take on this task?

Mark Jacobs had EverQuest in mind when he said he wanted to take the “suck” out of MMOs.  But his game, Dark Age of Camelot, was really about realm vs. realm combat and not the Diku raiding and level grind on which EverQuest was built.  So I don’t think we can count that.

SOE themselves offered up EverQuest II, dreaming of it being the successor.  But EQII was build on a base of ideas that seemed to largely revolve reducing customer calls and quieting a few persistent complainers on the forums.  Having played EQ and EQII at launch, I gave my impression of what SOE’s “lessons learned” must have included.  EQII was many things, but it was not a successor to EQ.

Blizzard, of course, brought out World of Warcraft shortly after EQII, and it has dominated ever since.  Openly based on EQ, it sought to make a kinder, gentler, and more colorful version of the game.  It embraced a solo, no-fail, low penalty path through the game, the sort of attributes we now derisively ascribe to millennials.  That couldn’t have possibly been the real successor, and even if it was, they screwed it all up.

Then there was Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the Brad McQuaid attempt to get back to all that was good and right about MMOs, the REAL sequel to EverQuest.  While people blame poor execution on its failure to stick with anything beyond a tiny audience… and, at the time, making MMOs was hard and you had to do all the grunt work yourself… but I still feel he strayed from the true path.  I mean, how many of the fans of the game would go on about how “pretty” the game was to look at?  When was “pretty” ever an aspect of EverQuest, unless the word was paired up with things like, “ugly,” “awkward,” “dated,” or “strange?”

Oh, the textures!  Classic EverQuest!

And he couldn’t leave well enough alone when it came to the 1999 formula and had to add new things like diplomacy.  So, in the end, not really a successor, as it never attracted enough of those it was alleged to be for.

Meanwhile, in 2006 SOE itself decided to try to farm this obsession for classic servers and rolled up what they called a “progression” server.  It was popular, so popular that the had to roll up a second one.  The two servers, The Combine and The Sleeper launched in June of 2006 and opened up later expansions as the raid bosses for the current expansion were defeated.  A flawed interpretation of 1999, and driven at the pace of raiders who would defeat bosses in short order, it became a staple of the game after free to play, when a subscription was required to wallow in the nostalgia provided.  To this day the servers remain popular, with the latest one, Phinigel, showing high loads on the server status page at even odd hours of the day.

Who is playing at 5am PST?

While Daybreak has finally realized the potential of such servers… the first couple of attempts were launched with fanfare and then largely ignored by the community team… and while they do hint at an untapped desire for such an old school experience… are not really successors in any sense of the word.  Also, the experience they offer is tainted by things that did not exists back in 1999, like crude maps and a quest log.

But for a long time… over a decade really… that was pretty much the only option available for somebody seeking the old school experience.  By 2006 WoW had fully dominated the market, and who wanted to knock-off an MMO that peaked at 550K subs when there was one driving to 10 million subscribers world wide they could blatantly copy.

It took the death of the big budget MMO (Star Wars: The Old Republic implosion), the death of the subscription-only MMO (The Elder Scrolls Online or WildStar, take your pick), and the cancellation of any future plans for Norrath (EverQuest Next gets cancelled) to really get to a point where the industry could even consider not copying WoW and reflect on the origins of the genre and where it first really succeeded.  Even Blizzard is having to acknowledge that their “good old days” are not today, but at some point in the past with the whole Nostalrius thing.

So we have entered the era of the niche revival MMO.  We have Camelot Unchained seeking to relive Dark Age of Camelot in some way, Shroud of the Avatar as some sort of 3D vision of the Ultima series, Crowfall… um… doing whatever it is doing, and Project: Gorgon just getting weird, because why not!

And in this time, it seems like somebody could go back and copy the 1996 Sojourn MUD/TorilMUD flavor of the classic DikuMUD mechanics and make another grouping and level focused MMO in Unity pretty easily.

Yes, I know we already have Project 1999, but having to be able to find a copy of EverQuest Titanium seems like a pretty high bar for entry in 2017.  And then there is Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, Brad McQuaid’s next run at an EverQuest successor.  But I fear that he will be tempted to stray off the true path yet again.

Isn’t there somebody else out there that could rebuild a vision 1999 for us?

I mean, unless this whole nostalgia thing is just bullshit and the last 18 years of the MMO market has actually reflected what most players really want.  In which case, never mind.