Eve Vegas had a number of fascinating talks on the present and future of our favourite space game. One of those talks was by CCP Quant, who went over the economy of New Eden. CCP Quant has since expanded that talk into a developer blog which was posted last week, and yes, he included glorious graphs.
The first topic of discussion he went over was tackling the narrative that “Eve is dying”. While Quant noted that the number of players on at the same time (Peak Concurrent Players, or PCU) has gone down, this is only one metric of measuring the amount the game is played. He then revealed that production has stayed relatively stable, along with destruction. This is expected to change when new changes hit and settle in. Players are, overall, becoming more productive in Eve.
Interestingly, of all the player actions tracked and mentioned in the blog, courier contacts had the lowest player participation — just 1.1% of all players on a given, non-specific day.
Next, he went over the production value of all regions in the game. Not surprisingly, the total value of The Forge, home of Jita, far outpaces the markets of all other regions. However, regions such as Deklein, home of Goonswarm Federation and the beating heart of the Imperium, actually have more production than Sinq Laison, one of the more popular regions of high sec to buy and sell. The least productive region in terms of raw ISK is Outer Ring, with a mere 20 billion ISK of goods produced in September. Despite being the home of the NPC corporation responsible for mining barges, Outer Ring also produced the second least amount of mineral wealth in September.
Amusingly, Quant noted that the fourth greatest importer of Exotic Dancers, Female, was a little wormhole region called E-R00024. “Those of us who have been in W-Space know how lonely things can get there,” said Quant. Wormhole regions also happen to have many people importing Exotic Dancers, Male as well.
Quant also examined how much ISK that is removed and added to the economy of New Eden, as well as looking at the total available money supply. While looking at this, Quant also found that ISK is becoming more stagnant, meaning that players are saving ISK more and more. And this trend is increasing.
The last major topic to be tackled was inflation. CCP tracks this through measuring the difference in several indexes month to month, and judging from the chart, it is a mess. Plenty of spikes and dips cover the graph, with most of these changes timed with the release of expansions. The price of minerals was also discussed, along with their production. While minerals are a huge focus, planetary commodities are an often overlooked part of the economy. In fact, planetary commodities became the primary component of the primary producer index for two years after 2005, after which moon materials became the primary components.
Finally, it was revealed that CCP will be doing these graphs monthly, letting players get a glimpse of the in-game economy from the dev team. It may even be the case that this information will make its way into the game itself, though this is purely speculation on the part of CCP Quant at this time.
While none of the insights offered into the economy of New Eden are likely to cause any shifts in how people behave, if you have ever been curious about how Eve’s living world works behind the scenes, these economics blogs will be something to keep an eye on.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Vos.
