I was a little worried on Saturday.  EVE University was doing an update to their wiki and my gut response to that was a deeply felt “please don’t break anything.”  It is one of the EVE Online community resources I lean on regularly and its departure would be missed.

A core of the New Eden community

Also, it would leave a ton of dead links on my site, which is what happened when CCP shut down the game wiki they were running.

Fortunately, not too long later, there was a message saying that the update was a success.  The wiki carries on.

Op success!

I should go donate some money at their Patreon.  I probably won’t, but in the words of Todd Rosenberg, the fact that I seriously considered doing so will make me feel better about myself. (I bring him up because I found an Odd Todd sweatshirt in a drawer and I had to sit and think about which economic downturn and layoffs that was from.

Shout out if you have any memories of this…

It was the Dot Com crash of 2001, which was like four Wall Street induced economic crises ago by my count.  Welcome to capitalism!)

As usual, I am off on a tangent, so back to the main thread here.

The Equinox expansion brought a host of new things, including new skills to learn, which meant that I was at least momentarily interested keeping an eye on my training queue.  I remember a time when that was almost an obsession.  In the days before the training queue you had to keep an eye on EVEMon to make sure you knew when to log in and start another skill because time subscribed without a skill training was time UTTERLY WASTED!

Old hands will remember being admonished to start training a long skill the day before an expansion as we never know how long the downtime would be or if CCP would do something wrong, like delete your boot.ini file.  (And no, I am never letting go of that bit of ancient history.)

Things are better now, but I do still feel a bit of the old obsession to stare at some utility while not logged into the game to see exactly where current skill training stands.

This is especially dumb because my currently training skill is Jump Portal Generation V, which I am a good 68 days from learning as of when this post goes live.

The top of my skill queue currently

I want that skill because I need it to do the carrier conduit jump and I want to have that capability.  I have a carrier, a twelve year old Archon that I bought back when we lived up in Delve and have never once used in combat to my recollection.  That is largely because nobody wants a carrier in the fleet when every capital pilot has a super carrier and because I can never remember how to use fighters.

Seriously, I’ve been through three Imperium capital training ops on how to use fighters and I know how to used them when the class is done, then I don’t use fighters at all and six months later when I think about it I have totally forgotten how to use them.

Odds are I’ll never use it, or if I am in a situation where a fleet needs somebody to do this, there will be two dozen others ready to go who also know how to use fighters.  But maybe, some day, Asher will need somebody in some set of circumstances and I’ll be the only one at hand who can manage it.  Be prepared.

So I want to be able to bring up my training queue and stare at it, all the better to make the training go faster.

But what can I stare at?

I mean, we used to have an official app from CCP, the EVE Portal Companion App, which showed up back in 2019.

EVE Portal App

I was not a fan, the app’s primary purposes seeming to be allowing PLEX trading.  But I had to admit that it did have some utility, including the ability to manage your training queue offline.

And I still have the app on my phone… the way I still have Harry Potter: Wizards Unite… because I am that kind of person.  But tapping on it gets me nothing because CCP gave up on the app last November.

So no joy there.

But the EVE Online community provides!  There must be some app out there I can use.

Except, there really aren’t that many other options.

There is the Neocom II app on iOS, the author of which lives in Belarus and went silent after the  anti-Lukashenko protests after the last election there, so I was told.

This version is made with moon goo

As such, the Neocom II app, while a fine app and well worth the money I spent on it, has been slowly decaying as EVE gets updated.  As such, no new skills show up in the skill queue in the app now and any sales transaction for a new item causes an error in the app.

But at least Jump Portal Generation is an old skill, so it appears in the app allowing me to stare at its progress on the couch, in bed, at the kitchen table, or any number of other household locations.  Except, it is wrong.  Look at what it tells me.

Things are thirteen days faster on the Neocom II app!

For whatever reason… CCP no doubt made some change with Equinox… the training progress in the app is somewhat more optimistic than what the in-game queue, pictured up the page, is telling me by nearly 13 days.  Also, you can see the Upwell skills simply don’t show up the way they do in game.

Anyway, that seems to leave Neocom II out.  I’ll still watch it to keep an eye on my PI and a few other things, but another aspect of it is now broken.

So my next stop is EVEMon.  Good old reliable EVEMon, which has been around since just after I started playing EVE Online.

I mean, it is past its prime.  It hasn’t been the same since Battle Clinic, which used to host its development page, went away back in 2016.  But it gets updates now and then, though where it lives can be a chore to find.  I think the link in the about page of the app is wrong, but the links in the EVEMon thread on the forums still seems good.

So how is that doing?  Well, on the bright side, it at least puts in placeholders for the skills it doesn’t know about.

My skill queue in EVEMon

On the down side, it seems to have the same problem with the training time for Jump Portal Generation V… though the first of the Unknown Skills seems to have the correct training time for the skill listed.  That seems odd, but at least I can see it somewhere I suppose.

Like I said, EVEMon does get updates now and then… and they even alert you and allow you to download and install them directly from the app… but there isn’t a lot of news going on that front.  The last update I see was in 2021, which doesn’t give one much hope.

It could get an update I suppose… or it might never get one.  So it goes.

I fished around a bit more and found EVE Skillplan.net, which is better in that it does get the time for the one skill correct, but then doesn’t acknowledge any of the new skills and it is about 6 million skill points shy of being accurate for my total skill points… which, now that I mention it, so is EVEMon… pegging me at 258 million SP when I am close to 265 million. It also doesn’t look like the site has been updated for a while, and his ISK tip jar has received zero ISK this month.

So I am feeling that gap in the EVE Online community that supports the game with the news and utilities and information that CCP has been consistently unable to supply on its own for the last 21 years.

This is the pain of depending on your customers to essentially do things for free.  When they are done with your game anything they built tends to fall apart.

And that’s when I start worrying about things like the EVE Uni Wiki and DOTLAN EVE Maps and zKillboard, all of which support the community for a few donations now and then but mostly out of the goodness of their collective hearts and their passion for the game.

It feels like it is getting a little late in the season to kick off the events that will lead to the twentieth Alliance Tournament.  I mean last year things were already in motion in April, though the final events were in August, while this year the actual tournament will be at the end of October, so perhaps the timing is fine.  It just feels off.

All of which is an awkward intro to the fact that CCP has announced the timeline for Alliance Tournament XX.

Alliance Tournament XX is coming!

And the first date on the list, pre-season and signups for Thunderdome server access starts today and team registrations close on Friday, July 5th, less than two weeks from now.

This year the tournament will be sponsored by CONCORD so you can expect a more law & order theme I suppose and the yet to be announced prize ships could be variations on their hulls I suppose.  What would an AT prize ship based on the Monitor look like?  I mean, it features in the teaser trailer, right?

This also means that the Marshal, Enforcer, and Pacifier will be allowed in the tournament this year, probably with enticing point values to make them more attractive.  Also, the new Upwell ships will be available if you have some sort of hauler based cunning plan in mind I guess.

CCP is changing the point system, giving each team 200 points to spend, double the 100 point system used previously.  Ship values will be scaled up to match this new system, but there will be space for more granularity between hull types.

CCP is also going to host the tournament broadcasts back in Iceland this year which means that travel plans and short notice will probably make it awkward to get as many presenters.  We shall see.

Full details for the tournament will be released on June 27th, the far end of this week.  But yesterday’s dev blog about it does have the planned timeline of events:

• 22 June – Pre-season begins & signups for Thunderdome access open
• 27 June – Rules announced, team registrations open, Thunderdome opens
• 28 June – Recruitment for commentators/analysts begins
• 5 July – Team registrations close
• 9 July – Team roster (and mercenary) submissions open
• 19 July – Feeder tournament format announcement & team draw
• 1 August – Roster (and mercenary) lock concludes (ad submission deadline for the Feeders)
• 24 & 25 August – Feeders tournament broadcast weekend 1
• 31 August & 1 September – Feeder tournament broadcast weekend 2
• 4 September – Post feeder roster lock begins
• 17 September – Post feeder roster lock concludes & flagship submissions begin
• 24 September – Flagship lock deadline (ad submission deadline for the main tournament)
• 19 & 20 October – Alliance Tournament XX weekend 1
• 26 & 27 October – Alliance Tournament XX weekend 2

That is the plan.  CCP is also encouraging people to use the AT channels on their Discord server to look for teams or keep up to date.  You can find the EVE Online Discord server here.

Related:

• CCP – Announcing Alliance Tournament XX!

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

The April Monthly Economic Report for EVE Online landed this week, so it is time to dive into that once more.

EVE Online nerds harder

As usual, I am going to focus mostly on destruction. You can find things about the general New Eden economy here:

• CCP – April 2024 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – April 2024 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – April 2024 MER Thread
• TNG –  April 2024 Activity In EVE Online
• TNG – A Look At The April 2024 Active ISK Delta

Overall Summary

With April we’re back to a 30 day month, so one might expect something of a drop in the total given that EVE Online players had 24 fewer hours to explode things.  But you would be wrong.  They managed to blow up 501,859 ships, structures, and capsules, a nearly 8K uptick from the 493,867 that went up in March.

That comes out to 16,728 losses per day in April, also a noticeable uptick over the 15,931 losses per day in March.  That is nearly 800 more things exploding every single day, though we’ll get to why that might not be as significant as the high level numbers might indicate… ans the come down starts when we get to ISK.

For ISK value a total of 42.48 trillion ISK was recorded as destroyed in April, down from 46.19 trillion in March, with the average ISK loss per day in April running at 1,415 billion ISK per day, down from 1,490 billion ISK per day the previous month.

That sank the average cost per loss, another metric in my spreadsheet, from 93.53 million ISK per loss to 84.64 million ISK per loss.

How did this happen?  I’ll throw a meme out for it and we’ll get into the details later.

It is an old meme, but it checks out

Okay, we’re now four months into the year and we’re now hitting a point where somebody has wrecked my pet theory that losses per day is a reasonable indicator of player activity in New Eden.  Ideally, my chart should correspond in some way to Jester’s daily rolling average chart.

Average Daily EVE Online Players – April 2024 Edition

Compare that to my average losses per day chart.

Average losses per Day – April 2024 Edition

At first glance the 2024 line appears to be following Jester’s 2024 line.  But his chart is a 30 day rolling average so it is still influenced by March numbers.  It won’t turn… or stay flat or dip a bit… until the May chart comes out.

Finally, for this section, there is the losses per day chart, which I usually trot our as a demonstration of the normal ebb and flow of New Eden destruction, peaking on weekends and dipping mid week, with ISK loss and hull count moving together.  But this month that last bit seems set to mock me.

April 2024 – Losses per day

Some very expensive ships were lost around the 5th of the month, as we see ISK losses spiking well above the loss count, while on the 22nd of the month the loss count spikes without a corresponding spike in ISK.  I refer you to the meme above for that, but I’ll have data to follow up on that.

Top 20 Most Frequent Losses by Class and Hull

Once more we kick off with the raw losses for the top categories.

Not for the last time in this post I am going to say something about shuttles.  Generally speaking, shuttles are in third place most months, behind the ever at the top capsules and the perennial second place entry, frigates as a class.  Last month, for example, shuttles rang in at 9.22% of the month’s total losses.  This month they surpassed 15%.

Hulls Lost only Once This Month

Once again I have filtered out all of the POS towers and modules… POS kills continue… and fighter squadrons and other odd and uninteresting… to me at least… kills to get to the more interesting stuff, with links to the kill on zKillboard… when possible.

We have some AT ships on the list this month, starting with the Cybele, an ATXIX reward ship, and only the second one recorded as lost, and the Laelaps, an ATXVI ship, which perished up in Vale of the Silent.

The Miasmos hulls, Amastris and Quafe Ultra editions, are hold overs from the Odyssey expansion.  The Amastris edition did not make it to zKillboard.  Somebody post that kill please.

The others on the list are a bit more commonplace, though the Komodo, the Guristas faction titan, is notable for its expense.  And the Syndicate Mobile Large War Disruptor… I haven’t seen one of those on the list before.  Over at zKillboard it records the last loss back in 2021.

Top 20 Total ISK Lost by Hull Type

Looking into that top hulls that made up the ISK losses in April.

Capsules, as always, top the list through sheer volume, even at a paltry average of 27.79 million ISK per loss.

This is becoming very much a “usual suspects” sort of chart every month.  Fortizar losses were up almost 50% over March, when 40 were blown up.  Dreads don’t make up much of the total, given the clash that happened in Abhazon in April… though I suspect those numbers will pop up a bit next time as there was a return clash there just this past week.

And I suppose it is a good thing that Capsuleer Day has come around again to replenish the Praxis supplies, as they keep blowing up at a substantial rate for a battleship.

Top 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

The regions where losses were happening most.

Pochven continues to blow up the ISK chart.  I wish I had some direct insight into that.

Top 20 Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

Diving a little deeper into losses by location.

On the ISK side of the chart we can see the effects of the struggle over the Imperium Fortizar in Ahbazon, as losses there were 50% above perennial champion Jita.

Meanwhile, at the top of the count side of the chart is Uitra and whatever shuttle exploit has been going on there for months and months.

Once again it tops the total kill in a system list.  Here are the ships lost in Uitra in April.  As usual, shuttles dominate, with 22,626 destroyed in the system, almost one third of all shuttles destroyed in New Eden in April.

However, in Black Rise, the system of Iwisoda emerged as a new locus of shuttle destruction in April.   Is the Uitra scam… or whatever it is… expanding?  Oh no, this is something completely different.

Here are the ship loss totals for Iwisoda in April broken out by hull.

That is a good 15,640 shuttles destroyed, about 20% of the shuttles lost in New Eden in April.  So the two systems together fall just shy of accounting for half the shuttles in April, ringing in at 49.82% of the total.

In Uitra though, the shuttle losses, if you look over at DOTLAN EVE Maps, are spread out pretty evenly across the month.  I Iwisoda, everything happened in a very short span of time, around which there was very little activity.

The destruction chart for Iwisoda – Apr 21 through 24

What apparently happened was that Snuffed Out, making mischief in low sec as usual, decided to fiddle somebody’s kill board by putting up a Raitaru, delivering 15,640 shuttles to that individual, then blowing up the Raitaru while it was in a state where asset safety would not engage.  That deposited all those shuttles out into space where they destroyed them.  The kills count against the person to whom they were delivered.

Now, the killdump.csv file, CCP’s official output of losses that comes with the MER, does not include individual pilot data.  Corps and alliances are all you get.  So with that data I could only tell you that Stay Frosty lost 15,640 shuttles in Iwisoda, eclipsing any of the regulars in Uitra by a fair margin.

However, I observed the goings on over on Twitter where Rixx Javix, CEO of Stay Frosty, spent several days posting cat pictures and telling people he was totally not bothered by some in-game incident.  Then he wrote a blog post about it where he wanted this “loop-hole” addressed.  You can judge for yourself whether it really bothered him or not.  I certainly cannot speak to his state of mind.

But yes, if you go to the Iwisoda page over on zKillboard currently, there are bunch of shuttle losses with his name on them, with Snuffed Out as the killer.  The system is otherwise not very active, so those will be there for a while.

A sample from the Iwisoda kills

They are all flagged as “padding” now, so they do not affect his kill board.  I suspect that this is somehow related to why the corps in Uitra don’t go all in on destruction, though I still haven’t figured out their game and how it benefits them.

Anyway, you can totally see that spike in losses on my kills per day chart up at the top, where losses spike while ISK is actually down.

Meanwhile, that “loop-hole” has been around for ages and I have seen it used before.  I first documented it here with the Fort Knocks Keepstar kill in December 2018, when somebody delivered a ton of Bantam frigates to Doomchincilla which all popped up on his zKillboad totals.

The PL killboard sullied with all those frigates

The “loop-hole” in question was put in place to stop a different sort of abuse.  When citadels came into the game people would create courier contracts that would send people to structures where they had no access, so they could not complete the contracts… and sometimes got ganked for the effort.  So CCP created a delivery mechanic to solve that, which assigned ownership to the recipient of the delivery, something that has been abused now and then ever since.

All of which I guess shows that a few dedicated individuals can mess with the destruction stats by blowing up shuttles… messing up my average kills per day metric by basically exploding about 30K more shuttles than expected (the March total was 45,547 while April saw 76,798 shuttles pop) while other ship class losses, such as capsules and frigate, were actually down for the month.

Systems with Just One Recorded Loss

We got a story out of the data this month, so a less dull post than usual I guess.  But in digging through the system level data I was a bit surprised to see how many systems recorded just ONE LOSS in the month of April.

I mean, there are a lot of systems in New Eden, and 7,486 saw at least something blow up.  I suspect there is a range of systems out there were no ships blew up, but they don’t make the data set.

So just to make this post super extra long, here are the 392 systems where exactly one ship was recorded lost by CCP… though this data does not 100% agree with what appears on zKillboard.

We shall see what the May stats will bring.

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

The April Monthly Economic Report for EVE Online landed this week, so it is time to dive into that once more.

EVE Online nerds harder

As usual, I am going to focus mostly on destruction. You can find things about the general New Eden economy here:

• CCP – April 2024 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – April 2024 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – April 2024 MER Thread
• TNG –  April 2024 Activity In EVE Online
• TNG – A Look At The April 2024 Active ISK Delta

Overall Summary

With April we’re back to a 30 day month, so one might expect something of a drop in the total given that EVE Online players had 24 fewer hours to explode things.  But you would be wrong.  They managed to blow up 501,859 ships, structures, and capsules, a nearly 8K uptick from the 493,867 that went up in March.

That comes out to 16,728 losses per day in April, also a noticeable uptick over the 15,931 losses per day in March.  That is nearly 800 more things exploding every single day, though we’ll get to why that might not be as significant as the high level numbers might indicate… ans the come down starts when we get to ISK.

For ISK value a total of 42.48 trillion ISK was recorded as destroyed in April, down from 46.19 trillion in March, with the average ISK loss per day in April running at 1,415 billion ISK per day, down from 1,490 billion ISK per day the previous month.

That sank the average cost per loss, another metric in my spreadsheet, from 93.53 million ISK per loss to 84.64 million ISK per loss.

How did this happen?  I’ll throw a meme out for it and we’ll get into the details later.

It is an old meme, but it checks out

Okay, we’re now four months into the year and we’re now hitting a point where somebody has wrecked my pet theory that losses per day is a reasonable indicator of player activity in New Eden.  Ideally, my chart should correspond in some way to Jester’s daily rolling average chart.

Average Daily EVE Online Players – April 2024 Edition

Compare that to my average losses per day chart.

Average losses per Day – April 2024 Edition

At first glance the 2024 line appears to be following Jester’s 2024 line.  But his chart is a 30 day rolling average so it is still influenced by March numbers.  It won’t turn… or stay flat or dip a bit… until the May chart comes out.

Finally, for this section, there is the losses per day chart, which I usually trot our as a demonstration of the normal ebb and flow of New Eden destruction, peaking on weekends and dipping mid week, with ISK loss and hull count moving together.  But this month that last bit seems set to mock me.

April 2024 – Losses per day

Some very expensive ships were lost around the 5th of the month, as we see ISK losses spiking well above the loss count, while on the 22nd of the month the loss count spikes without a corresponding spike in ISK.  I refer you to the meme above for that, but I’ll have data to follow up on that.

Top 20 Most Frequent Losses by Class and Hull

Once more we kick off with the raw losses for the top categories.

Not for the last time in this post I am going to say something about shuttles.  Generally speaking, shuttles are in third place most months, behind the ever at the top capsules and the perennial second place entry, frigates as a class.  Last month, for example, shuttles rang in at 9.22% of the month’s total losses.  This month they surpassed 15%.

Hulls Lost only Once This Month

Once again I have filtered out all of the POS towers and modules… POS kills continue… and fighter squadrons and other odd and uninteresting… to me at least… kills to get to the more interesting stuff, with links to the kill on zKillboard… when possible.

We have some AT ships on the list this month, starting with the Cybele, an ATXIX reward ship, and only the second one recorded as lost, and the Laelaps, an ATXVI ship, which perished up in Vale of the Silent.

The Miasmos hulls, Amastris and Quafe Ultra editions, are hold overs from the Odyssey expansion.  The Amastris edition did not make it to zKillboard.  Somebody post that kill please.

The others on the list are a bit more commonplace, though the Komodo, the Guristas faction titan, is notable for its expense.  And the Syndicate Mobile Large War Disruptor… I haven’t seen one of those on the list before.  Over at zKillboard it records the last loss back in 2021.

Top 20 Total ISK Lost by Hull Type

Looking into that top hulls that made up the ISK losses in April.

Capsules, as always, top the list through sheer volume, even at a paltry average of 27.79 million ISK per loss.

This is becoming very much a “usual suspects” sort of chart every month.  Fortizar losses were up almost 50% over March, when 40 were blown up.  Dreads don’t make up much of the total, given the clash that happened in Abhazon in April… though I suspect those numbers will pop up a bit next time as there was a return clash there just this past week.

And I suppose it is a good thing that Capsuleer Day has come around again to replenish the Praxis supplies, as they keep blowing up at a substantial rate for a battleship.

Top 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

The regions where losses were happening most.

Pochven continues to blow up the ISK chart.  I wish I had some direct insight into that.

Top 20 Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

Diving a little deeper into losses by location.

On the ISK side of the chart we can see the effects of the struggle over the Imperium Fortizar in Ahbazon, as losses there were 50% above perennial champion Jita.

Meanwhile, at the top of the count side of the chart is Uitra and whatever shuttle exploit has been going on there for months and months.

Once again it tops the total kill in a system list.  Here are the ships lost in Uitra in April.  As usual, shuttles dominate, with 22,626 destroyed in the system, almost one third of all shuttles destroyed in New Eden in April.

However, in Black Rise, the system of Iwisoda emerged as a new locus of shuttle destruction in April.   Is the Uitra scam… or whatever it is… expanding?  Oh no, this is something completely different.

Here are the ship loss totals for Iwisoda in April broken out by hull.

That is a good 15,640 shuttles destroyed, about 20% of the shuttles lost in New Eden in April.  So the two systems together fall just shy of accounting for half the shuttles in April, ringing in at 49.82% of the total.

In Uitra though, the shuttle losses, if you look over at DOTLAN EVE Maps, are spread out pretty evenly across the month.  I Iwisoda, everything happened in a very short span of time, around which there was very little activity.

The destruction chart for Iwisoda – Apr 21 through 24

What apparently happened was that Snuffed Out, making mischief in low sec as usual, decided to fiddle somebody’s kill board by putting up a Raitaru, delivering 15,640 shuttles to that individual, then blowing up the Raitaru while it was in a state where asset safety would not engage.  That deposited all those shuttles out into space where they destroyed them.  The kills count against the person to whom they were delivered.

Now, the killdump.csv file, CCP’s official output of losses that comes with the MER, does not include individual pilot data.  Corps and alliances are all you get.  So with that data I could only tell you that Stay Frosty lost 15,640 shuttles in Iwisoda, eclipsing any of the regulars in Uitra by a fair margin.

However, I observed the goings on over on Twitter where Rixx Javix, CEO of Stay Frosty, spent several days posting cat pictures and telling people he was totally not bothered by some in-game incident.  Then he wrote a blog post about it where he wanted this “loop-hole” addressed.  You can judge for yourself whether it really bothered him or not.  I certainly cannot speak to his state of mind.

But yes, if you go to the Iwisoda page over on zKillboard currently, there are bunch of shuttle losses with his name on them, with Snuffed Out as the killer.  The system is otherwise not very active, so those will be there for a while.

A sample from the Iwisoda kills

They are all flagged as “padding” now, so they do not affect his kill board.  I suspect that this is somehow related to why the corps in Uitra don’t go all in on destruction, though I still haven’t figured out their game and how it benefits them.

Anyway, you can totally see that spike in losses on my kills per day chart up at the top, where losses spike while ISK is actually down.

Meanwhile, that “loop-hole” has been around for ages and I have seen it used before.  I first documented it here with the Fort Knocks Keepstar kill in December 2018, when somebody delivered a ton of Bantam frigates to Doomchincilla which all popped up on his zKillboad totals.

The PL killboard sullied with all those frigates

The “loop-hole” in question was put in place to stop a different sort of abuse.  When citadels came into the game people would create courier contracts that would send people to structures where they had no access, so they could not complete the contracts… and sometimes got ganked for the effort.  So CCP created a delivery mechanic to solve that, which assigned ownership to the recipient of the delivery, something that has been abused now and then ever since.

All of which I guess shows that a few dedicated individuals can mess with the destruction stats by blowing up shuttles… messing up my average kills per day metric by basically exploding about 30K more shuttles than expected (the March total was 45,547 while April saw 76,798 shuttles pop) while other ship class losses, such as capsules and frigate, were actually down for the month.

Systems with Just One Recorded Loss

We got a story out of the data this month, so a less dull post than usual I guess.  But in digging through the system level data I was a bit surprised to see how many systems recorded just ONE LOSS in the month of April.

I mean, there are a lot of systems in New Eden, and 7,486 saw at least something blow up.  I suspect there is a range of systems out there were no ships blew up, but they don’t make the data set.

So just to make this post super extra long, here are the 392 systems where exactly one ship was recorded lost by CCP… though this data does not 100% agree with what appears on zKillboard.

We shall see what the May stats will bring.

We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously.  But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything.  That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least.  From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote.  And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post.  I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package.  Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss?  Then harden the fuck up.  Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra.  Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant?  I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you?  Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top.  But you’re wrong!  It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow.  And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening.  But there it is in that quote.  Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden.  There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years.  I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.

The April Monthly Economic Report for EVE Online landed this week, so it is time to dive into that once more.

EVE Online nerds harder

As usual, I am going to focus mostly on destruction. You can find things about the general New Eden economy here:

• CCP – April 2024 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – April 2024 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – April 2024 MER Thread
• TNG –  April 2024 Activity In EVE Online
• TNG – A Look At The April 2024 Active ISK Delta

Overall Summary

With April we’re back to a 30 day month, so one might expect something of a drop in the total given that EVE Online players had 24 fewer hours to explode things.  But you would be wrong.  They managed to blow up 501,859 ships, structures, and capsules, a nearly 8K uptick from the 493,867 that went up in March.

That comes out to 16,728 losses per day in April, also a noticeable uptick over the 15,931 losses per day in March.  That is nearly 800 more things exploding every single day, though we’ll get to why that might not be as significant as the high level numbers might indicate… ans the come down starts when we get to ISK.

For ISK value a total of 42.48 trillion ISK was recorded as destroyed in April, down from 46.19 trillion in March, with the average ISK loss per day in April running at 1,415 billion ISK per day, down from 1,490 billion ISK per day the previous month.

That sank the average cost per loss, another metric in my spreadsheet, from 93.53 million ISK per loss to 84.64 million ISK per loss.

How did this happen?  I’ll throw a meme out for it and we’ll get into the details later.

It is an old meme, but it checks out

Okay, we’re now four months into the year and we’re now hitting a point where somebody has wrecked my pet theory that losses per day is a reasonable indicator of player activity in New Eden.  Ideally, my chart should correspond in some way to Jester’s daily rolling average chart.

Average Daily EVE Online Players – April 2024 Edition

Compare that to my average losses per day chart.

Average losses per Day – April 2024 Edition

At first glance the 2024 line appears to be following Jester’s 2024 line.  But his chart is a 30 day rolling average so it is still influenced by March numbers.  It won’t turn… or stay flat or dip a bit… until the May chart comes out.

Finally, for this section, there is the losses per day chart, which I usually trot our as a demonstration of the normal ebb and flow of New Eden destruction, peaking on weekends and dipping mid week, with ISK loss and hull count moving together.  But this month that last bit seems set to mock me.

April 2024 – Losses per day

Some very expensive ships were lost around the 5th of the month, as we see ISK losses spiking well above the loss count, while on the 22nd of the month the loss count spikes without a corresponding spike in ISK.  I refer you to the meme above for that, but I’ll have data to follow up on that.

Top 20 Most Frequent Losses by Class and Hull

Once more we kick off with the raw losses for the top categories.

Not for the last time in this post I am going to say something about shuttles.  Generally speaking, shuttles are in third place most months, behind the ever at the top capsules and the perennial second place entry, frigates as a class.  Last month, for example, shuttles rang in at 9.22% of the month’s total losses.  This month they surpassed 15%.

Hulls Lost only Once This Month

Once again I have filtered out all of the POS towers and modules… POS kills continue… and fighter squadrons and other odd and uninteresting… to me at least… kills to get to the more interesting stuff, with links to the kill on zKillboard… when possible.

We have some AT ships on the list this month, starting with the Cybele, an ATXIX reward ship, and only the second one recorded as lost, and the Laelaps, an ATXVI ship, which perished up in Vale of the Silent.

The Miasmos hulls, Amastris and Quafe Ultra editions, are hold overs from the Odyssey expansion.  The Amastris edition did not make it to zKillboard.  Somebody post that kill please.

The others on the list are a bit more commonplace, though the Komodo, the Guristas faction titan, is notable for its expense.  And the Syndicate Mobile Large War Disruptor… I haven’t seen one of those on the list before.  Over at zKillboard it records the last loss back in 2021.

Top 20 Total ISK Lost by Hull Type

Looking into that top hulls that made up the ISK losses in April.

Capsules, as always, top the list through sheer volume, even at a paltry average of 27.79 million ISK per loss.

This is becoming very much a “usual suspects” sort of chart every month.  Fortizar losses were up almost 50% over March, when 40 were blown up.  Dreads don’t make up much of the total, given the clash that happened in Abhazon in April… though I suspect those numbers will pop up a bit next time as there was a return clash there just this past week.

And I suppose it is a good thing that Capsuleer Day has come around again to replenish the Praxis supplies, as they keep blowing up at a substantial rate for a battleship.

Top 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

The regions where losses were happening most.

Pochven continues to blow up the ISK chart.  I wish I had some direct insight into that.

Top 20 Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

Diving a little deeper into losses by location.

On the ISK side of the chart we can see the effects of the struggle over the Imperium Fortizar in Ahbazon, as losses there were 50% above perennial champion Jita.

Meanwhile, at the top of the count side of the chart is Uitra and whatever shuttle exploit has been going on there for months and months.

Once again it tops the total kill in a system list.  Here are the ships lost in Uitra in April.  As usual, shuttles dominate, with 22,626 destroyed in the system, almost one third of all shuttles destroyed in New Eden in April.

However, in Black Rise, the system of Iwisoda emerged as a new locus of shuttle destruction in April.   Is the Uitra scam… or whatever it is… expanding?  Oh no, this is something completely different.

Here are the ship loss totals for Iwisoda in April broken out by hull.

That is a good 15,640 shuttles destroyed, about 20% of the shuttles lost in New Eden in April.  So the two systems together fall just shy of accounting for half the shuttles in April, ringing in at 49.82% of the total.

In Uitra though, the shuttle losses, if you look over at DOTLAN EVE Maps, are spread out pretty evenly across the month.  I Iwisoda, everything happened in a very short span of time, around which there was very little activity.

The destruction chart for Iwisoda – Apr 21 through 24

What apparently happened was that Snuffed Out, making mischief in low sec as usual, decided to fiddle somebody’s kill board by putting up a Raitaru, delivering 15,640 shuttles to that individual, then blowing up the Raitaru while it was in a state where asset safety would not engage.  That deposited all those shuttles out into space where they destroyed them.  The kills count against the person to whom they were delivered.

Now, the killdump.csv file, CCP’s official output of losses that comes with the MER, does not include individual pilot data.  Corps and alliances are all you get.  So with that data I could only tell you that Stay Frosty lost 15,640 shuttles in Iwisoda, eclipsing any of the regulars in Uitra by a fair margin.

However, I observed the goings on over on Twitter where Rixx Javix, CEO of Stay Frosty, spent several days posting cat pictures and telling people he was totally not bothered by some in-game incident.  Then he wrote a blog post about it where he wanted this “loop-hole” addressed.  You can judge for yourself whether it really bothered him or not.  I certainly cannot speak to his state of mind.

But yes, if you go to the Iwisoda page over on zKillboard currently, there are bunch of shuttle losses with his name on them, with Snuffed Out as the killer.  The system is otherwise not very active, so those will be there for a while.

A sample from the Iwisoda kills

They are all flagged as “padding” now, so they do not affect his kill board.  I suspect that this is somehow related to why the corps in Uitra don’t go all in on destruction, though I still haven’t figured out their game and how it benefits them.

Anyway, you can totally see that spike in losses on my kills per day chart up at the top, where losses spike while ISK is actually down.

Meanwhile, that “loop-hole” has been around for ages and I have seen it used before.  I first documented it here with the Fort Knocks Keepstar kill in December 2018, when somebody delivered a ton of Bantam frigates to Doomchincilla which all popped up on his zKillboad totals.

The PL killboard sullied with all those frigates

The “loop-hole” in question was put in place to stop a different sort of abuse.  When citadels came into the game people would create courier contracts that would send people to structures where they had no access, so they could not complete the contracts… and sometimes got ganked for the effort.  So CCP created a delivery mechanic to solve that, which assigned ownership to the recipient of the delivery, something that has been abused now and then ever since.

All of which I guess shows that a few dedicated individuals can mess with the destruction stats by blowing up shuttles… messing up my average kills per day metric by basically exploding about 30K more shuttles than expected (the March total was 45,547 while April saw 76,798 shuttles pop) while other ship class losses, such as capsules and frigate, were actually down for the month.

Systems with Just One Recorded Loss

We got a story out of the data this month, so a less dull post than usual I guess.  But in digging through the system level data I was a bit surprised to see how many systems recorded just ONE LOSS in the month of April.

I mean, there are a lot of systems in New Eden, and 7,486 saw at least something blow up.  I suspect there is a range of systems out there were no ships blew up, but they don’t make the data set.

So just to make this post super extra long, here are the 392 systems where exactly one ship was recorded lost by CCP… though this data does not 100% agree with what appears on zKillboard.