O it definitely has had an effect on world pvp this is a zkillboard kill stat list for the region of black rise:
It’s getting worse as time goes on.
Tbh I am not sure what happened between June and July that had such a drastic effect, it could be the abyss it could be something else.
Triglavian invasion.
Loss of systems like Ichoriya.
Arena’s are absolutely terrible for one main reason, alt’s and manipulation.
I have been pvping on my main for about a year now and a friend told me about this bringing solo back channel to learn quicker and while on I saw this convo about arena’s that made me instantly hate them:
Prop’s to this Cable dude for masterfully manipulating the system and screwing everyone over thou pretty evil genius stuff.
lol 60 chars in top 100.
that was adressed some time ago, CCP prohibited mass queuing with alts
That’s the word I’ve been looking for for the last weeks!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/2hf3rs/prototype_feature_on_duality_dojos_features_ideas/
It was CCP Veritas who brought us this, back then as a prototype, and it took them six more years of changes to turn it into something that ties into the lore and is actually usable on TQ.
Thanks, Rich!
Dojo was the search term I was looking for. 
You’re welcome! @Solstice_Projekt
As requested by @Dantelion_Shinoni, an update:
Well, maybe let’s start with the top level participation in each event to date:
As you can see, participation beyond the first hyped ones has been pretty mixed, with a few being essentially ignored complete (<100 participants) like the Tactical Destroyers and the Caldari one, and a few of the others, particularly the FFAs, faring a little better. Still, the median participation of these events is only around ~340 characters on an event day.
So basically the observations in the OP still hold - only a few hundred players engage with this feature and it is largely ignored by the player base.
Ok, so onward. Now that there is more data, I was able to better assess the effect of the Proving Grounds on activity elsewhere, and yes, there is an effect. Basically the majority of activity in the Proving Ground comes at the expense of lowsec.
To see this, first a calculated the correlation of player activity (defined as being present on a killmail) for event days and an equal number of non-event days (matched by day of the week) across the various sectors of New Eden. In this analysis, the correlation coefficent will be 1 if the number of players moves equally in the same direction each day, 0 if there is no correlation between activity in the sectors, or -1 if they move in opposite directions - that is if one increases at the expense of the other decreasing. Here is what you see:
It’s clear: lowsec is significantly impacted on Abyss PvP weekends experiencing a drop in player activity. Now, from this it is difficult to exactly see how many players Abyssal PvP is cannibalizing from lowsec. For that, I looked at the mean change in players comparing again an equal number of day-matched event and non-event days:
To be transparent, I did remove the first two events from this calculation (and their matched controls) as they were a bit of an outlier. But the data are clear: on event weekends, lowsec activity drops by about 200 characters while the Abyss PvP event only adds 340. That means the majority of the activity in the Abyssal Proving Grounds comes directly from lowsec, removing players from the open world. And if you make some allowances for queue stuffing and multibox collusion that would increase the number of characters per human player, maybe all the activity comes at the expense of lowsec.
So while that is bad, and what many people including me expected from experience with similar experiments in other open-world games, it probably doesn’t matter too much. As you get a hint of from that last chart, that decrease lowsec experienced is still quite small - maybe 5-10% of its normal activity. The reality is that even though most of the activity in the Proving Grounds comes at the expense of lowsec, the Proving Grounds are still largely ignored by almost everyone so the activity hit isn’t really significant. Even the noise in the activity of nullsec and highsec is larger than this small transfer of activity from lowsec to the Abyss.
So the main conclusions in the OP stand - the Abyssal Proving Grounds have failed to attract a player base of any size. We can now add that the players that do regularly participate mostly come from elsewhere in the game, specifically lowsec, where activity drops during the events, even if this activity that is siphoned off is very small.
Here are the raw data for your own exploration:
Nice data, I had a quick look through and came to the following conclusions:
Also I take issue with this statement:
I haven’t seen or heard anything suspicious in the last few events with the rules banning these practises. Everyone I faced was fully fit and fought hard. (There might have been one exception, But I can’t find it on my killboard.)
My conclusion is that this feature provides content for the people involved and for a wide variety of miners, industrialists and traders. Actually interesting content as decisions about what to stock and how much need to be based on knowledge of the event and likely fits.
Fantastic data gathering, as always. I can enrich it with my own experience during the last 3 events.
For the 3v3 Frigate event, I spent the entire weekend looking for teammates, that simple. So people like me got no matches in during that weekend.
For the FFA Cruiser I got the most matches in the least amount of time, from my perspective the queues were fast and people were participating.
As for the 1v1 Battlecruiser I just didn’t bother with that one, I did some market manipulation and that’s it, dealing with Battlecruisers was too much of a hassle.
That’s just my experience of course, but I find that it reflects that data pretty well!
Again, fantastic job! I ought to be able to do the same!
Well thought out post.
I have not and will not engage in these events. I don’t need the overlords to give me a reason to go shoot at other people. The whole point of this game and genre is too give us the tools to create content for ourselves. Ccp and all these events do little but get in the way.
People very quickly worked out a meta.
The same 30 or so players dominate every single proving ground event, and everybody else is just there to feed them.
It’s a fail feature.
As long as stuff gets destroyed in there i’d say its a success
LoL… aka quatity over quality …
That mindset kills everything really truly yes…not only quality but creativity, enthusiasm, improvisation. And many other good value. yes yes…
but i dont think thats what EvE Online as sanbox game really need these to be killed !
I just don’t get it how instanced gameplay could benefit eve online.
If you want fair fights, there are already many very good games on the market.
If you want safe farming, there are already many very good games on the market.
to run a successful game you need to have a unique selling point. When Eve started it was ‘sandbox’. Many people got attracted by this concept, however, it never was mainstream. But there was a strong community.
Now, a lot of ‘me too’ features get added to cater for different concepts in gameplay. This might work in a game with millions of players but I doubt it will work out well for eve.
+1 from me - abyssal proving grounds are a failure
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