Came across this thread by chance. And I think I can clear the confusion up.
When I first began running ECs, I had made detailed spreadsheets of my income so I could try and calculate the ISK per hour and compare it with other forms of work. After finding out it was quite lucrative, I eventually stopped recording and just ran ECs like anyone else.
Then what I call the “November Incident” happened. One day in November, ECs vanished globally for several hours. Now I know this wasn’t just a fluke or anomaly because help chat was flooded with, “Where did all the ECs go?!” questions, suggesting it was a global thing. But after a few hours they came back online and things went back to normal. Hypernet had launched that week so I had assume it was just a passing bugged caused by that.
A few days later someone mentioned in passing that it felt like their rewards had dropped a lot. So remembering that first dataset I had from before “the incident” I decided to record a second dataset now, after the incident, and compare the two to see if there truly was a change or he was imagining it. Spoilers: There was a change.
Before the incident: Avg. 28 mil per EC payout
(sample size: 20 runs)
After the incident: Avg. 14 mil per EC payout
(sample size: 32 runs)
Note that payout here assumes all loot is obtained, all wrecks salvaged, that all items were sold at Jita prices, and rewards were not divided or diluted with other players.
I know the above values are hardly the most robust or large sample sizes, but I think they’re large enough to strongly suggest there was a significant change – especially given the massive gap between rewards before and after.
Now I’m not here to try and argue whether or not the changes were justified, rather I’m merely trying to clarify that there’s stronger evidence than simply anecdotes to suggest a stealth nerf did in November.