Everything in this game is numerical. Think before you post.
Mr Epeen 
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Thanks everyone for these amazing replies! I’ve read them all, but expect to be rereading them again as the advice in them is brilliant. This game can be almost daunting at times, so having other people reassure you of the direction to take makes it easier.
Just to address a common thing brought up. I don’t mind mining, but only when I’m doing other stuff. If I want to actually play EVE, I prefer things which are more active, such as exploration. PvP is why I joined this game and is what appeals to me the most, but I’ve just found it difficult to get into. But perhaps I just need to be confident losing some ISK.
Unfortunately, as much as I wish it weren’t the case, I am primarily driven by ISK generation in this game (although I’d imagine most are). I try and calculate everything in terms of ISK/hour, and I’m always looking for ways to increase this number. Currently I seem to be averaging only around $44m or so an hour. But it’s also hard to keep track of as there are a lot of things which are passive, and it is spread across multiple accounts.
Regarding the multiple toons, my current distribution looks like this:
- Main/Original toon- Balanced mix of skills (plexed)
- Mining toon (plexed)
- PvE & PvP toon
- 6 trading toons
- Kind of an experiment account, not much potential yet, but also serving as a director of a corp where I have a bunch of SP farms, although I haven’t really touched this much.
Thanks again everyone, and in advance to anyone else who might have some words of wisdom to share
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Bonus points for recommending OZ_Eve 
I love his trading videos
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To evaluate your potential you can uninstall the game. Wait for 1 month and check how much people is missing you. If no one even remembers about your existence after 1 month, it shows your lack of potential.
Is pvp skill numerical ?
What about the relationships you build in the game?
Or the fear/respect you gain?
I think not.
You have better returns if you pick a fiat currency (USD, Euro, AUD, etc) and compute your $/hr and then convert into ISK as needed.
This isn’t a sarcasm / troll post. It’s what I’ve done, and as a side effect I live a good life.
Considering the fact that Killmail stats are always referenced with PvP skill…
The answer is absolutely yes.
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Actually no because its easy to get lots and lots of kills in groups but having lots of kills doesn’t mean that person is good at pvp.
So the Numerical side is an inaccurate representation of player skill.
And even if the person has a lot of solo kills they could just be killing easy pray with cloaky t3c taking 0 risks.
Like If I just looked at the killboard https://zkillboard.com/character/2075069066/ and made asumptions on player skill it would assume that you where a newbro but I know that is far from true.
Not really.
A lack of killmail stats do indeed show a lack of PvP experience and thus skill.
But having many killmails doesn’t mean you’re good at PvP. I have plenty of kills, but would do terrible in an 1v1.
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I think it’s simply that there are two primary methods of ‘evaluation’ at work here.
The first is evaluation of one’s own satisfaction within the gaming experience. It is subjective and not amenable to numerical quantification.
The second is revealed following numerical analysis and reflects those measurable elements of the game (ISK, influence, kills, etc.) which may give a player some insight to their relative position within it.
As @ResonanceOfWar states, above, the numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story and are, in any case, mainly of interest to those who ‘do numbers’ (of whom I am not one). Not every player will use them in every case.
Numbers are, however, one means of evaluation, and their significance is tacitly supported by EVE’s well-known reputation for resembling ‘Spreadsheets in Space’. No spreadsheets without numbers!
This is one of the design issues EVE runs into, that restricts the player base to a narrow niche. It’s a conflict between player goals vs. the design goals of EVE.
Humans are inherently wired (or genetically programmed, if you will) to feel rewarded by successful resource accumulation. They’re inherently wired to avoid unknown quantities of risk which lack an offsetting potential payoff.
Most EVE resource/ISK accumulation activities are repetitive and not exactly thrilling. Climbing the ISK/hr ladder often requires focusing your attention on a narrower range of tasks in a more limited area. Which limits exposure to the rest of the game, which leads to potential burnout some time later when you start asking yourself why you’re even running on this hamster wheel.
Most of the resource/ISK generation can feel like a repetitive grind after a while, and most of the actually interesting content can feel like too much unknown risk with too little chance of a positive result. (Which is essentially what your OP is asking about).
ISK generation ‘feels’ like a goal in itself, and ISK/hr is an effective way to measure your ‘progress’ at it, but in the long run it’s essentially pointless without a solid plan how you’re going to put that ISK to use. It’s an easy trap to fall into: “I need to make more ISK so I can invest more in X, Y and Z to increase my ability to make even more ISK so I can step up to the next level of making some serious ISK”.
So you end up with a bajillion ISK, so what? It’s all just space pixels anyway, and you likely missed more than half the game in getting there.
However if you compartmentalize things, as you’ve already done with alts, and set up a system something like “Okay, ISK generation alts are set up. Every time I add a billion to their ISK wallet, I’m going to shoot 100 million of that over to my ‘learning PvP’ alt and I’m going to actually spend that ISK on ships/fits and go out and blow something up/get blown up. And I’m going to do the same with my exploration alt.”
Then you’ll have a plan for growing with 80% of your resource generation and actually playing with 20% (which means you’re on the right side of “don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose”). Win or lose with the 20% is no longer a ‘risk’ because you know you’re playing with only a small portion of your earning potential - it’s just freedom to do anything you can think of trying.
And if you find you’re having trouble spending that 200 million effectively on learning PvP/exploring/whatever, you know you’re generating more ISK than you can actually use. And if your 200 million goes by in a flash, or doesn’t even get you rolling in a ship any more, then you know you still have to up your ISK game.
It’s a way to keep in touch with various aspects of the game while keeping balance between your various goals and activities.
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@Gerard_Amatin @ResonanceOfWar
I never said having Killboard stats means they’re good PvP players.
My reply is simply that those who consider themselves as PvP players almost always reference Killboard stats as proof. And since those stats are numerical in nature then in general PvP skill is numerical. If it wasn’t numerical then there’d be no need for Killboards or ingame Killmarks…
As for my own Killboard, in all my years of playing Eve I never once claimed to be a PvP player. Now if there was a board that kept track of escapes, I’d definitely be in the top running list… 
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Imo there is no need for killboards I think killboards make the game worse because it encourages winning over a good fight and people who are offered a 5v5 will rather wait for reinforcements so they can fight 10v5 just so their killboard looks good and that both destroys the joy that could have come from the battle and the player skill that could have been developed from the difficult situation.
The way I understand it if something is numerical that means it can be accurately calculated. Let’s take for example the alliance tournament imagine plugging in every participants zkilldata in and then getting all the rankings in which they placed.
It might get somewhat decent results but it will never be accurate, there is no strict formula for it that just works.
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The question is how to read a killboard statistic. Someone with 500 kills that are all at a score value of 1 (which is the minimum points you can get per kill) and 80% abandoned structures on his KB obviously isn’t a good PvPer. Someone who has 125 kills, with a score of 6 or 8 each, including 30 solo kills obviously is a much better PvPer.
Killboard stats don’t have to be numerical though.
Sure, some people care about numerical killboard stats. They care how many kills they make, how much ISK they destroyed or how well they do in a particular ship compared to other players using that ship.
It’s a bit like caring how high your reputation is to factions or how much ISK you have in your wallet: numerical goals.
Many killboard stats are not numerical though.
What I like the killboard for is that I can look back combat history. It shows when I caught a local scammer in a shuttle with a combat prober in the 30s it took them to alt-f4 after spamming their message. It shows when I got slaughtered by one of the first lancers used in fleet fights. It shows the end of WWB2 when my alliance did one final push in Atrons before retreating, and I got a lucky last hit on a poor Marshal pilot at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I also like the non-numerical part of the killboard for other purposes. Browsing fits for my own use, investigating enemy behaviour of their fit choices and common pilots that show up when one of their cyno pilots tackles someone.
And one part is to check what a certain player does in space. Have they been part of a null sec fight? Or do they lose ships in wormholes? Mining ships, haulers or does this pilot have access to cynos?
These things aren’t numerical either, it’s just binary: either the pilot shows activity in a certain role in space or they don’t. Having a third Ishtar kill with a blops group doesn’t make them any more leet at PvP than the second kill, while the first kill compared to none is a sign that this player can fly Covert Ops ships and does partake in that part of the game.
When people talk about PvP skill reflected in the killboard, I usually see it as “this player takes part in that part of the game”, not that the player has over 100 kills and therefore must be good.
Personally I couldn’t care less about the numerical part of the killboard. Or about the numerical part of the game.
I just need to make enough ISK to have fun.
The amount of corpses one gathers in EVE is also a numerical value but the quality of the corpses can only be assessed by non-numerical method due to the historicity attached to each corpse (and the way acquiring them) …or lack of. 
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This is partly a problem of EVE game design and partly a problem of data access. Zkillboard is an amazing resource in so many ways, much more useful for it’s research aspects than for it’s epeen measuring-stick “how many ‘kills’ I got”. It doesn’t “make the game worse” (especially since few players even refer to it), it just reflects the way the game is.
EVE PvP isn’t about “good fights”, it’s mostly about cheesing every fight you can in every way possible so you win more and lose less. The killboard can only show what people are actually doing - or more accurately, what the limited data window CCP makes available to @Squizz_Caphinator and others is capable of showing. It doesn’t change (for the most part) how people PvP: that’s been fairly consistent for decades.
Yes, there are more than a few people on here bragging about their killboard stats, who basically have hundreds of “kills” where they did 0 damage as part of a fleet. Again, this is a data design issue. CCP has never been very good at adding any degree of nuance to the game, they tend to design and code with very blunt hammers.
If the data design and reward system for instance, rewarded and reported on the quality of kills rather than the quantity of “fights participated in, even if you did next to nothing”, then you’d have people striving for better kills and better fights. A well-designed, in-game leaderboard or ranking system would rate your example of the 125 kills/30 solo/6-8 points per as much higher than the F1 monkey who’s basically just following the fleet around.
You scare me a little
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There was never any issue on how to read Killboard stats and my post wasn’t whether those PvP players are good or bad, just that usually when someone states they’re PvP, they almost always reference Killboard stats as proof which is numerical.
Technically everything in this game is numerical so my reply is correct…