Monthly Economic Report - April 2021

[Ash_Beldrulf]

@Daichi_Yamato

You’re saying 8000 players logged in because they had mined enough minerals that month? Of course not.

No, I am flat out say that because ships were cheaper players could lose those expensive ships. If Rorq could not mine like they used to caps would be so expensive no one would us them. Patch incoming and see what happens during the next battles.

@Daichi_Yamato

I’m not denying the rewards being nerfed.

I am tell you since I started in 2017, I have seen the rewards come and go but the increase risk stay. CCP and eve players always talk about risk vs reward. Well guess what? After 2 years of nerfing mining and indy, CCP is driving Hundreds of players from the game. Where will the minerals for the next big war come from? Heck were will the next prey for hunter/PKers come from? It is not like this game keeps many of the new players who start the game.

[Zhalyd_Lyehin]

@Ash_Beldrulf

What I know is that whalers had targets, ships were cheap, miners were every where mining, targets moving ALOT, and EVE has seen the BIGGEST fights in it’s history because of the time of plenty.

None of these fights were anything to be proud of. They may have been the fights with the most characters involved but they were something akin WW1 trench fights.

@Ash_Beldrulf

This is all because of CCP Rat/balance team. I saw 250+ of friends being pushed out of the game because of CCP Rat’s changes.

This would not have been necessary if someone at CCP had stood up against Hillmar’s madness to make EVE look good for purchasers. CCP could have given the Rorqual a really good spot as mining booster but at the same time they would have had to completely remove the ability to multibox the ship. They should have never removed industry slots for capital production which opened the flood gates for their proliferation. They should have also never allowed uncontrolled numbers of supers and titans to be docked in structures which made it easier to hold thousands of them with absolute ease.

These are all things that CCP should have done to make the features better and much less damaging for the game. But they opted to ignore all feedback for years … until it was too late. And now we are stuck with titanic battles that are utterly unenjoyable, unplayable and a farce eternalized in the guinessbook.

[Makshima_Shogo]

Yea that is what people don’t realize, Citadels started the carnage and its been crazy to balance the game after they where introduced.

[Adunh_Slavy]

Colonization vrs Conquest.

[Daichi_Yamato]

@Ash_Beldrulf

No, I am flat out say that because ships were cheaper players could lose those expensive ships.

Oooh, so you’re neither talking about player numbers nor the value. You’re literally talking about ship size when you say ‘big’. I’m with you now.

Well in that case, yeah. But you say that as if super v super fights, where no other ship was relevant, was a good thing. That’s one of the things we should be trying to get away from.

@Ash_Beldrulf

since I started in 2017

Ok, you see 2017 as the norm, but that was after years of nerfs to pvp and hunting. The state of the game in 2017 was when we were already on the way to too much farming and alpha bots gallore.

2017 may even be the year CCP said ‘stop the hemorrhaging’.

@Ash_Beldrulf

Where will the minerals for the next big war come from?

As I’ve been trying to say, the game has had big wars without quadrillions of minerals to fuel it before. It’s not the size of ships that makes war possible.

Players will goto, and have gone to, wars in frigs if they have to. It’s most famous war happened with barely a handful of titans involved.

You really needn’t worry about wars. If players stop shooting eachother, it will have nothing to do with lack of mineral supply and everything to do with convoluted mechanics and the devs pandering to bears.

[Makshima_Shogo]

CCP Already has the % on all system they should use it to make it exciting for us.

Imagine if we saw changes like:

% of System increases passively (not sure if it does already) this allows a crop rotation effect which causes a nice flow of movement.

Introduce new versions of ice/ ore and gas that give 50% extra resources that spawn more often in high % systems.

System % effects more than just bounties it now effects amount of faction spawns in belt’s / the amount of signatures in that system and also effect’s ore/ice/gas quality (Quantity effects big blocks while quality effects the little guys too)

so a 200% system is going to attract a lot of people that want to be rich those people all end up going to the same systems and a lot of fights break out, those who stay in the same place and are afraid to venture out will sit with the standard things they are used to now.

Since there is a carrot then it will be ok to do a slight nerf on citadels at the same time to bring them to a more balanced point.

[Osir1s]

Only for ratters. Peace is hell for contractors, producers and miners.

[Rhysio_Typho]

@CCP_Fleebix I have been looking at the killdumps and noticed that the data for the last day in the month is not included. checked for the last 2 MERs (march and april) and one in early last year(january) and has been missing on all of them.
Edit: sinks_and_faucets_over_time.csv and commodity_sinks_and_faucets_over_time.csv is also only showing data only until 2021-03-31

[Osir1s]

The answer is more nuanced that that. The reality is that stagnation was due to how favored defenders are in null, and how safe it was to generate wealth, and the amount of wealth you could extract from a region. As a result, staying home and krabbing was the optimal play.

[Arrendis]

@Zhalyd_Lyehin

This would not have been necessary if someone at CCP had stood up against Hillmar’s madness to make EVE look good for purchasers.

Let’s keep something very important in mind, though: Hilmar was not given that choice.

The venture capitalists whose investment group had majority ownership of CCP wanted to sell the company. Before it became known that it was about a sale, there was a lot of speculation that the layoffs at CCP were an effort by the VCs to isolate Hilmar (because he still held enough stock to make firing him… problematic).

Blaming Hilmar for the VCs deciding they wanted to get out of the computer game business is not accurate, and not fair. Had there been internal resistance to the VCs selling the company, there likely would not be a CCP right now. And before you think I’m overstating things, consider:

The Newcastle studio responsible for Valkyrie got shut down and sold off.

The entire catalog of White Wolf Game Studio’s IPs got bundled up and sold to Paradox. This was literally a bunch of intellectual property that was making money just by existing, because Onyx Path Publishing was paying licensing fees so they could keep publishing game books for the RPGs. Think about that: the VCs just wanted to cash out so bad, they sold off something that was literally just sitting there printing them money.

CCP Atlanta was finally shut down.

Every other EVE-Universe property in development at the time got shuttered so those teams could be laid off. CCP Shanghai barely avoided the same fate because mobile gaming was the ‘hot new thing’ that even the VCs could see.

If CCP didn’t find a buyer, I have absolutely no doubt the VCs would have turned around and started shopping the EVE IP to people like Sony, or PA, or Paradox, or Electronic Arts, and only kept CCP running long enough to make sure the IP was making money to attract a buyer.

And at this point, if we’re lucky, we’d be awaiting the multi-shard release of ‘EVE II: The New Empyreans’, while wistfully telling tales about the game that used to run on CCP’s servers, before those servers got shut down so they could be liquidated along with the rest of the company.

I am the last person to tell you CCP’s making great decisions. They make more than their share of boneheaded moves, including the way they released the Great Escape patch, and the way they totally munged up this month’s MER. Hilmar himself has made a metric ton of mistakes over the years. One of the biggest of them is he keeps insisting on trying to do game development instead of, you know, being CEO. Getting CCP sold, intact, to a company that wants to be in the business of making computer games, though?

That is not one of them.

[Teckos_Pech]

So the CPI is still screwed up and CCP can’t provide a CPI without the items that are not produced in game (extractors, skins, etc.). Figures…makes me wonder. Did they look at such a CPI see it was horrible and decide to lie to us?

[Makshima_Shogo]

Thanks for all the constant updates o7

[Rhivre]

No, its just that the baskets have not been updated since forever. Its not just the CPI, take a look at the SPPI and the PPI

[Zhalyd_Lyehin]

The joys of inviting venture capital(ists) to the party with the baby that you created just so that you can pursue some weird dreams bites him and ultimately us hard.

[CCP_Fleebix]

Thanks for the headsup, I’ll let the appropriate Dev know.

[Arrendis]

@Zhalyd_Lyehin

just so that you can pursue some weird dreams

You realize the VCs come in around 2008, right? When EVE’s still growing and doing well, before even the introduction of wormholes… the only other project any of CCP’s people would have over the next 5 years was the World of Darkness MMO, and that was CCP Atlanta, who were hired specifically to work on that (and the Atlanta offices were originally White Wolf, so it’s not like they had any real dearth of motivation or knowledge).

2008, CCP doesn’t have any of its people in London, or working remotely. They’re paying through the nose to keep people like CCP Soundwave on a godforsaken volcanic rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. No VCs, the studio probably doesn’t have the money to really invest in hardware upgrades and expanded development. It’s a case of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Hilmar doesn’t go haring off on ‘weird dreams’ (which are all designed to put the company on more secure footing by not being reliant on one game) until 2011 or so.

[Hazen_Koraka]

I’m confused. Is it March now or April, or perhaps we are in May?

[CCP_Fleebix]

@Rhysio_Typho

@CCP_Fleebix I have been looking at the killdumps and noticed that the data for the last day in the month is not included. checked for the last 2 MERs (march and april) and one in early last year(january) and has been missing on all of them.
Edit: sinks_and_faucets_over_time.csv and commodity_sinks_and_faucets_over_time.csv is also only showing data only until 2021-03-31

Check if you’re reading the data from the old zip file. There was an error in the first upload of the MER and I updated the charts and zip file at 1:15PM 22nd of may.

[Carolus_Magnus]

How anyone could look at this and not come to the instant conclusion that an extraordinary amount of botting is going on in the Vale, is beyond me….

We knew it already, and we know who it is. CCP needs to address it.

[Rhysio_Typho]

In the new zipfile are commodity_sinks_and_faucets_over_time.xls and commodity_sinks_and_faucets_over_time.xls which contain the correct data (they are csv files, just with a different file extension), but the versions ending with .csv does not contain the full data.