Greetings,
The Monthly Economic Report for March is ready for your enjoyment.
You can find the downloadable data for this last months report in the follow LINK.
o7
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First 
I love the pretty colors on those graphs! I don’t know how useful they are to me but thanks anyway.
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I would suggest using another data representation scheme for https://images.ctfassets.net/7lhcm73ukv5p/6j488BmrThRIVaMGH1ryI1/a7e1d2855cf954bc5cfc58c4d54acbd0/13_fw_Caldari_State_vs_Gallente_Federation.png?w=900 as its fairly useless.
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OH MY GOD! A miracle happened! We finally have a lightbox gallery for the pictures.
Other than that I see some data that absolutely disgusts me. 
Hrm. ISK supply’s going up, and velocity’s going down again…
The quantity of isk flowing in the markets, total amount that changed hands over the time period.
This is a measure of how active the playerbase is with respect to buying and selling stuff.
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Sure:
I mean that. I mean (the total trade value for the past 30 days) / (the total available ISK over the last 30 days), which has typically been presented as ‘how many times does each ISK effectively trade hands each day?’
It’s a measure of market activity relative to the ISK pool. So if the total ISK in the system is going up, and market activity is keeping pace, it should stay level. But if market activity’s flat, then you get a decrease. It means you’ve got an ISK faucet that’s not translating into a driver of market activity.
The way an ISK faucet should drive market activity is either a)by encouraging people to come back to the game, or b)incentivizing people to go out and blow things up / get blown up. Either one creates demand, which is the driver of all market activity (supply-side people like to get all pissy about that fact, but the fact remains: nobody produces a single widget more than they think they can sell).
IOW: more money is pouring into the system, with no increase in market activity. Worse, though… more money’s pouring into the system, and all of the price indices are rising… so there’s inflation. Prices are going up. That means the same activity in the market should mean more ISK moving…
… but it’s going down.
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epic stagnation. as much as nullsec cried about brm and how it was killing the game, there is pretty empirical proof no that it was fixing a problem.
panfam and imperium will never go to war with eachother and there isn’t much left in the game big enough to keep the markets healthy with the toxic supplies of cash being mass printed
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Major powers could go to war, (and have done so) but it’s not the FC’s job on either side to throw all their capitals into an obvious trap because they think they might get a Molok or a Keepstar, AND it would be fun for the other side. Even so, one major lost battle isn’t enough - one a month would be better.
1000’s of big ships destroyed and being replaced over the course of months would become a major driver of indy: minerals, gas, planetary, and market activity. Instead, stocks of everything accumulate; resources those things are made from are constantly replenished. Miners gotta mine: netflix demands it 
If there is less people the market is smaller. Those lines corelate fairly good with amount of players in game:
https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
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@Arrendis so does this mean that more people are doing ISK making activities but not really spending much of that ISK, aka hoarding it/making their wallets fatter. And/or not engaging in PVP/getting blown up so therefore not having to replace loses via the marketplace.
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Yup, I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. I also don’t think that a drop in isk flow is really going to lead to inflation is it? A drop in isk flow would cause a downward force in prices, would it not? (honestly correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not an economist).
I remember learning about ways to manipulate a gold standard currency, and one of the ways to do it, is to hoard gold. Continue accumulating and hoarding it. As the reduced pool of available gold left in the economy causes a reduction in prices (due to the increased purchasing power of whatever gold is left over), one can then use their hoarded wealth to buy a shitload of land. When the flood gates open and gold is poured into the economy, suddenly the value of the land increases (in terms of gold because it will have reduced purchasing power), allowing one to then sell the land for more than they paid for it. This can be repeated to own all the gold.
Thankfully in EVE Online, ISK can be created out of thin air at any time by anybody, so there’s no real benefit to hoarding onto it. In fact, it’s a bad idea (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not an economist). It’s smarter to hoard assets like plex, modules, ships, materials, etc. Because as inflation continues to happen, so too will the value of your assets. (I think)
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The only thing that is preventing the influx of more ISK into circulation from devaluing the ISK as much as it should is that people continuously make things that cost ISK explode, which then need to be replaced.
Beyond that you can see the ISK losing value relative to the PLEX over time.
What’s been really going down the drain though, is Militia LP, due to an increase in the number of players earning it, and an increase in the amount paid out, and it no longer being divided across the pilots in the sites.
If there were that many fewer people, you’d expect the ISK supply to drop off as their wallets stop counting toward the total.
It means that, at the very least, more money’s being made. It’s hard to draw a conclusion about the number of people involved in those activities off of only a single month. However, if @Nana_Skalski is right about the number of active players dropping, then that means the amount of ISK being made by each player is increasing even more sharply, because it has to offset all of the money in the wallets of people who aren’t logging in.
Keep in mind, the number of active users isn’t the same thing as the number of Concurrent Users (which is what EVE-Offline measures). If 12,000 people (numbers totally arbitrary for easy comparison) all spend the same 8 hours logged in, E-O shows at 12k. If 24,000 people all log in for 4 hours each, but they spread that out over the day with minimal overlap, E-O will only ever show them as 4,000 (4 hour shifts means 6 shifts, 24k/6 = 4k).
Twice as many active users, half the PCU on E-O. So usage patterns matter on E-O as much as sheer numbers. That’s also why CCP likes to talk about DAU/MAU (Daily or Monthly Active Users) rather than PCU these days.
Now, that’s not to say that E-O is useless. Far from it. In a game where interactions are what drive the majority of gameplay, PCU’s more important than DAU/MAU, especially since we don’t have any actual definition of ‘active’ from CCP. For all we know, if you login and get your daily login rewards, but never get past character select… CCP calls that ‘active’. I don’t think anyone else here would, but they might. They might not. We don’t know, and they refuse to tell us.
So for the purposes of actually knowing WTF is going on in the game, DAU/MAU are about as helpful as ‘how many NPCs spawned today?’
Actually, probably less helpful, since people like @Rhivre who do deeper dives into the analytics than I do can probably tell you how many people are actually in space by the number of NPCs that spawn (since sites only re-spawn if they get blown up).
The drop in ISK flow isn’t a driver, it’s a symptom. People don’t hoard ISK to hoard ISK, they hoard ISK because they don’t need to spend it.
It’s always smarter to hoard PLEX than anything else, because PLEX can be bought on-sale and dumped onto the market whenever the price starts to get ridiculous. Which is has been for some time.
And we don’t (unless I’m missing it, which I could be) appear to have a handy chart of that. I’d imagine there’s an increase in purchases of faction parts for the higher LP/lower ISK rates (as many are offered at multiple balance points). The older way of buying primarily with ISK would have served as more of an ISK sink.
Depends. If people now start with alts, or they keep playing on their mains, and have enough knowledge about the game, they can print isk very efficiently. We have seen Pochven printing machine in work for quite some time for example.
In very bad scenario only left are the people who make billions in hours trading stuff between themselves, a trading game taking place in one station. They dont have to even print isk, it just have to change hands.
Well, a ‘if they keep playing with their mains’ means there aren’t fewer people, which is kind of the main thing you suggested.
but b) if they’re that good at making money, then their wallets already have all that money, so if they move to alts, that wallet that hasn’t logged in still drops off the ISK supply numbers… and we don’t see that.
In that scenario, we’d see the ISK velocity skyrocket. That’s literally what it’s measuring: ISK changing hands.
There may be smaller amount of people, but they can make isk very efficiently, that is what I wanted to say.
If it doesnt change hands so often, they dont need as much and it stays in wallets.
But we’d see all the inactives drop off of the ISK supply numbers. And we haven’t. No matter how efficiently someone makes ISK, you don’t make ISK efficiently enough to instantly offset the loss of trillions in wallets without making the ISK supply chart look like a vertical line.