Monthly Economic Report - May 2023

Greetings,

The Monthly Economic Report for May 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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By golly Im first!:sunglasses:

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It still amazes me that CCP do not increase the ISK sink of planetary import/export by getting rid of player owned customs offices, even if only in HS.

Historically, the last thing any developing state in early modern times did was to alienate its customs base. Other state financial functions might be farmed out commercially, but only the mad or the utterly desperate alienated its direct control over customs. It makes absolutely no sense that the Eve factions should allow their high security sovereign territory to be controlled in this way by non-state entities, and would take a useful bit of ISK out of play.

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Don’t pay attention too often to these threads, but what should I be using this info for?

Evaluating the overall health of the game and game economy.

It gives a useful baseline to look at the player base size, and impacts of significant game changes on the economy.

“good” looks like steady, proportional increases across the board. More people buying ships, more people producting ships, more people killing each other in ships.

“bad” looks like flat lines and downward trends, but it also looks like sudden spikes (up or down) in places. Some of that may be intentional (bad in short term, better for long term), and it helps to use other data sets to combine those with (e.g. player base average log on per day metrics) in order to draw actual conclusions, but it does provide a very important piece of the larger puzzle.

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Too much Ice mined afk in highsec like every month. Fix that already. Remove the static belts, let them spawn in random systems as anomalies and much smaller size. Add scannable Ice Sigs with larger amounts of ice in it. Make it a competition where small and active groups can get an advantage over lazy massive-multiboxers that just farm the belts every day basically afk in their 10+ mackinaws.

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Or…

Introduce some penalty to the “guaranteed Ice Belts”

Maybe this could include a refining penalty Since - Well, you know, you can just pay a merc corp to “Ahem” Protect your refinery…

Last time I checked - refining didn’t have a system index related value ??? - I could be VERY wrong.

Ice though - In HS ? --------- It’s not the bigger picture this report paints.

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In general, resources should not be distributed static by security status but dynamically like the system indexes (research, manufacture…) we got. The further you go from travel routes, hubs and areas frequently mined, the more and wider range of resources you should find. This should be dynamic in a way resources deplete and replenish each downtime. Not in a sudden drop or increase, but steady changes over time. Resources should “bleed out” and take days or weeks to reappear depending on initial amounts. Jita for example got no belts at all by design, which makes sense. Major hubs would have been stripped from any resources long time ago. Concentric from there, neighboring systems would have resources available depending on recent activity and harvesting. This would hopefully result in nomadic fleets and better activity distribution over the whole map vs. groundhog day behavior and everyone clustering 3 jumps from a hub.

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Make all ice belts Sansha incursion sites? kek

Side note I’m almost certain the “Largest Battles” graphics are new this MER, but the last picture has no way of showing WH battles, some of which can get three hundred or more bodies in the fight.

Still petitioning for some fractionalizing of data between hs/ls/ns where doable, like incursions and bounties.

Never gonna happen. These customs offices belong to Null sovereign alliances, ie: EVE policy makers.

Just wish WH was a little more balanced for loot distribution. C1s are “equally” as dangerous to participate in as C5s. Yes the “ISK on GRID” math is important too, but it’d be nice to see the C5 domination reduced a bit.

Please fix C4 site ranges. The efficiency drop is just so significant.

Wormhole space just in general could use a revamp. Please don’t break the lifestyle, but improve it.

the last revamp was kind of disappointing, high class escalations replaced with the drifter bosses…which while have interesting mechanics, is just a big beefy damage sponge… only CCP couldn’t be bothered to change the name of the thing to be unique, it shares a name with one of the original drifters that have the overshield and doomsday 1-shot weapon .

I guess the moral is “be careful what you wish for”, as the monkey paw’s finger may just curl.

Don’t touch WH space! They will ruin it. WHs generate enough content and enough wealth already, there is no need to “fix” anything that isn’t broken. Even C4 sites are absolutely not a problem that needs fixing, I lived in a C4 for two years and the sites (time to run vs reward) are fine.

…. Like bringing back High sec piracy?

Players are the only way AFKers are punished. Game mechanics (and changes to them) are automatable.

If you come up with a detailed solution for that, I am more than willing to give my feedback to it. While I agree that AFK-players should be more easily engagable, in my opinion the problem with Ice Mining lies more in the design of Ice Mining itself (roid size, belt size, static belt locations) and the distribution of the resource. If we add mechanics that enable players to punish afk-miners/haulers/ratters (no matter the resource they are “farming”), I am fine with that.

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Take a look at the “Production” and “Trade Value” columns on the second image. Now study them… profoundly.

I’m recently playing more actively after a couple of years of hiatus and I have noticed that all regional markets except The Forge are pretty much empty. Entire classes of modules are simply missing, along with ships to the point where you simply can’t buy and or fit 80-90% of ships. I though, well, that’s OK… I’ll just get some minerals and build the stuff myself, only to discover that many items, ships especially, now require new items which are built from reactions and advanced components - which are, again, mostly not available for sale or are in very limited supply outside The Forge.

Then I thought, well that’s fixable - I’ll setup a supply/trade route and seed the market - only to discover that it looks like this problem existed in the game for so long (while I was gone) that the mentality of players changed. Hardly anyone is buying seeded stuff, even though it’s at Jita price. Players are simply not expecting to find stuff on the market anymore - outside of The Forge.

Is this a strategy to concentrate what little players have left in the game in The Forge and pretend that the in-game economy is alive and kicking or is it something else, some industrial or content imbalance? I’m still trying to figure it out.

All I know is that these two columns must be taken as huge warning signs about the health of the game.

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they did that with BRM and the world almost ended then CCP backed down from it after fixing out of control isk growth

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Yes, because CCP again forgot something elemental: Just because a system gives you 500% bounty doesn’t mean that the system is worth the risk or effort. IF a system only spawns crap and unusable anomalies, even 500% bounty plus aren’t enough additional rewards for the added risk. It’s a typical case of dumb, shortsighted, incomplete and not though through CCP feature implementation. Had they enabled the spawning of more Havens, Sanctums, Rally Points, high level combat plex signatures and the likes in high BRM systems, the feature would have at least generated somewhat more appropriate rewards for the added risk. But that would have required CCP to actually put development effort into this feature, instead of creating a bare-bones player punishment service.

Funny that you mention this. Want to hear a hilarious story about this subject? CCP actively and deliberately removed the one and only dynamic resource replenishment system from the game and seeks to replace it with their own, continually and manually adjusted system because CCP thinks they know best when what thing should spawn.
Asteroid belts of the old days depleted quickly and needed days to replenish to full yield. But CCP removed them from half the cluster because CCP does not like old automatic systems that work perfectly fine taking away their jobs. Instead, CCP flooded the cluster with useless ore anoms for every system that are not dynamic, are not adjusted manually at all. On top of that, CCP has also completely stopped working on their promised dynamic resource distribution system that they promised years ago with the resource rework.
So, CCP not only removed an actually working, dynamic resource distribution system from the game, failed to implement a new working, dynamic resource distribution system despite promising just that, and implemented more static resource anoms instead.

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I agree this is a huge thing that is being overlooked.

Usually I try to sell my goods at Dodixie (5 jumps) or Hek (3 jumps), but the transaction volume going through is significantly worse. My main concern is that Jita has about 20-25 billion more transactions than any other hub, as per Fuzzwork (33billion vs Amarr’s 6billion) Buy/Sell orders are also similar, but not as extreme.

Now to be fair, I am also back from a ~3 year break, and my first thing to blame is the mining changes in 2020, but at this point I doubt they’re still a problem. I wonder (and again, EVE player back from break throwing out an opinion piece) if we need to re-think where goods are bought and sold. Originally, Jita/Dodixie/Amarr/etc. were the places with the best agents and LP store (I think?) so players were just there so often that those stations became the trade hubs. Again, just throwing words out there since I surely don’t have a solution or even know what the real issue is.

FYI first forums post so I hope I formatted this right lol

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And why would more sites be needed? even a -0.1 system can support super ratting.

FYI - rally points are the second lowest level site in null, and are also already abundant at an ADM of 2 in 0 to -0.24 systems.

Lack of sites was never the problem, risk aversion is.