So, funny thing you mentioned this. I decided to put my IT skills to use, and I created a quick n dirty Golang tool to actually scrape the data from zKill:
After taking that resulting data and applying a 5-day moving average, surprise surprise! Maybe for one month, small structure destruction was elevated – note patch day is the very middle of the graph – before things return to nominal rates:
So 2 behaviors to observe:
- After patch day, everything spikes because everyone goes for the easy
first. - After this “initial rush”, activity decays to a new normal. That is what is interesting: the long-term effects of this.
So, destruction long-term has settled back into the same nominal rate. I use “nominal rate” to mean “the same rate as before the patch”. Why does “nominal rate” matter? For comments like this:
If people are destroying small structures the same as before for months at this point, then people are still “spamming” them up at the same rate. Otherwise, at this point, either:
- Spam would decrease, so available targets would have dried up at this point, and the destruction rate decreases to below previous levels. This is not observed nor supported in data.
- People would be spamming them at the same rate, but attackers would be more enthusiastic about destroying small structures, so the rate would have been at some higher level. This is not observed nor supported in data. We’ll come back to the “enthusiasm” of some select people and groups later.
“Spamminess” and “Ease of – and willingness – to destroy” together determine the availability of targets and the rate they are able to be destroyed. Not enough targets because of less spam – rate goes down. People still willing to spam but the easier destruction is applying pressure? Rate goes up.
This is super important for the next section!
Let’s move on to space geography and gameplay.
We heard a lot of complaints about:
- Small gangs in lowsec
- Small gangs in wormholes
…and how they are going to disproportionately bear the brunt of activity. If this were true, we’d expect destruction rates to go up in each, as people keep trying to use these citadels at the same rate, but are more easily destroyed.
For example:
To which the prevailing thought that brought us here today is:
So, maybe it would be compelling data if the rates of destruction were higher in lowsec and wormhole space?
But recall that nullsec wanted to address “small structure spam”. Those alliances can afford to not put down small structures, so conceivably targets just dry up in nullsec, and destruction rates decrease.
Enough foreshadowing:
- High sec: Nominal long-term destruction rate
- Low sec: Growing long-term destruction rate
- Wormhole: Had elevated destruction rate for a long time, but settling down to something long-term, hard to tell.
- Null sec: Nominal or lower long-term destruction rate
Knowing what we know before: Nullsec destruction is at a low long-term rate, implying they’ve “cleaned up” and there’s no interest to destroy small structures there like there used to be.
Lowsec is growing, and Wormholes have had a very very long decay to some new nominal rate. Probably because people are struggling to still get footholds and such in wormhole space, and the data suggests both these groups of players are now fighting more often.
So, finally, this leads us to the “willingness to destroy”. It was very clear that Brisc was interested what large groups were doing:
So I went through the extra effort to take the ZKill scrapes and examine every single attacker on the killmail. If it belonged to Init or Brisc, I added them up.
Here’s that utility coming into play for the bigger groups:
I don’t need to explain this one.
