This week just has so much EVE Online goodness, I have trouble figuring out where to begin.
Yesterday, we got a dev blog on “Operation Unholy Rage“, a recent anti-RMT initiative by CCP. They banned something like 6500 paying accounts, and this had a large effect on CPU utilization in the cluster. I wouldn’t have really considered that effect, as it appears that the macroers and spammers took up a disproportionately large share of CPU time.
Pilot population in my lovely Ingunn, though, has plummeted. It seems like this has reduced piracy in the area, though really that probably should count as a positive because it means the gatecamps hitting the macro haulers will move on and do actual, real, useful piracy that interacts with other players.
More importantly for me, this has really reduced the supply of cybernetic implants due to the number of L4 and storyline agents in Ingunn. That drove up the price, so even while I took my break from flying, my stock sold and I made quite a bit of ISK. Dealing in implants still provides a lot of my income. This just means that I don’t simply make the Rens-Emolgranlan-Ingunn circuit constantly, but instead get to see more of the regions in the general vicinity of Republic space. And this sort of change has led to lots of profits as well. I love PvPers that destroy pods, because that keeps demand high with limited supply.
We also received the 2009 Q2 Quarterly Economic Newsletter, always a highlight for me. Player population increases (more than 300k accounts now), though I found it interesting that only 170 trillion of the 300 trillion ISK in the game sits in wallets of active accounts. Additionally, it seems like players hit a massive curve in their assets when they reach the 50k login minute mark (about 830 hours, or 208 days of four hours a day).
The report also provides some brief analysis of the popularity of hisec versus lowsec versus nullsec, but I found the graph ill-conceived and the analysis superficial. Lowsec has far fewer pilots than the other two areas, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. I hope CCP takes steps to boost it, though.
Other highlights:
- Rifter popularity has increased; I give full and complete credit to Wensley. They seem to think that new players and the L1 epic arc have a bigger effect, for some reason.
- Tony’s favored Nighthawk dominates command ship popularity by a huge margin.
- Mineral price volatility continues with sustained deflation occurring right now. Great for us secondary producers, not so great for miners.
- Interceptors don’t provide much profit to T2 inventors, though HACs do. This reflects my own experience, incidentally.
They also briefly analyze quite a few modules, both from the perspective of T2 production (BPCs versus BPOs) as well as price history:
- Codebreaker I
- Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
- Warp Scrambler II
- 10MN Microwarpdrive II
- Control Towers
- Standard X-Instinct and Exile Boosters
- Falcon
- Rook
- ECM – Multispectral Jammer II
- Small Tractor Beam I
- Ballistic Control System II
- Purifier (the first Prorator graph, mislabeled)
- Prorator
- Ballistic Deflection Array
- Siege Missile Launcher II
- Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
- Thrasher
- Concussion Bomb
- Capacitor Control Circuit I
- PLEX
Anything you particularly noticed in the report?
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