Ecliptic Rift

EVE Online has a reputation as “Spreadsheets in Space”, and for good reason: complexity, tremendous amounts of data, and endless ways to get it out and analyze it. For some of us, this holds a lot of appeal. Whether that means market analysis or EFT theorycrafting, EVE players like to play with numbers.

So if you belong to that former group, who likes to work with trade and manufacturing and research, then you really should love EVE Metrics. The site has tremendous amounts of market data, fed by a nice automatic uploader that scrapes your cache as you play (though the lack of a Linux version limits that particular utility for me). They then present all sorts of interesting visualizations of the data, including sparklines and punchcard graphs. I really love that last one, by the way.

While this next feature may not get a lot of public attention, EVE Metrics also turns this back around by providing its own API for this market data. I don’t doubt that some folks have written their own apps specifically to slice and dice this data, but if you don’t have that particular skillset, don’t worry: Google Docs has already done the heavy lifting for you with a function called ImportXML.

Essentially, in a cell where you want a particular value for a particular item, you call ImportXML and pass it the URL you want it to grab and the specific value you want it to pull out.

As an example: say you want to look at Standard Drop Boosters. If you go to the market page for that item, you can see in the URL that the item ID is 15466. You’ll need to decide which data to get: buy or sell, and minimum, maximum, median, or average. So if you wanted to get the minimum sell price in the entire cluster, you’ll enter:


=ImportXML("http://www.eve-metrics.com/api/item.xml?type_ids=15466", "/evemetrics/type/global/sell/minimum")


You can also specify region IDs by appending “&region_ids=10000011″ (or whatever ID is appropriate) after the type_ids parameter.

Pilots with a lot of manufacturing activity can easily see how this can allow you to build a cost model and keep it up to date easily, and even check your expected margins, all without knowing how to code.

Image credit Thomas Hawk

Related posts:

1. Quick Trading Guide
2. jEveAssets
3. Blog Banter 12: EVE Everywhere