New EVE Quarterly Economic Newsletter discusses PvP
Four times per year, CCP's lead economist Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson publishes the EVE Online Quarterly Economic Newsletter (QEN). Each report provides a snapshot of the in-game economy, with graphs showing market trends over the previous quarter and some speculation on the reasons for them. The third quarter 2010 QEN has just been released, and it contains some interesting information. This report has a special focus on PvP and death, starting off with statistics on ship kills by race and deaths as a function of skillpoints. Dr Eyjo suggests that players tend to progress from high security space, through low security space and eventually on to nullsec PvP. He goes on to suggest his data shows that an average player needs two years worth of skillpoints to be competitive in nullsec PvP.
The QEN shows the effect of recent nullsec wars, with a mass exodus of players from the eastern regions of nullsec to those in the south and west. Following up on the previous report's look at EVE's ISK sinks and faucets, this quarter's report indicates that the total amount of ISK in the game has been rising steadily over the past year. Most of this can be attributed to a 16% rise in total bounties paid out on NPC ships. Dr Eyjo believes this rising trend began with Dominion as system upgrades made ratting more profitable in nullsec. The ISK sinks designed to counteract the massive influx of liquid ISK bounties provide are not adequately tackling the issue, with the top five ISK sinks combined taking only 31% of bounty income out of the game. The rest of the report contains the usual snapshots of various market items in addition to a special statistics segment on ship deaths and killing blows.
