February Economic Report - Trade, Production and Mining

I was looking at the February Economic Report and seeing which Regions were the busiest (and slowest) in terms of Trade / Production / Mining.


Trade

		Trillions
1	The Forge	707.5
2	Domain	114.1
3	Sinq Laison	42.2
4	Heimatar	22.2
5	Metropolis	15.6
6	Lonetrek	13.4
7	Essence	5.2
8	The Citadel	4.6
9	Providence	4.3
10	Tash-Murkon	3.3

No surprises that for Trade it was the 5 Trade Hubs in the order we know: The Forge (i.e. Jita); Domain (i.e. Amarr); Sinq Laison (i.e. Dodixie); Heimatar (i.e. Rens); Metropolis (i.e. Hek).

Perhaps some surprises in the next 5: the expected Essence and Tash-Murkon are there.  But also Lonetrek and Citadel (both Regions that are one jump out of Jita) and Providence (null sec space that borders Domain / Tash-Murkon / Devoid / Derelik) - more on Providence below.

For me, it was that Lonetrek is close on becoming a key secondary Trade Hub that caught my eye.  I will need to investigate further what is driving the Trade - i also sell into Lonetrek and do ok business but nothing off the dials.  Certainly not as much as i do in Metropolis (Hek).

The dominance of The Forge reigns supreme though.

For me, i find The Forge way too competitive hence i aim to sell very little there.  Domain is also very competitive hence i tend to list less than my all the items i can sell.  I find Sinq Laison, Heimatar and Metropolis make good hubs for my trading income.  I also trade in The Citadel - nice income stream from low competition.

Production

		Trillions
1	The Forge	17.2
2	Lonetrek	13.2
3	The Citadel	12.0
4	Domain	6.8
5	Sinq Laison	4.6
6	Providence	3.2
7	Deklein	3.2
8	Vale of the Silent	2.8
9	Metropolis	2.4
10	Geminate	2.0

In terms of Production The Forge is top slot - makes sense, many people will produce near where they buy the raw materials and/or intend to sell.

I suspect Lonetrek and The Citadel benefit from being next to The Forge.

I do all my production in Lonetrek - historic reasons but found no reason to change so far.

Providence is null sec space but connected to a number of High Sec regions - also see below for more.

Deklein - more on that below though it seems clear why it is high up on the Production tables despite being null sec.

Mining

		Trillions
1	The Forge	1.6
2	Domain	1.1
3	Lonetrek	1.1
4	Providence	1.0
5	Metropolis	0.9
6	Everyshore	0.8
7	Malpais	0.8
8	Deklein	0.8
9	Tash-Murkon	0.7
10	The Kalevala Expanse	0.7

Mining also had few surprises at the top.  The Forge and Domain being major Trade Hubs - so people mining near where they intend to sell and Lonetrek being next to The Forge and itself a major production Region.

I guess Providence is up there given it is nullsec space that is very connected to several High Sec Regions - and see below for more.

Overall Slowest Region

I looked at how each Region ranked on Trade / Production / Mining and looked to see which region was at the bottom of each table.

The slowest, by a clear win, is Cloud Ring.  Bottom of the pack for Trade and Production.  Only 6bn ISK traded and 11bn ISK mined and 15bn ISK of production.  (vs The Forge of 708 Trillion / 1.6 Trillion / 17 Trillion respectively).

Oddly, though, the Destroyed value was ranked about middle of the pack.

No NPC stations would be a hinderence, and the remote location also a deterence.

It is though only 13 jumps out of Jita hence i jumped into my Interceptor and took a look around.  I met hardly anyone in there whilst i was flying around.



Non-Highsec Regions of note



Deklein

One of the busiest non-highsec regions is Deklein (Providence is the busiest).

2.6 trillion ISK traded and 760bn ISK mined and 3.2 trillion ISK of production.  It is in the top 10 for Production and Mining, and number 13 for Trade.

Now this demonstrates how little i am aware of the game outside of the Economy.  I decided to take a look around.  Passed through 2 battles no less to get there and discovered it is, more or less, the home region of the Goons.

Not an NPC station in sight (assuming i am reading the Dotlan Maps correctly).



Providence

In terms of Trade / Production / Mining outside of High Sec then Providence takes the top slot in every category.

In part because it is directly connected to the High Sec regions of Domain / Tash-Murkon / Devoid / Derelik.

There is no NPC station as far as i can tell hence there does seem to be more to it.

It is also one of those few regions where Imports exceed Exports by over 120% (indicating that people are bringing more items into the Region as vs taking items out).

As far as i can tell, so far, there is an ethos / rules in the Region that are more neutral friendly than most.  If that were the case, i can see how it would encourage / allow greater participation in trading, production and mining than other null / low sec regions.

I am looking into this Region - i still need to find a Low or Null sec region to set up my next trading venture.

The cost of the repeating Scope video in the Captain's Quarters

Anyone who is docked in the Captain's Quarters for longer than 6 minutes will hear the Scope video: "The serpentis corporation has been suffering heavy losses both in ships and materials etc etc".

Technically, there are two videos being shown:

So here are some quick facts:

• They play every 6 minutes, one after the other.
• They use 22mb in total (11mb each)

So, for 1 hour docked in station it costs 220mb.  That all starts to add up if you are in the station updating market orders, working on industry or just have an alt sitting there doing nothing.

And then if you have more than 1 account open . . . . . . . 

If you, like me, have a cap on what you can download and have to pay for additional MB then several hours of playing Eve starts to become a real life financial cost.

It can only make sense to be able to toggle this to play only once per log on session.

February Economic Report: the upward driver to plex prices

CCP Quant has put up another Dev Blog post looking at some of the economic metric within the Eve Online economy for February 2016.

It follows on from the talk given at Eve Vegas which looked at the economic metrics for the month of September 2015 - that specific blog post also gave the definitions of each item of data.



Active ISK - and what it means for the price of Plex

The chart below shows the amount of ISK sitting in alts wallets (green line) and corp wallets (orange line) to give the total ISK just lying around as the blue line going back to 2012.  In summary, there was 949 trillion ISK lying around by end of February, a rise of 13 trillion.




949 trillion is a lot of spare ISK to have lying around - but the question we could have is how much is needed to finance player operations (replacing destroyed ships and equipment, running war operations, running trade operations, etc i.e. in wallets and expected to be spent) and therefore how much is truly doing nothing and therefore can be spent on Plex.

To answer that question we need to use the "Velocity of ISK" graph below.  The Velocity of ISK described how much of 1 ISK is used over a 30 day rolling period.




As can be seen above, the trend has been falling over time to now below 0.5x.  The recent large spike was caused by skill extractors.

But lets stick with the 0.5x and indeed the long term decline.  That tells us two things.  Firstly, of the 949 trillion ISK lying around, only 475 trillion is actually used per month leaving the other 474 trillion just sitting idle.  Secondly, that proportion of ISK and absolute value of ISK just sitting idle is rising each month and so can only be an upside driver for Plex prices - what else would it be spent on?

As i write the price of Plex is 1.13 billion ISK and is flat over 6 months having rising from 0.80 billion to 1.30 billion, breaking 1bn in June 2015.  The recent move has been down but it feels like the ongoing rise of ISK coming into the game (mainly through bounty payments and NPC buy orders).

In a way, I would always expect the ISK coming into the game to exceed player requirements (i suspect CCP don't want people to leave because they can not get enough ISK to play - and the ease of getting ISK for you and me may not be the case for someone else, so the required ability to get enough ISK needs to be quite low).  Hence, until a new Sink (method of taking ISK out of the game, such as transaction taxes) comes along we have an inbuilt upward driver of Plex prices.

Perhaps what is also interesting is that if we add up all the ISK coming into the economy and deduct all the ISK leaving the economy then we get a rise of 22 trillion ISK which therefore indicates that 9 trillion ISK (22-13) was held by characters that ceased their subsciptions - not sure how much Plex is also "retired".

Bringing PVP and team based PVE to the masses

Something of a thought for Eve Online here - though nothing to do with making ISK - but all about seeing if we can bring the joys of PVP to the PVE / HighSec community.

I was missing said other game referred to as World of Warcraft.  I was missing the ability of someone like me, a solo player, who enjoys the markets and PVE but also the ability to get into PVP and team based PVE at the drop of a hat for short periods of time (like an hour or so).  So i fired the game back up and started a new alt.

What does WoW do for instant PVP or team based PVE?

Eve Online gives me the great market based game (much deeper than World of Warcraft) but is not as good on the ability to get into team based PVE or PVP almost instantly if i am not in the right location geographically in the game.  Generally, i have to travel to get some team based PVE or PVP.

The way World of Warcraft allows such instant PVP or team based PVE to happen from very early on in the game (i got to that point within 4 hours) is to allow players to queue to form a group that is going to enter PVP or PVE.  Whilst they are in the queue they can continue doing what they were already doing (general PVE etc).  These are called Instances, and the other players on the server can not interfere with them.

The queuing players specify the role they will take (tank, healer or dps).

And once enough people are in the queue to form a group each player gets notified that the PVE / PVP is about to start and, if they accept, they are instantly taken from their current location to the location of the PVE / PVP event.  Once over, each player is returned to their prior location.


How could this relate to EVE?

Clearly, Eve already has PVE / PVP events ready to go but, as far as i am aware, there is no way of being transported straight there?

My proposal is to create PVP events (instances), with set ships and specs (say 5 frigates on each side with set specs and set clone specs) where players can put themselves in a queue to join.  When enough people are ready then the players are notified and transported straight to the event.  Hence, these can happen at any time - just needs enough players to want to play.

Would seem to be an ideal way of getting different players together and allowing PVE / HighSec players to see what PVP is all about.

And something similar could happen for team based PVE.


But would this not detract from general PVP?

Not really.  It does not in WoW.  It is another aspect of the game that allows solo players to mix with others or those in guilds (corps) to enjoy team based events when their corp is not online.