The Tug of War Between Escalation and Hulkageddon

Again, CCP_Diagoras offers up data tidbits too juicy to ignore.

This time it is a comparison of mining activity before and after the Inferno: Escalation update went live.

Inferno – The Escalation Begins

One of the notable aspects of this update was the removal of mineral drops from drone NPCs and the removal of tech I ship fittings from all NPC drops.  Both of these were very significant sources of mineral in the New Eden economy.

The intent of this was to spur mining and make it a more profitable venture.

So you would assume that mining activity would be on the rise post-Escalation. And there was an increase some regions of space.

Null sec:

Compared to the 7 day avg before Escalation, the last 7 have seen a 14.3% increase in avg m3 mined in nullsec (from 19.8% to 33.2% of total)

Low sec:

Compared to the 7 day avg before Escalation, the last 7 have seen a 49.1% increase in avg m3 mined in low sec (from 0.26% to 0.58% of total)

WH space:

Compared to the 7 day avg before Escalation, the last 7 have seen a 14.7% increase in avg m3 mined in WH sec (from 2.8% to 4.7% of total)

So far, as expected.  Rising mineral prices appear to be driving a desire to mine.

Then there is high sec:

Compared to the 7 day average before Escalation, the last 7 days have seen a 45.53% decrease in average m3 of ore mined within high sec.

Ouch, a 45% dive!

Of course, Hulkageddon is under way.  And Hulkageddon targets are primarily in high security space.  So most of those (as of this moment)  nearly 4,000 dead mining ships on the leaderboard were in high sec.

The targets are in high sec for two reasons.

First, in low, null, and WH space, miners already have to take defensive precautions every day.  Hulkageddon in null sec, for example, is pretty much a non-event.

Second, most of the miners in the game are in high sec space.  CCP_Diagoras put up one more factoid that illustrates this very well.

Average mined per day for the last 7 days: High (1.47bn m3), Low (13.8m m3), Null (796m m3), WH (112m m3)

So even with a 45% drop in high sec mining, it is still the place where most of the ore is harvested.  High sec accounts for nearly double the ore as the rest of space, even with Hulkageddon in full forces.

I hope we’ll get to see some 7 day yields in the post-Hulkageddon time frame to see how much ore high sec miners will be pulling in when the threat of gank has been (mostly) removed.

Anger About Discord on Fippy Darkpaw

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx

The surprise “no” vote on the unlock of the Gates of Discord expansion on the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server has some people quite annoyed.  It seems like a more aptly named expansion as each day goes by.

Gates of Discord indeed

There were threats of bad in-game behavior posted to the forums, intended to protest the results.  According to one poster on the forum (post since removed by SOE, but save here via the magic of RSS) these threats were being made good.

So the threats from Citi/TL have come true. Because GoD was not released they have now jumped the rotation and are killing everything, and then saying ” you don’t like it, vote yes for GoD”. Heck, some of them are even training people to get what they want. Is this going to be tollerated, I WOULD HOPE NOT

I suppose there is some small irony in this happening in relation to the Gates of Discord expansion, since its high level content is instanced and thus would make this sort of bad behavior much more difficult.

Cooler heads were interested in knowing how close the vote was.  SOE, however, has a policy of not releasing the actual vote count, for reasons they won’t list, which seems to me like a dubious stance at best.  Questions about the results lead to a forum thread of its own.

Initially Piestro, who seems to be on EverQuest duty again, announced that the “no” vote won by a 13 point margin.

Overall there was about a 13 point difference between No and Yes, with No being victorious. That’s a pretty significant victory.

Then questions came up as to exactly what that meant (something people should ask any time they see poll results without any context) with people trying to derive possible result scenarios.

Piestro followed this up with a single clarification.

Yes, it was 13% difference with greater than 50% of the populace voting no.

After that he left the thread to itself, which was probably wise if that was all the information he could release.

I, for example, wonder how they defined “populace.”  That seems like a very large number of people potentially, given how popular the server was initially.  I suspect that it means “eligible voters who have logged on to the server recently.”

Eligible voters was, of course, another of the points of contention that flared up in the thread.  For this round, anybody within 21 levels of the level cap were eligible, which meant characters who were level 44 or higher could vote.

This lead to the usual argument about such franchise, with one side declaring that only players at level cap should be allowed to vote, since the next expansion only matters to them, while others pointed out that if everybody pays the same subscription fee, then they all ought to be allowed to vote.

And things went down hill from there, devolving into the usual “if you aren’t at level cap then you aren’t really playing on this server” argument, which ended up out in left field arguing about tax law in the state of Washington, proving once again that you should avoid analogies at all cost.

The thread was abandoned at that point and a new thread started up in an attempt to regulate behavior based on vote outcomes, which seemed, to me, to be an effort to validate the behavior complained about in the initial quote above.  This thread devolved as well, but it is a official game forum, so what do you expect.

There *should* be a new vote up next week.  We will see what the outcome is this time around.