22 | December | 2022 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

It has become something of a tradition for CCP to offer up some sort of summation of player activity at year’s end. For the last three years they have done it in video form, which has been a pretty cool end of year feature, enough so that I saved off mine and uploaded them to my YouTube channel in order to preserve them.

This year though, the whole video thing didn’t make it into the budget I guess, because we got am email summary instead. Still, that is more than I get from other titles most years.

So what did CCP tell me about my time in 2022?

2022 is what we get

Well, to start with, they went for a single character rather than trying to tie everything together in accounts. They also only looked at characters on accounts that were Omega somewhat recently, so I only got a report on my main and the one account that got some Omega time when I used the ability to refer myself to some skill points. I could have been more strategic with that, but whatever.

So, the totals for Wilhelm Arcturus:

HOURS PLAYED: 158
MOST FLOWN: Megathron

The hours lines up with my own count from ManicTime. ManicTime shows fewer hours, but EVE Online is one of those games you spend time tabbed out of to look up things on the web… or to watch YouTube when you’re waiting for something to happen.

That total is a lot less than 2021 where my summary reported that I spent 982 hours just in fleets. That was largely the M2-XFE hell camp, and the count was across multiple characters, but still, that is quite a gap.

Megathron as my most flown ship… maybe? It is hard to say, but I guess we had those out during the early campaign against FI.RE.

SYSTEMS VISITED: 191
STARGATE JUMPS: 553
WORMHOLE SYSTEMS VISITED: 2

Again, that is way down from 2021 when I recorded 539 systems visited and 1,860 stargate jumps. But there was no null sec-wide war going on in 2022. There was no count of wormhole systems visited last time, but I am sure it was more than 2.

Then there is combat.

KILLS: 6
RATS KILLED: 34
MOST EXPENSIVE KILL: 366,521,129
ISK DESTROYED: 1,008,530,672

The total number of kills is way, way down relative to 2021, where I was on 902 kill mails. I know that we are not comparing apples and oranges here because even zKillboard, which doesn’t catch everything, says I was on about 250 kill mails in 2022.

The difference is that for 2022 CCP decided to only count the kills where I got the final blow. And, if I compare that number to the list of final blows shown in game, that totals out to 6.

My in-game total for 2022

At least I think those are the six. It depends on when they cut off the date for this report, something not mentioned, though I suspect it was later than the November 30th cut off they did last year.

As for why only six, when you fly in larger fleets it can be pretty rare to get the final blow while still getting yourself on a lot of kill mails.

As for the most expensive kill, they don’t say what it is, but I suspect it was that Tengu in Feythabolis, and I guess that all six of those add up to 1 billion. I could look that up on zKillboard, but the numbers might not match and I am kind of lazy.

In 2021 though my total killed was a bit over 2 trillion, though as I noted, that count included all kill mails I was on rather than just final blows.

Ship kills and value back in 2021

My top value kill mail in 2021 was a titan that rang in at over 100 billion ISK.

There was also something about a nemesis. CCP’s attempt to build some story or tension in to the stats. However, my nemesis and I only crossed paths once, the kill being that last one on the screen shot of final blows I included above. Not much of an adversarial relationship in that.

And the final stats are for market activity.

MARKET TRANSACTIONS: 324
VALUE OF SALES: 4,797,421,823
NET ISK GAINED: 4,641,194,826

I am trying to remember what I might have sold that could have added up to almost 5 billion ISK… though it does just say “market transactions.” However, since the net ISK gain was 4.6 billion, it has to be sales. I think I sold some PLEX I had on me… maybe 100 or so… when we had the big PLEX spike at the end of September.

But the in game transaction record doesn’t go back that far and all I can recall selling was a few ships left over from the war and my regular Planetary Industry output. The latter, mostly just mechanical parts, can add up to 400 million a month if I am diligent, so maybe that was it.

And that is about it. It was a quiet year in New Eden for me… and for others. There were no huge wars, though there are always some conflicts going on in null sec somewhere, and the economy was in a bad state for much of the year. Things are better now, but it took a while to get there.

CCP did produce a video however, and put together a dev blog about 2022, that wraps up the more meta achievements of the community in 2022.

As with things of this sort, I do find some of the numbers meaningless without any context. It is cool that, for example, 810 trillion ISK in value was destroyed in game in 2022. But is that more than usual? Less than usual? And is 9 million “visits to Jita” down from past years or a new record? I suspect I know, but I just get a bit irked when people trot out numbers without any anchor to what they really mean.

One slide that was pretty funny was the most popular ships in null sec based on the number of undocks.

We’re all a bunch of krabs out here

The Epithal is the planetary commodity hauling industrial. Most of my characters have at least one of those. The Hulk is the champion mining ship for throughput, especially if you have a Rorqual boosting your mining op. And then there is the Ishtar, which has fallen out of favor as a fleet doctrine heavy assault cruiser, but which remains the AFK anomaly ratting ship of choice for many due to tech II materials being cheap, making it a hull that is not too expensive to replace if you get caught.

A few years ago you would get mocked for ratting in a spendy ship like an Ishtar when the Myrmidon and the Dominix. Then CCP threw the economy into disarray and while Myrms are still a cheap ratting staple, the Dominix, a tech I battleship, is too expensive to run for ratting.