We had the Monthly Economic Report for February 2023 land the week before last… I’m only just now getting to it due to a several day power outage… and it was tempting to once again declare it to be something of a benchmark to consider before events. In this case, the Imperium moving north to war in Pure Blind.
EVE Online nerds harder
Except, of course, that the Imperium is joining a war already in progress. Fraternity and its WinterCo allies have been going after B3 in the north and things have advanced to the point where even CCP has taken a moment out of their usual blinkered focus on their marketing plan to note that null sec was up to something again.
So we should go straight into destruction.
Destruction
And, after all of that, destruction overall was down in February. You can see the blue line representing destruction trending down in the back half of the month.
Feb 2023 – Production vs Destruction vs Mined
The data for that chart shows the total value of destruction at 34.97 trillion ISK in value, down from 41.09 trillion ISK in January.
Likewise, the region stats also show about a 6 trillion drop in destruction, with the total there being 34.54 trillion ISK. The top ten regions for destruction were:
- The Forge – 1.67 trillion 4.82% (Caldari High Sec)
- Pure Blind – 1.61 trillion 4.68% (B2 Coalition)
- The Citadel – 1.52 trillion 4.40% (Caldari High Sec)
- Vale of the Silent – 1.45 trillion 4.19% (Fraternity)
- Fade – 1.43 trillion 4.15% (B2 Coalition)
- Sinq Laison – 1.40 trillion 4.05% (Gallente High Sec)
- Lonetrek – 1.38 trillion 3.99% (Caldari High Sec)
- Delve – 1.32 trillion 3.83% (B2 Coalition)
- Perrigen Falls – 1.23 trillion 3.56% (PanFam)
- Metropolis – 1.08 trillion 3.12% (Minmata High Sec)
While The Forge remains on top, Pure Blind is in the second spot. All told those ten regions made up 40.79% of the destruction in February.
So it feels like Pure Blind was indeed warming up when it came to the war, really there appeared to be less destruction elsewhere. PB was in fifth position last month, with 1.57 trillion ISK destroyed, very close to the February value. FI.RE and their move op disasters last month were no doubt part of what built up those numbers.
The security band chart shows null sec was still the place for destruction, though it was down by a bit.
Feb 2023 – Destruction over time by Security Band
CCP has also included a new graphic this month in an attempt to illustrate the largest battles every month. Unfortunately, the version I can post here, the PNG graphic, is pretty useless. It does not impart any information of value beyond something akin to a heat map.
Feb 2023 – Battles in New Eden by Participants
The HTML version has data embedded in it that gives more information and context.
A battle example from Pure Blind
But I cannot embed that in the blog because it would be too large to fit in my format and WordPress.com doesn’t allow that sort of thing in any case. (Too easy to embed trojans and such.)
However, they do provide the data for the charts. If I get to another look at just kills in another post this month, I will draw some data from it. I have already pulled the data into Power BI. The main pain is that they don’t map the system IDs to their names in that table, so I have to go elsewhere to find the mapping.
Production
Meanwhile, production numbers were also off a bit, though not by as much as destruction. The regional stats recorded 152.90 trillion ISK in production in February, off by a little less that 3 trillion, with the top ten regions being:
- The Forge – 22.49 trillion 14.71% (Caldari High Sec)
- Delve – 20.74 trillion 13.56% (Imperium)
- Vale of the Silent – 16.34 trillion 10.68% (Fraternity)
- The Citadel – 10.00 trillion 6.54% (Caldari High Sec)
- Lonetrek – 7.99 trillion 5.23% (Caldari High Sec)
- Heimatar – 7.72 trillion 5.05% (Minmatar High Sec)
- Perrigen Falls – 5.13 trillion 3.35% (PanFam)
- Fade – 5.12 trillion 3.35% (B2)
- Fountain – 4.86 trillion 3.18% (Imperium)
- Deklein – 4.12 trillion 2.70% (Fraternity)
As usual, the regions feeding Jita remain at the top of the list, while those ten regions made up 68.35% of the production in New Eden.
Trade
February saw 736.23 trillion ISK in trade value, down 61.35 trillion from January. That feels like a lot, but the total averaged out over 28 days is about 26 trillion ISK, so that drop could very much just be the fact that February is three days shorter than January.
- The Forge – 494.07 trillion 73.21% (Jita)
- Domain – 40.52 trillion 6.00% (Amarr)
- Delve – 22.04 trillion 3.27% (Imperium)
- Lonetrek – 19.68 trillion 2.92% (Caldari High Sec)
- Perrigen Falls – 14.45 trillion 2.14% (PanFam)
- Sinq Laison – 13.30 trillion 1.97% (Dodixie)
- Metropolis – 12.09 trillion 1.79% (Hek)
- Heimatar – 7.74 trillion 1.15% (Rens)
- Vale of the Silent – 7.06 trillion 1.05% (Fraternity)
- Fade – 5.28 trillion 0.78% (B3)
As always, The Forge, home to Jita, tops the list representing almost 3 out of every 4 ISK spent on trade.
And, furthering my statement about the lower value being more a matter of fewer days in the month, the velocity of ISK continued to rise.
Feb 2023 – Velocity of ISK
That points to a healthier economy, especially after the doldrums of the economic strangulation era that CCP went through a while back. We still haven’t full recovered… you can see grim moments in CCP decision making in the big dips in the line… but we are at least back on the rise.
Still, the bottom line on that chart, the one absent PLEX or contracts, isn’t rising all that much, so the activity of the top line, which includes PLEX, is something CCP can manipulate with in-game sales on game time for PLEX.
ISK Faucets
Here is where we talk about the money and where all that ISK comes from. The top faucets for February 2023 were the usual suspects.
Feb 2023 – ISK Faucet Totals
Commodities remained above the combo of NPC bounty prizes and ESS payouts, but only just. Commodities were actually down by about 8 trillion ISK in value when compared to January, while bounties were up a bit. Commodities are always a bit odd though, because they only get counted when people cash them in to an NPC, while bounties are collected and counted immediately.
Feb 2023 – Top Faucets Over Time
You can see that, after the big climb for commodities in December and January due to the holiday event, there was a fairly big dip in both commodities and bounty prizes, followed by a resurgence for both, with commodities leading the way again.
Drilling in to commodities over time we see the holiday event spike and then the rise in Sleeper drops.
Feb 2022 – Top Commodity Items Over Time
Breaking that out to the total values for the month shows us this.
Feb 2023 – Commodity Value by Type
Then, on the NPC bounty and ESS payout side of things, the top regions on that front were:
- Vale of the Silent – 4.29 trillion 10.26% (Fraternity)
- Delve – 3.73 trillion 8.93% (Imperium)
- Perrigen Falls – 2.94 trillion 7.04% (PanFam)
- Fountain – 2.66 trillion 6.36% (Imperium)
- Querious – 2.59 trillion 6.20% (Imperium)
- The Kalevala Expanse – 2.27 trillion 5.43% (PanFam)
- Deklein – 1.73 trillion 4.15% (B2)
- Branch – 1.69 trillion 4.05% (Fraternity)
- Tribute – 1.39 trillion 3.33% (Fraternity)
- Malpais – 1.36 trillion 3.26% (PanFam)
Overall the regional stats showed the combined bounties and ESS payouts added up to 41.77 trillion ISK in value, about a trillion less than January. Those ten regions added up to 59.00% of the total payouts.
All of that drove the money supply up in February.
Feb 2023 – Money Supply
The big jump was still in November, when we got the Uprising expansion and CCP loosened up on the dynamic bounty system. In December we saw a flat month due to money being taken out of the economy due to players who came back for the 7 days of free omega leaving again. But since then the money supply has continued to grow.
Feb 2023 ISK Balance
This is not a bad thing. Players with ISK in their pockets feel better about putting assets at risk. The whole CCP scarcity theory, that making us poor and resource starved would drive conflict, proved to be false. I have said this before, and will no doubt say it again, but applying real world economic theory to a game like this comes with risks. The players don’t live in New Eden. If life gets expensive and miserable for them in game, if they feel poor and are afraid to lose the assets they have, that doesn’t drive them to conflict, that drives them to log off and play something more fun.
Mining
Mining remains as boring to write about as it is to do for me, but still I have some numbers. From the regional stats, the top ten regions for mining value were:
- Delve – 1.49 trillion 6.79% (Imperium)
- The Forge – 1.14 trillion 5.19% (Caldari High Sec)
- Vale of the Silent – 1.07 trillion 4.86% (Fraternity)
- Lonetrek – .99 trillion 4.49% (Caldari High Sec)
- Metropolis – .93 trillion 4.22% (Minmatar High Sec)
- Domain – .87 trillion 3.97% (Amarr High Sec)
- Aridia – .75 trillion 3.40% (Amarr Low Sec)
- The Kalevala Expanse – .73 trillion 3.31% (PanFam)
- Sinq Laison – .71 trillion 3.25% (Gallente High Sec)
- Perrigen Falls – .68 trillion 3.09% (PanFam)
Those totaled up to 21.95 trillion ISK in value and 42.58% of the mining value done in New Eden.
Overall, mining was broken out in February in the following security bands.
Feb 2023 – Mining volume by security band
That might be a little hard to read, but you can click on it to see it full size.
Loyalty Points
And then there are loyalty points, which I started listing on a whim, but which don’t really change enough from month to month to really be worth writing about. So, for one final list from the regional stats, here are the top ten regions.
- Lonetrek – 1556.97 million 16.15% (Caldari High Sec)
- Venal – 1491.29 million 15.47% (Guristas)
- Metropolis – 1274.95 million 13.22% (FW low Sec)
- Placid – 851.11 million 8.83% (FW low Sec)
- Delve – 427.98 million 4.44% (Blood Raiders)
- Curse – 344.73 million 3.58% (Angel Cartel)
- Stain – 343.42 million 3.56% (Sansha)
- Aridia – 332.41 million 3.45% (Low Sec Paragon Agent)
- Essence – 322.24 million 3.34% (FW low Sec)
- Pure Blind – 286.73 million 2.97% (Mordu/SOE)
There was a total of 9,641.26 million loyalty points earned, with the ten regions above accounting for 75.01% of those earned.
And so it goes, another month in the books. All of the sources and other places I could find where this was being discussed are linked below.
Related
- CCP – February 2023 Monthly Economic Report
- CCP – February 2023 MER Forum Thread
- Reddit – February 2023 MER thread
- TNG – Looking at EVE Online in February
- TAGN – Last month’s MER Post
The Ancient Gaming Noob 