EVE Elements

CCP announced at FanFest that the next expansion, Dominion, will be released on December 1st, 2009. What we know so far about how the new sovereignty system works is based on CCP WeirdFish's dev blog, Print 'Hello, World'. The mechanics are not finalized, but fundamental changes seem to me to be unlikely at this point, so we can take a look at how defensible systems will be after the expansion.

The first step in forcing a claimed system to neutral sovereignty is to anchor and online disruptor fields, or "System Restore Units" as they're called right now, at each stargate. Counterintuitively, systems with more stargates are easier to defend than systems with fewer stargates, as attackers need to anchor a disruptor at all the stargates, and defenders need to destroy only one disruptor to cancel the process. In systems with many gates, the attackers need to spread out to defend the disruptors while they're onlining, giving the advantage to the current system holders.

This looks similar to an earlier entry I made, Systems by Stargate Count, but in this case only systems in which players can claim sovereignty are considered. Again, there are quite a few dead-ends, and only a handful of hubs:

I don't claim to know how alliances decide on what systems to claim, nor how the decision will be made post-patch, but it seems to me this would be a factor to keep in mind.

The upcoming expansion, Dominion, will be doing away with the present POS-based sovereignty claiming system. Defensibility will no longer be influenced by how many moons a system has, and instead be related to how many stargates a system has. So, let's take a before picture.

There are 2,711 systems that are claimable -- which is to say, accessible to players via stargate (not CCP space or wormhole space), with 0.0 security, not claimed by any NPC faction, and with one or more moons. There are actually three systems with no moons at all: Tuuriainas, in 0.6 space; New Eden, 0.3; and 35-JWD, 0.0. The lack of moons in 35-JWD means that it is unclaimable under the current system.

The median number of moons in a system is 44, and the mean is 43.5. The mode is a bit higher, with 63 systems having 50 moons each. Let's take a look at the extreme cases:

It's not yet been made clear how system upgrading will work, including whether or how moon mining will be affected. Perhaps the systems with a large number of moons will become less valuable, and vice versa.

Now that we have the old data exports, we can look at what's changed over the last few years.

Red Moon Rising was the first data export with item types included, by which point there were already quite a few types available. The number of items has grown over time, as would be expected. There were 13,261 different items in the export then, and we're up to 18,260 now -- an increase of about 1.3 thousand items per year.

Clearly, the meaning of the "published" flag has changed over time. With the first Revelations release, the number of published items plummeted from 11,606 to 4,462, from which it's been climbing ever since. At the moment, whether or not an item is published seems to determine whether or not you can sell it via the contract system.

The biggest jump in the number of items on the market was going from Revelations to Revelations II. New items include bombs and outpost upgrades, but the majority of the newly purchasable items were old items added to the market as a result of the decision to allow faction ammo (ie, True Sanshas Radio L or Guristas Tungsten Charge M) to be more easily traded. Revelations I did away with the "secret" market: previously, you could right-click on any item and "View Market Details", even if the item type didn't have a market group (as in, you couldn't get to it via the "Browse" tab on the left). This led to an interesting situation where you could only buy things you already have, and you could only sell to people who have or have had the item (if they added it to their market favorites). The contract system, which was introduced at the same time to replace the older escrow system, turned out not to be convenient for purchasing ammo, and so it was added to the market.

Second to Rev1 -> Rev2 was Apo1.3.1 -> Apo1.5, due almost entirely to the differently-sized rigs introduced: 156 new blueprints and 312 new rigs (both tech 1 and tech 2 versions; tech 2 rig BPOs, of course, do not exist).

CCP recently announced their anti-RMT account initiative, Unholy Rage. Their first strike was on June 22nd, which you may recall I noticed by the sudden drop in the number of jumps per day. From the dev blog:

...the very disproportionate load the RMT type accounts imposed on our system. While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2% of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30%.

Clearly, the state of Ingunn has improved so dramatically that one can hardly recognize it as the same system. The same is true for many other systems previously chock full of macro miners and mission farmers.

So let's take a look at this and other systems. To get a somewhat balanced view, I've taken the jump data from June 15th, June 20th, June 22nd, June 27th, and June 29th -- respectively, a week before, the Saturday before, the day of, the Saturday after, and a week after the mass banning. June 22nd is split at 11:00 (downtime), which is not quite halfway through the day. Also, since my map data is pulled on the :45 minute mark, 15 minutes of the previous hour is being counted as post-downtime. Hopefully these two factors are outweighed by the inclusion of two days on either side of the division, one of which is a weekend day, and by taking the average jumps per hour instead of the total.

While there's a pretty dramatic graph in the dev blog, raw numbers have their own power. Jumps into and out of Ingunn dropped by 97% and a whopping 2,434 jumps per hour! In fact, all seven of the systems in the Evannater constellation of the Heimatar region dropped by at least 95%; six were in the top 20 and the seventh ranked at 43 (when sorting by difference in total jumps, not percentage difference). One of the probable reasons for Ingunn's attractiveness was the number of high level agents -- six level 4, quality 20 agents in one system, and a storyline agent for one of the two factions in that system. Mission locations tend to be in the same constellation as the agent, which pretty much explains the number of jumps (and after the ban, the fall in jumps) in Evannater. Gultratren, also in the Evannater constellation, has the distinction of having 17 asteroid belts.

The Ravin constellation, in Kor-Azor, was similarly affected. Six of the seven systems dropped by 85% or more, with the seventh system (Kerying) staying about the same, at around 127 jumps over two and a half days. The mission hub would appear to be Schmaeel, with three L4Q20 agents and one storyline agent. Schmaeel is also the only system in the top 10 to have an ice field.

Let's finish up by taking a look at some aggregate numbers for constellations:

For comparison, the mean decrease in average jumps per hour was 1.95, and the median decrease was -0.38 (meaning, for the average hour in the average system, there were 0.38 more jumps per hour after the banning than there were before)*. It's amazing how large a difference relatively few players can make.

For a change of pace, CCP has released the data export for Apocrypha 1.5 BEFORE it's actually live on Tranquility. Chruker has done an excellent job of showing the history of EVE releases; I thought I'd look at the history of the official data export.

• 2009-08-18 Apocrypha 1.5
  • forum thread: Apocrypha 1.5 Static Data Dump - Oh wow, already?, by CCP Zirnitra
  • official MSSQL: Apocrypha_1.5.29569_db.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/apo15/ (MySQL)
• 2009-07-07 Apocrypha 1.3.1
  • forum thread: Apocrypha 1.3.1 Static Data Dump - Get it while its hot, by CCP Zirnitra
  • official MSSQL: Apocrypha_1.3.1.94168_1_db.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/apo131/ (MySQL)
• 2009-05-15 Apocrypha 1.2
  • forum thread: Apocrypha 1.2 Static Data Dump available, by CCP Zirnitra
  • official MSSQL: Apocrypha_1.2.0.88517_db.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/apo120/ (MySQL)
• 2009-04-23 Apocrypha 1.1
  • forum thread: Apocrypha 1.1 DB Dump Is Out (shared with the apo100 release, not officially announced)
  • official MSSQL: Apocrypha_1.1.0.86756_db.zip
  • official images:
    • Apocrypha_1.1.0_imgs.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/apo110/ (MySQL)
• 2009-03-18 Apocrypha 1.0
  • forum thread: Apocrypha 1.1 DB Dump Is Out (shared with the apo110 release, not officially announced)
  • official MSSQL: Apocrypha_1.0.0.84609_db.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/apo100/ (MySQL)
• 2008-11-13 Quantum Rise 1.0
  • forum thread: Quantum Rise Database Export?, by CCP Lingorm
  • official MSSQL: QuantumRise_1.0.0.69477_db.zip
  • official images:
    • classic
    • premium
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/qr100/ (MySQL)
• 2008-10-07 Empyrean Age 1.1.1
  • forum thread: EA 1.1.1 Data dump, by CCP Lingorm
  • official MSSQL: EmpyreanAge_1.1.1.64451_db.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/ea111/ (MySQL)
• 2008-09-05 Empyrean Age 1.1
  • forum thread: Empyrean Age 1.1 Static Data Dump Released, by CCP Lingorm / CCP Prism X
  • official MSSQL: EmpyreanAge_1.1.0.20724-1_db.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/ea110/ (MySQL)
• 2008-07-30 Empyrean Age 1.0
  • devblog: Empyrean Age Data Export, by CCP Prism X
  • forum thread: New Dev Blog: The Return of the Data Export
  • official MSSQL: EmpyreanAge_1.0_sql.zip
  • official images:
    • EmpyreanAge_1.0_img_icons.zip
  • conversions: http://eve.no-ip.de/ea10/ (MySQL)
• 2007-12-05 Trinity 1.0
  • forum thread: Trinity 1.0 Static Data Export, by CCP Garthagk
  • official SQL: trinity_1.0_sql.zip
  • official images:
    • icons
    • classic types
    • premium types
  • MySQL conversion (CCP mirror)
• 2007-08-30 Revelations 2.2
  • forum thread: Newest Data Dump, by CCP Garthagk (not officially announced)
  • official SQL: revelations_2.2.0_sql.zip
  • MySQL conversion
• 2007-07-09 Revelations 2.0.1
  • devblog: Third Party Development (And A New Data Dump!), by CCP Garthagk
  • forum thread: New Blog, Garthagk with more API information and a Surprise!
  • official SQL: revelations_2.0.1_sql_2.zip
  • official images:
    • icons
    • alliance logos
    • types
  • MySQL conversion (CCP mirror)
• 2006-12-06 Revelations
  • devblog: EVE Data Export, The Continuation Of An Epic Saga, by CCP t20
  • forum thread: EVE Data Export, REVELATIONS Edition and Dev Blog
  • official SQL: SV-2.14__CL-99999__DB-1953.rar
  • MySQL conversion
• 2006-01-24 Red Moon Rising
  • devblog: EVE Data Export, RMR Edition, by CCP t20
  • forum thread: EVE data export, rmr edition
  • official SQL: data_misc_sql.rar (official CSV: data_misc_csv.rar)
  • official images:
    • alliance logos
    • blueprints
    • drones
    • icons (black background)
    • icons (grey background)
    • icons (white background)
    • map images
    • NPC corporation logos
    • NPC faction logos
    • ship icons
    • ship wireframe artwork
    • stations (1)
    • stations (2)
    • structures
• 2004-09-23 Castor
  • devblog: Agents And Almost Everything About Them, by CCP t20
  • official Excel spreadsheet: EVE_map_tables.xls
• 2004-08-19 Castor
  • devblog: Updated Map Topology Published, by CCP t20
• 2003-10-13 Second Genesis
  • devblog: Map Topology Unveiled - Yours To Download And Study, by CCP t0rfifrans
  • official Excel spreadsheet: EVE_map_tables.xls

I was very happy to learn that the Wayback Machine had saved the Excel spreadsheets, as I didn't think they crawled files. The second version seems not to have been saved, which is why I don't have a link to it; if you have a copy, please let me know.

There is an abrupt drop-off moving from the 10-50 m3 range to the 50-100 m3 range, as you may recall. There are only 98 items in this group, which is just 2% of all the items on the market:

There are just two deployables in this size range: the Mobile Small Warp Disruptor, in tech 1 and 2 varieties. 16 of the 22 charges are tech 2 mining crystals, which are 50 m3 each. The other charges are the six bombs, at 75 m3 a piece. These aside, once again, the predominate category is modules.

There are still quite a few groups, but this time there are few enough to allow a meaningful examination. Except where stated otherwise, every single module is 50 m3 in volume:

• Both the tech 1 and tech 2 battleship-sized (100 MN) afterburners are here.
• The only armor reinforcer in this bucket is the 800mm Reinforced Steel Plates I.
• The armor repair projector group includes the tech 1 Large Remote Armor Repair System I and its four named variants.
• The battleship class "X-Large" shield boosters, along with their merely "Large" counterparts in the armor and hull repair unit groups are all here, including the tech 2 versions.
• The Cynosural Field Generator I is here; the Covert Cynosural Field Generator I is smaller, at 25 m3.
• The battleship versions of both the energy destabilizer (Heavy Energy Neutralizer I) and the energy transfer array (Large Energy Transfer Array I) fall into this size bracket.
• Four energy weapons: the dual heavy beam, the mega pulse, the mega beam, and the tachyon beam lasers.
• Except for the Command Processor I, everything in the gang coordinator group is a link, at 60 m3 a piece.
• Five hybrid weapons: the 350 and 425mm railguns, and the electron, ion, and neutron blaster cannons.
• There's only one interdiction sphere launcher, used to launch (among other things) the Mobile Small Warp Disruptors mentioned above.
• Related to that is the Warp Disrupt Field Generator I, which is used on a heavy interdictor.
• To use the aforementioned bombs, you'll need a Bomb Launcher I, which is in the curiously named missile launcher bomb group.
• Three projectile weapons: Dual 650mm Repeating Artillery I, 1200mm Artillery Cannon I, and 1400mm Howitzer Artillery I.
• There is a tech 1, a named, and a tech 2 smart bomb for each of the four damage types.
• And last, but not least, is the Small Tractor Beam I.

Medium control towers are in an interesting position. They're the least used size, according to a dev blog from a few months ago: "Medium control towers have been the least popular since their introduction except for only one month, making it seem that there is less demand for a middle ground, with the wish being for either as large a starbase as possible or as small a starbase as possible." On player-made goods, this lack of demand would drive prices down (as well as supply, of course), but since this is an NPC-provided item it remains at 200m ISK per tower. Of course, the faction towers are made by players from dropped blueprints, so they are subject to supply and demand. With no demand, prices are quite low... less than a small tower, in fact. There were several different medium tower contracts available when I checked, so for the purposes of this post I'll say pirate control towers are 150m ISK more than empire, and elite towers 200m ISK more.

As with the small towers, the medium towers all had the above fuels in common. Since they're all the same, they can be ignored.

Once again, the pirate towers use about 85% as much fuel as the basic towers, and the elite ones about 75% of base. So, now we can compare savings and ROI.

The prices have pretty much all risen since I figured out the cost of running a small POS, which means that the time to recoup the investment in going with a pirate or elite pirate tower will be even lower:

This looks like a much more reasonable proposition, with all but the Guristas tower paying off in less than a year.

Rank three is the third most common rank of skills, with 75 skillbooks. Ten of those are unpublished:

• The corporation management skills refinery management and CFO training seem to be abandoned ideas to give benefits to corporation leaders. The first "increases mineral yield of refinery by 5% if acting as station manager"; the second gives a "5% discount on all fees at non-hostile NPC station if acting as CFO of a corp".
• The third corporation management skill with rank three, public relations, doesn't have much of a description: "Skill at managing corporate offices." Perhaps CCP considered making the number of offices a corporation could have skill-limited?
• The two gunnery skills shield piercing and armor breaching seem to be related, as they're only one typeID apart and have similar names. The first doesn't have a description, but the second does: "Improved understanding of armor weaknesses. Grants a 5% Bonus to Armor breacher duration." This seems to suggest that there were to be modules that made it more likely for damage to bleed through the shield or the armor before they were depleted, but there doesn't appear to be anything else in the data export.
• The missile launcher operation skill missile guidance has the description "Skill at missile tracking and guidance. +5% bonus to all missile agility", but as I understand it, missiles will always hit.
• The trade skill general freight gives a "5% Bonus per level to Ship Cargo Capacity". This could either be something that was tried and failed, or possibly it was replaced by per-ship skill bonuses from the relevant spaceship command skills; I'm not entirely sure on the timeline for those.
• Like the DED connections skill it requires, the trade skill bounty hunting never made it into the game.
• The electronics skill propulsion fall off would have given a "5% Bonus to warp scrambler and stasis web Falloff per skill level." Instead, you can have the level 4 equivalent by overheating those modules.
• Finally, the electronics skill tournament observation serves as a super-powered version of multitasking: "Skill at observating tournaments. +2 extra targets per skill level, up to the ship's maximum allowed number of targets locked." Presumably there's also a ship that has a large number of maximum targets, but either that ship isn't in the database or its target limit is infinite (which makes it hard to query for...).

So, the other 65 skills:

Mechanic has the most rank three skills, of which 10 of the 12 are rigging skils. Gunnery is next by quantity, with 3 cruiser tech 1 skills and 6 frigate tech 2 skills. Trade has the largest proportional number of skills, with 46% of the trade skills being rank three. The advanced learning skills are also rank three, which means this is the last time we'll be seeing the learning group.

Most of the rest of the skills are unconnected and not easily summarized. So, yeah.

There are fewer items which fall into this next bucket, which houses items with volumes greater than or equal to 10 m3 and less than 50 m3. This is 11% of the items on the market, or 658 items:

This set is still dominated by modules, although not to the same extent. Let's see what each category contains:

• Ancient relics are at the core of reverse engineering. There are three qualities of each kind, with increasing chance of success: wrecked, malfunctioning, and intact. There are five different subsystem groups, which gives us 15 ancient relics, all 10 m3 in volume.
• The high-end asteroids are found here: arkonor, bistot, crokite, mercoxit, and spudumain. Each of those are 16 m3 in volume, except mercoxit, at 20 m3.
• The category celestial once again contains gas clouds, this time mostly of the drug variety. Cytoserocin is used in booster production, and mykoserocin is used in making synth boosters (legal, but less effective). There are eight types of drug, so eight of each type of gas. Fullerite-C540 is here, too. All of these gas clouds are 10 m3 per unit.
• The charge category is mostly made up of high-end mining crystals (30 m3 each), but also includes two cap boosters (400 and 800, at 16 m3 and 32 m3, respectively) and the discovery survey probe (10 m3).
• Commodities are mostly building materials, again. Capital construction components are used to build jump freighters. They're 10 m3 each, and there are 9 for each race (two of which are, as yet, unused). There are 6 tech 3 components, of which 5 are 10 m3 and 1 is 20 m3. All 23 levels of overseer personal effects, which serve as sort of a replacement bounty, are 10 m3 in volume. Finally, there are 21 of the tools used in tech 2 research and production in this bucket, at 15 m3 a piece.
• The category drone contains exactly what it says on the tin. Combat drones, EW drones, and repair drones, in medium (10 m3) and heavy (25 m3) varieties. Also a mining drone (10 m3).
• The one item in the material category is C3-FTM Acid, used in building the previously mentioned 20 m3 tech 3 component. 10 m3.
• There are 37 groups in the module category, so once again I won't be going into it. What I can say is that the items here are mostly cruiser and battleship specific, which means medium and large items. Shield, armor, and repair modules; energy, hybrid, missile, and projectile weapons; and more besides. 25% of all marketable modules fall in this category; 184 are 10m3, 5 are 12.5 m3, 6 are 15 m3, 135 are 20 m3, and 51 are 25 m3
• All 80 subsystems (4 versions times 5 types times 4 races) are here, at 40 m3 each.

Arguably more important than the cost of the fuel is the fitting and tank of a tower. Fitting and shield resistances are shared by all the faction variants, so I'll only list the base tower here:

The Caldari towers have the most CPU but the least power, while the Amarr have the most power and the least CPU. In fact, this seesaw trend holds for all four races: Caldari, Gallente, Minmatar, Amarr. Left to right, CPU decreases and power increases.

Not surprisingly, we see the usual set of racial resistances, as well. In a bit of a twist, due to the way POSs work it all applies to the shields, instead of the normal armor/shield balance.

From a combat point of view, the bonus to hitpoints the bonus to anchoring time and onlining time make the faction towers more useful:

The pirate and elite towers have a 10% and 20% bonus, respectively, to shields, armor, and to onlining time. For a starbase, shields are probably the most important: they regenerate by themselves, and reinforced mode is triggered by having the shields reduced to 25%. Caldari have the best shields, followed by Minmatar, Amarr, and finally Gallente. Amarr have the best armor, followed by Gallente, Minmatar, and Caldari. Gallente have the best structure, followed by Amarr, Minmatar, and Caldari. Gallente have the fewest total hitpoints, at 13.25m; Minmatar have 14.25m, and Amarr and Caldari both have 14.5m. While a small tower can never be a deathstar, the Gallente towers are less suited than most.