EVE Frontier Cycle 5 Starts Today

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in New Eden anymore"

- Dorothy if she were an EVE Online player logging into EVE Frontier

I didn't play in EVE Frontier's development cycle 4 due to real life and other video games. I heard that if I didn't play in Cycle 4 then Cycle 5, which launches today, was a must to see how the game had changed since Cycle 3. From the videos and patch notes I think I can safely say that Frontier may use the same engine but is really different from Online now. 

Going through the dev blog for Cycle 5 really highlights the differences. Players won't create implants but grow Frontier's version of clones.

Allowing players to manufacture the clone bodies they inhabit, taking direct control over their production, storage, and enhancement. With the introduction of the Nursery manufacturing facility and the Nest storage facility, players can create new Shells and manage their equipped skills through Crowns - specialized memory constructs - to shape their capabilities and progression. If a Shell is destroyed, the skills and memory imprinted on that body are lost with it, demanding preparation and adaptability to survive the Frontier’s unforgiving nature. 

EO players who hate the more intelligent and active NPC actions will find a lot to hate in Frontier.

Orbital Zones now replace dungeons, introducing distinct, persistent ecosystems across solar systems and distributing resources, NPCs and loot naturalistically. Feral AI now patrol and move dynamically between points of interest, reacting to their surroundings, analyzing and defending key locations. Two new types of rifts and crude matter are available across almost every star system, allowing players earlier and more frequent access to crude industry. 

The Upwell Consortium never existed in Frontier, although I don't know if the developers will ban the name if an enterprising player wants to specialize in infrastructure development. I imagine old school EO players who loved making dickstars will get flashbacks. Automating the flow of industrial processes is a really nice touch.

Construction Sites at owned Network Nodes allow players to collaboratively deliver materials before structures come online. At L-Points, multiple players can now establish a base, increasing opportunities for cooperation and conflict. Defensive infrastructure has also been overhauled with the introduction of three specialized turrets: the Autocannon Turret, built to shred smaller ships; the Plasma Turret, designed to counter mid-sized threats; and the heavy Railgun Turret, engineered to engage larger combat vessels.

The next section gave me a chuckle thinking about all the complaining I hear from Star Citizen about their ships' flight model. Watching the video on the Cycle 5 patch notes reminds me combat is really different in Frontier.

Combat has been rebalanced to clearly distinguish between light and heavy ships. Lighter hulls now accelerate faster and carve tighter flight paths, with slot layouts that emphasize active defenses. Heavier ships trade angular agility for greater mass, higher top speeds, and passive durability. A powerful new Exclave frigate can also be manufactured, offering a focused, high-mobility option for pilots who favor precision. Traversal systems have also been updated. Fuel now carries new properties that impact active consumption and interstellar travel, while passive scanning allows players to detect signatures in space and monitor their surrounding environment before committing movement or engagement.

Of course, I do have to mention the blockchain. Cycle 5 introduces the replacement for Ethereum, Sui. I'm interested to see if the change really does lead to increased performance.

With Shroud of Fear, EVE Frontier migrates from Ethereum to the Sui blockchain. Launching the same day, the 2026 Frontier Hackathon features an $80,000 prize pool, inviting builders to develop mods that extend the Frontier both inside and outside the game world.

EVE Online's Monthly Economic Report For February 2026

On Friday CCP Games released the February 2026 monthly economics report for EVE Online. As usual the developers told us up front the details they thought were either important or notable.

Economic Trends:

• Destruction Value increased, while Mining and Production Value declined.
• Velocity of ISK continues to decrease.
• The Mineral Price Index continues to decline, down ~52% over the past year.
• The Ship Price Index continues to decline, down ~21% over the past year.
• The Module Price Index continues to decline, down ~13% over the past year.

I think the takaways are that mining activity has increased, leading to cheaper ships and modules. Of course, cheaper goods results in less need for money, meaning the velocity of ISK continues to decline.

Given the way I've been told by CSM member The Oz the money supply calculations work a decreasing velocity of ISK isn't a surprise. While the changes in average daily concurrent users is seen immediately, ISK isn't officially removed from the New Eden money supply until an account has been inactive for 90 days. The ACU continued to decline in February from the highs of the Winter Nexus event which ended in the first week of January.

Looking at Jester's yearly average concurrent user chart, the ACU for the first two months of 2026 was still at 25,400. Doing a little math leads to the discovery that the ACU for the month was 24,518, a drop of 6.4% from January's ACU. 

Looking at the amount of ISK spent on items accounted for in the MER plus that exchanged for PLEX on the global PLEX market, the amount of ISK spent by players declined by 7.6% from January to February's total of 777.3 trillion ISK. If one considers ISK to PLEX transactions as a form of currency exchange the decline of 6.7% in the value of the goods traded comes out very close to the 6.4% decline in the ACU for the month. So the decline in the value of goods traded in the New Eden economy was due to the number of players dropping, right?

Not so fast. February has 3 fewer days than January, making last month 9.7% shorter than the first month of the year. Converting the monthly totals to daily totals of ISK spent by players, the breakdown is as follows:

• Amount of ISK converted to PLEX: down 1.4%
• Amount of ISK spent on Accessories: up 4.3%
• Amount of ISK spent on non-PLEX related items: up 3.2%

Overall, the amount of ISK spent in the New Eden economy each day actually increased by 2.3%.

By taking time into account I feel pretty safe making the following observation. The drop in average active users through the first two months of 2026 was due to the game losing more casual players at the end of the Winter Nexus event. The part of the player base that remained was a bit more dedicated to playing the game as the increased daily spending in February showed.

Could I have made the observation without using the MER? Sure. The theory sounds plausible on its face. But having some data to back up a theory always helps.

The Nosy Gamer And AI

I have a bad habit of missing notable dates. One of those dates was the 17th anniversary of the launching of The Nosy Gamer which occurred on 16 February. I'm going to take the belated opportunity to feature not the content over the past year, but how AI has shaped the content over the last year or two.

My AI of choice turned out to be Copilot. I think I was trying to cut against the grain and at the time ChatGPT was all the rage. When I first tried AI programs I tried them out by looking up facts in the video games I play. The results were, to put it mildly, disappointing. Apparently MMORPGs are enough of a niche genre of game that the models really don't receive a lot of information. At this point Copilot isn't horrible, although still at times is a couple of years out of date.

But I've been assured, especially at work, that AI is the future. So, as I've posted in the past, I'm using my blogging to gain some experience with AI programs at the same time. The one I've mentioned in the past is using Copilot to help with the scripts I use to produce the global PLEX market graphs every week. I use Python, with which I need to practice for work as well.

I also use the AI to come up with ideas and research on topics as well. One topic I hope to expand on in the next month or two is the Samurai Daishō post I wrote back in January. The comparison of Final Fantasy XIV's Warrior of Light to a samurai daishō was spot on, but I really needed the links to know I wasn't dealing with an AI hallucination. With the links, any hallucination was mine, which as the author is the way the blame should fall.

Using AI to do research has led to an insight I'm not sure a lot of people in the business world will pick up on. Following the links leads to an expanded look at a topic. Combining the machine perspective with that of a source's author can lead to something that either makes me look really smart or really stupid. Hopefully the former happens a lot more than the latter. From what I've seen, a lot of people don't worry about looking dumb if they can shave a few hours of time off of a task.

One thing I've found is that Copilot can pretty accurately review a web page or a YouTube video if given the transcript. I've used AI for that purpose a couple of times in the past, although I made sure to add my own comments into the review. I may start doing that again for EVE Frontier. I want to keep track of development of the game but don't have time to play this development cycle. Letting Copilot give me updates would help. And if I have Copilot give me summaries of articles and videos turning those into blog posts doesn't take that much more effort.

One thing I'm wondering about is how much "smarter" Copilot has gotten about video games over the last few years. I'm planning on writing a few posts where Copilot tells me how to fit ships and fly them in EVE. The only caveat on the plan is I have to actually fly the ships in missions before publishing a post on the subject. At this point I'm having fun flying two different Ishkur fits with pilots with vastly different skills. I'm also playing with an Ishtar fit to blitz level 4 missions using sentry drones. That one I'm having some problems with so I have Copilot trying to teach me how to use sentries.

I also need to try applying Copilot's knowledge (or lack thereof) to Final Fantasy XIV. I'm not quite sure how to do that yet. But I do want to show how well, or poorly, AI knows video games. Honestly, except for losing millions of ISK in dead sentry drones, I don't really have a big interest in which direction to answer falls. I just want some entertaining content.

So yes, if anyone asks, I am using AI to create blog posts. But the plan is to make the use of Copilot obvious and hopefully get some chuckles, or at least smiles, from using the software in unusual ways.

Flying Solo In EVE: Relocating To The Ani Constellation

I'm now into my fourth month playing EVE daily or almost daily again. I don't PLEX my accounts but I have a suspicion the continued fall of the price of PLEX has something to do with player concurrency on Tranquility.

Once again last week the average concurrent users logged onto Tranquility was 24,000 +/- 500 accounts. I did a little math using Jester's average concurrent users chart per year and in February the monthly average was 24,518 accounts logged in at any one time. For the first two months of 2026, an average of 25,400 accounts were logged in at any one time.

For the week, the average price of PLEX on the global PLEX market was stable, only increasing by 10,000 ISK during the week. For the week, only 31.9 trillion ISK was spent to purchase the equivalent of 15,244 months of game time, both lows for the year so far. Week-over-week the amount of PLEX purchased fell 9.6% and the amount of ISK spent on PLEX by 9.9%

Now for my in-game activities. I'm moving back to the Ani Constellation in Metropolis. My first deployment to the area was back in 2011 when I ran the high sec COSMOS missions on my way to getting 9.9 standings with the Minmatar Republic. My goal this year is to gradually gain the loyalty points for an Odysseus, the new Sisters of EVE exploration battlecruiser. Back in 2016-2017 I ground out the LP and mining to build a Nestor.

This year I decided to do something a little different. I went to Copilot and let the AI select fits for the two ships I plan on using for security missions in the constellation: the Ishtar and the Ishkur. Copilot selected the Gallente heavy assault cruiser to blitz the Sisters missions out of Lanngisi. When I just need to kill NPCs to meet the AIR Daily Goals I can use the Gallente assault frigate. Copilot insists an armor-tanked Ishkur can handle the level 1 and level 2 missions given out by the Krusual Tribe even with the natural explosive armor hole. Well, I did want to test out whether Copilot knows EVE. I just wish the AI would remember that the new slot layout for the Ishkur is 4 high/4 mid/3 lows.

Since getting the PLEX and skill points from the AIR Daily Goals is part of my plan, my Pioneer will come in handy for mining and Prowler for the distribution missions. I didn't ask Copilot for fits, especially for the Prowler. I might let the AI try fitting my mining ships next, but not now.

Doing the missions in Ani has another advantage. The pilot I am using is my industrial/market/hauling pilot. With Hek the first system outside the constellation, keeping my market orders up to date will be easier than before. 

For now though, I'll just putter around seeing if Copilot is as smart about EVE as it thinks it is.

Cloud Imperium Games Sales Surge 21.8% In February 2026

For those wondering if the shutdown of Intrepid Studios and Ashes of Creation would negatively affect Cloud Imperium Games, never fear. The developer of the upcoming games Squadron 42 and Star Citizen recorded record cash shop revenue for the month of February of nearly $9.4 million. The monthly total is a year-over-year increase of 21.8% compared to last year's record total of $7.7 million. For the year, the Cloud Imperium cash shop has raked in $17.8 million, an increase of 14.9% over the first two months of 2025. The lifetime revenue for the CIG online cash shop since November 2012 to the end of February 2026 was $946.9 million.

The $946.9 million displayed on the Roberts Space Industries funding page at the end of January was not a comprehensive accounting for all of CIG's revenue since the project's Kickstarter in October 2012. Overall, the company has recorded $1,071.3 million ($1.07 billion) in confirmed revenue (the funding page & the 2023 financial report).

• Sales/Pledges: $946.9 million (through 28 February 2026)
• Other cash shop revenue: $2.3 million (through 31 December 2023)
• Subscriptions: $39.5 million (through 31 December 2023)
• All other sources: $82.6 million (through 31 December 2023)

In addition, the company has received a total of $68.25 million in outside investment. According to the 2023 financial report, $4.8 million of the amount was returned to investors in 2020 and another $1.9 million in 2023. Including the outside investment money, the total amount raised by CIG to create Squadron 42 and Star Citizen is $1.139.6 million ($1.14 billion), or $1.132.8 million ($1.13 billion) when excluding the returned funds. An additional $12.6 million in loans issued in March 2025 and due for repayment on 31 December 2027 are not included in the total.

  

New user accounts: While the number of new accounts generated does not have a relationship to money spent in the cash shop, many existing Star Citizen players find comfort in the statistic. Those players have a lot to celebrate as year-over-year new account creation in February rose 200.7% to 78,364. For the year, players have created 136,787 accounts, a 127.7% increase over the 60,062 created in the first two months of 2025.

What to watch for: We head into the month of March with CIG not publishing its financial report for 2024. That report would give some indication as to how well the company did in 2025. In 2023 CIG spent $162 million, which is more than the $155 million the cash shop recorded last year. Newer data on company expenditures would help put 2025's record cash shop sales in better perspective.

The other piece of news to look for is a release date for Squadron 42. I figure CIG will give 6 months advance notice on the release of the game. If a date is not published in March then assume the earliest the game will come out is in November or December.

Final Fantasy XIV Patch 7.45 Coming On March 3rd

I finally managed to finish the grid to acquire the Cosmic Armored Weapon late last night. A good thing because literally two hours later Square Enix announced on the Lodestone that patch 7.45 would launch next Tuesday. 

Patch 7.45 will bring two major pieces of content to FFXIV next week. The first is the new variant dungeon, the Merchant's Tale. As a reminder, Dawntrail's version of the variant dungeon was divided into three flavors:

Variant Dungeons

Explore branching paths to uncover the dungeon's mysteries. Starting from level 90, you may enter solo or with up to three other players, and the difficulty scales with party size. You will also be rewarded with experience points.

Variant Dungeons (Advanced)

Fight even more powerful versions of a variant dungeon's three bosses. They can be fought in any order, and each boss will offer its own rewards. Defeat all three bosses for even greater spoils. Two to four players may enter, and difficulty scales with party size.

Criterion Dungeons

Face the dungeon bosses at their most formidable. Will you best them all, or be buried by their wrath? Parties must consist of four players.

The other is the next installment of Inconceivably Further Hildibrand Adventures. We get to continue to track down the latest bad guy, an old enemy of Detective Hardiboiled. I might be able to wait for a couple of weeks to finish up a few other things, but I definitely need to finish up the Hildibrand story before patch 7.5. Then again, I also need to finish the MSQ and run Hell on Rails as well.

While we wait for the patch the next holiday, Little Ladies Day arrives in the game. The event may take a bit more time as players can obtain four t-shirts, six emotes, an orchestrion roll, three wall-mounted posters, and a cherry tree. From what I've seen, if the cherry tree is tall enough I may plant some in the yard of my cottage.

Just a quick post today because work is keeping me from logging into video games at my usual time at night. But I do have some things I need to do that will keep my busy in FFXIV for a couple of months longer. 

Flying Solo In EVE: The Lunar New Year

Heading into the last week of February I don't think EVE Online has done that poorly. In today's posts the graphs are on a downward trajectory, which can mean both good and bad things. Let's take a look.

Average concurrent users from 16-22 February

First for the bad. The average number of accounts logged onto Tranquility fell again, to 24,000 +/- 500 accounts. Yes, the shard experienced two hiccups during the week but the average line descended before the server instability. I hoped that the holiday last Monday in the U.S. would keep the ACU for the week at 25,000 but that didn't happen.

Prices on the global PLEX market continue to decline

Now for the good. The average price of PLEX on the global market fell another 2.3% last week, down to 4.16 million ISK. I have the feeling that volumes on the market go down the third full week of a month as the amount of PLEX sold last week would only fund 16,859 months of Omega game time. Over 1400 years of game time sounds like a lot, but represents a week-over-week decline of 18.1%. Add in the price decline and the amount of ISK spent on global PLEX market fell 21% last week. Below are the weekly stats so far in 2026.

Selected weekly stats so far for 2026

Today's EVE topic is Lunar New Year. Except for Japan, most of East and South-East Asia celebrates the Lunar New Year instead of the Gregorian New Year. Needless to say, once Pearl Abyss acquired CCP Games the game started featuring a celebration of the holiday in order to reach out to new or underserved markets in Asia.

The free gifts from the New Eden Store

Needless to say, the devs lead players to the New Eden Store in the hopes of getting players to engage in some impromptu shopping. But the 8 PLEX is nice. Of course, the devs aren't stupid and in order to prevent thousands of alt accounts from spinning up, only accounts who played from 29 January 2025 – 16 February 2026 and had over 8 hours of playtime throughout the year are eligible for the gift.

For $88 a little too rich for me

Of course the cash shop is offering a special called The Noble Steed pack. But at $88 the price isn't for me, especially since I don't fly any of the ships mentioned in the offer.

I do wish CCP would come up with something in-game like Final Fantasy XIV does for holidays. Something I could engage with that doesn't require opening up my wallet, either in-game or in real life. Who knows, maybe next year if things go well financially for CCP and Pearl Abyss in 2026.

Upgrading Aura In EVE Online

From the official forums

Last week CCP Games published an EVE Evolved dev blog about a new addition to an old friend: Aura. Aura is a toned-down AI (according to the lore) voiced by the entertainer and poetry translator Excena Foer. To players, Aura is the first (somewhat) friendly voice heard when a player first starts playing the game. Our friendly AI received an upgrade in 2016 with the introduction of the Inception new player experience. Aura became more than just a tool tip narrator, the AI persona was given "a powerful triple guidance system of voice, text and highlighting" to help players begin the game. And now, nine years later, CCP is experimenting with putting a low-level AI into Aura.

But why introduce the world to the idea of putting AI into EVE? Large segments of the gaming public don't like the idea of AI slop in their video games. Why not just give it a different description? Here's the description given in the dev blog.

Why Aura Guidance?

EVE already has strong guides, tutorials, and documentation. They are accurate, valuable, and not going anywhere. However, every time a new player alt-tabs to read a guide, there’s a real chance they won’t come back.

We want to keep players in the game. When a question gets answered within the client with links to ships and items, players see things they did not know existed. A new player asking about mining might discover a ship they want to fly right away.

If an answer mentions the fitting window, clicking it highlights it in the client. Rather than just explaining in text, Aura Guidance can guide you through the UI directly. That inspires curiosity, which is a hook, and it only works if the answer shows up where they are already playing.

EVE knowledge is situational. Understanding depends on where you are, what you are flying, and the current situation. Every additional login makes a player more likely to discover the wonders of EVE. We want to help people get to that point.

Let's be honest. For those who don't hate AI's, turning Aura into an actual, if limited, AI is pretty cool. Back when EVE was in development one of the most iconic artificial intelligences, Cortana, was released with Halo back in 2001. Going back in history, Cortana, like Aura, was created to guide players through the game.

[Bungie’s lead writer Joseph] Staten also said that originally, Cortana was originally due to be just a simple guide in helping get Chief from A to B among some things. But as it turned out later on, Cortana would show a more human side to Chief.

“We needed a character who could consistently guide the player through the game, and an onboard A.I. was something that could always credibly accompany the player (i.e., another soldier might get lost, wounded etc),” Staten said.

“Over time, Cortana became a fully realized character—a friend and companion to the Chief, not to mention the only person to poke revealing holes in his tough-guy exterior.

Cortana, though, was a character in the story. I personally think CCP Games enhancing Aura's ability to serve as a player‑support AI designed to answer questions, reduce friction, and help new players navigate EVE’s complexity 25 years later would make Aura more amazing that the AI's actual capabilities.

One of the big problems with Large Language Models is many companies use rather suspect ways of getting the information to train their AIs. According to the EVE devs the LLM used by Aura uses information retrieved from Rookie Help chat. The way the AI works also hopefully will minimize the occurrence of hallucinations. 

When a player asks a question through Aura Guidance, we embed their question and match it against this bank. We find the questions closest to player questions with existing answers, from real players and ISD volunteers. Those Q&A pairs are pulled, and a response is synthesized from the retrieved content, enriched with the player’s current context: their location, ship, recent deaths, whether they are docked, and so on.

The player’s actual question is never sent to a language model in its raw form. This is deliberate. It does not stop players from trying to break the system with toxic inputs or prompt injection, but it does make those attempts a lot less effective. We look up similar questions instead and build from those answers.

When the system cannot find a confident match, it does not answer. It redirects players to Rookie Help. This is a feature, and it happens often.

I will say I do like the prior experience of the team working on Aura's AI.

The team’s roots are in healthcare AI, with experience diagnosing diseases from biometric data. Getting those answers wrong has life-altering consequences.

That mindset carries over into this work: be careful, be honest about what you don’t know, and don’t guess.

The damage that a hallucination can do is immense, which is one reason I'm a bit wary of the concept. But the restrictions on the advice coming from Aura Guidance does ease my mind a bit.

Let’s be clear about some things that Aura Guidance intentionally does NOT do: it does not give fleet advice, market strategies, or detailed fitting optimization. It does not help you win fights or earn ISK faster. It does not replace the depth of knowledge you get from experienced players, mentors, or specialized communities. Those limitations are by design.

And another statement about the output from Aura I liked.

All responses are built from the vetted Q&A bank. No open-ended generation. No detailed tactical advice. No guaranteed outcomes that could mislead players. And if the system detects questions about exploits or hacks, it doesn’t even attempt to answer.

One final concern I'll address in this post involves the environmental impact of the system.

A Note on Environmental Impact

We take the environmental cost of running AI systems seriously. Our architecture is designed to minimize it from the ground up.

Aura Guidance is retrieval-first. There is no open-ended generation, no reasoning chains, or self-reflection loops. Each question gets a single, short answer. We only run small language model variants, and we evaluate new models with energy cost as a factor.

To put the footprint into perspective, even under generous assumptions where every active player sends a question every day, Aura Guidance's annual energy usage would be comparable to running a single small European household for a year. That is a rounding error next to the energy consumed by the game servers themselves.

Aura Guidance is currently undergoing A/B testing on new accounts on Tranquility. The determination if the program sticks around is the success of keeping new accounts playing. If the system fails, CCP goes on and tries something else. But for the cool factor I hope the testing succeeds.

FFXIV Cosmic Exploration - An Oizys Update And Token Grind

Over in Final Fantasy XIV I'm hearing speculation on whether patch 7.45 for Dawntrail will launch on 3 March or 10 March. Time to look around at the progress players have made building up Oizys as a base.

Aether is far ahead of the other logical data centers

For this segment of cosmic exploration North America is far ahead, with three worlds already finishing building the base on Oizys and three more close to doing so. The only world outside North America close to finishing is Tonberry over on Elemental. 

The spread of progress is really wild, with worlds on the newer logical data centers like Dynamis (North America) and Materia (Oceania) still on level 12 of the 28 step journey. I think the shorter cosmic tool grind on Oizys has had a greater impact than before. But as patch 7.45 is still 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 weeks away all worlds are still on track to finish the third segment of cosmic exploration by the time patch 7.51 rolls around this summer.

On a personal note, I've only managed to get 36 of the 60 Oizys Token Booklets needed to get the Cosmic Armored Weapon mount. One of the rare mounts that hides the rider, I like the idea of running around in a mechanical spider. But that's for outside cosmic exploration. Inside the content I still like my Cosmoboard.

In the token booklet grind I learned something about how to do two time-restricted missions, EX+: Survey of Rare Aetheric Flora for botanists and EX+: Survey of Rare Aetheric Minerals for miners. Each requires collecting 100 items. Each mission has 3 groups of 2 nodes, one with a duration of 5 and one with a duration of 6. I've learned to do the three 6 duration nodes first because the mission action Greater Reach is guaranteed to proc at least once, returning 200 gathering points per proc. Before gathering from these nodes I either activate Blessed Harvest II (botany) or  King's Yield II (mining). That way I only spend 300 GP at each of the nodes. If I don't have the 100 items gathered yet the next node usually gets me to the mission's goal.

I also learned to do two weather restricted missions that grant token books. The EX+: Rare Alchemical Reductions (botanist) and EX+: Crucial Initiative Reductions (mining) require gathering collectables and reducing them to 45 items. I use the Collector's Stellar Standard mission action as the first action for the first two collectables. I usually have enough GP to use Scrutiny twice on the third collectable and once on the fourth collectable. Usually by this time I have between 10-12 collectables gathered. I then reduce the items and, depending on the random number generator, I usually succeed with a Silver result. Eating Nasi Goreng gives the most GP, which is the stat I most look for now that I have all my cosmic tools up to iLevel 775 and my gear fully pentamelded.

Flying Solo In EVE: A New AI

A new week, another look back at last week in EVE Online. As usual, I'll start with the average number of concurrent users (ACU) logged in last week.

From EVE-offline.net

In what I consider a good sign Eve-offline.net still showed the ACU at 25,000 +/- 500 accounts. Yesterday's federal holiday in the U.S. might keep the ACU at that level one more week. But after that I expect the line to tick down another 1000.

PLEX continues its downward trend

A factor in my belief in a lowering ACU is the continued decline in the average price of PLEX. Between 9 February and 15 February the average price of PLEX fell 3.6% down to 4,252,000 ISK on an average of 1,470,000 PLEX traded daily. I track the amount of PLEX for sale on the global PLEX market and the amount increased by 13% last week.

2026 stats by week

Overall, the amount of PLEX traded last week increased by 4.7%. Reflecting the declining price of PLEX, the amount of ISK players spent acquiring PLEX only increased by 2.3% last week. Imagine that! A lower price of PLEX resulted in increased sales. In all seriousness I spent enough time working with the price of consumer packaged goods to expect that result. Of course, sales help as well and the latest one ended at downtime today.

As a veteran player I often skip past a lot of content meant for newer players. One of those features was the AIR Career Program. I didn't start paying attention until I started to train up one of my PI alts. I reached some goal and received a Catalyst and a SKIN. But the delivery was kind of cute.

Introduction to IRIS

I met a new AI, IRIS. I guess AI assistant technology has come a long way since Aura was first introduced back in 2003. I have to say, I liked the interplay between the two, so kudos to the writer. I'm now looking to trigger another AIR Career reward just to see if the interaction is different.