EVE Online ACU/PCU Climbs As War Activity Continues

In a major twist on conventional wisdom, player activity in EVE Online is drastically increasing in August.  

From Eve-offline.net

Over the last 7 days, the number of average concurrent users on the world shard of Tranquility has risen to 21,000 accounts. A month ago, the figure was down around 17,000.

Ripard Teg has updated his graphs and the upswing began at the end of July as PAPI forces prepared for a final offensive push against The Imperium's stronghold in the O-EIMK constellation. Well, as PAPI line members prepared. As we now know, leadership was preparing for a withdrawal from Delve and "an end to the war."

Source: http://jestertrek.com/eve/players/

Now, despite the narrative going around, the war is not yet over. Even if Test Alliance Please Ignore completely implodes, cleanup actions and alliance relocations are still ongoing. For example, while Goonswarm Federation now controls all the infrastructure hubs in Delve, as of now TEST still controls 30 territorial control units and Pandemic Legion another one in the region.

The Dotlan iHub map shows plenty of work still to do

In Querious, The Imperium still has work to do just removing Brave Collective iHubs from the region. As PAPI alliances are removed, Siberian Squad and Dracarys. are moving in.

But iHubs and TCUs are not the only structures The Imperium needs to destroy to fully reclaim its lost regions. The matter of a few trillion ISK worth of citadels still needs to be addressed. Imperium forces destroyed the first two TEST keepstars located in Q-02UL and QC-YX6 a few hours ago.

In addition to the keepstars, by 1800 on 11 August I counted 40 other PAPI citadels destroyed in Delve and Querious. The breakdown is:

Delve

Astrahus
Already Replaced. - 3
Pandemic Horde - 3
Test Alliance Please Ignore - 6

Fortizar
Already Replaced. - 4
Pandemic Legion - 1
Test Alliance Please Ignore - 17

Marginis Fortizar
Test Alliance Please Ignore - 1

Querious

Astrahus
Test Alliance Please Ignore - 3

Fortizar
Brave Collective - 1
Test Alliance Please Ignore - 2

The big question, of course, is how long will the current phase of the war last? Will the moving around and cleaning up last 2-3 weeks with EVE then experiencing the normal seasonal slump in late August/early September? Or will the end to the trench warfare null sec experienced from May to July see increased player activity for the rest of the year? At the very least, following EVE is a lot more interesting now.