July 2021 Monthly Economic Report: What Is Redeemed ISK Token?

In Wednesday's post about EVE Online's July 2021 Monthly Economic Report, I misinterpreted one of the ISK faucet line items, the Redeemed ISK Token. I did some more research on the subject and found some interesting, at least to me, information. Today's post should correct the mistake I made in my earlier post.

First, the Redeemed ISK Token category has nothing to do with the ESS system. While The Grand Heist promised to open up the reserve banks in the Encounter Surveillance System on 27 July, bugs prevented the full acquisition of the keys to the bank. Besides, the SCC Encrypted Bonds players acquire from the banks are already found in the MER under the Commodities category.

Players stole 260 billion ISK from ESS banks in July 2021

What does the Redeemed ISK Token represent? According to what I found, ISK redeemed from the in-game redemption queue. Many people speculated that was the case. Some said the category was brand new and inserted in July. I found the line item going back to February 2021. But someone let me know the category has been in the data files going back to November 2019.

The history of the category goes back to 5 November 2019

My quest in doing research was to find some type of CCP documentation explaining the definition of the Redeemed ISK Token. I think I succeeded. In patch notes for 2019-11-05.1, CCP noted a change connected to the New Player Experience:

New Player Experience:

• A portion of new capsuleers will start experiencing a preliminary version of a login campaign, complete with minor rewards. 

The first entry for the Redeemed ISK Token was on 5 November 2019, the day of the patch. I think that is as close as I'll get to a definition from CCP outside of someone making an explicit statement on the subject.

The spikes on the graph starting on 28 July 2020 are related to events around the Abyssal Proving Grounds. The first event ran from 16-28 July. A coincidence? While not listed, finishing on the leaderboard did bring rewards.

The rewards for reaching the leaderboard in an event in Quadrant 3 will include a set of unique ship SKINs. These SKINs will only be accessible by reaching the top 100 in one of the Proving Ground events during Quadrant 3 2020. This means that if you see one of these skins being sported in space you can know you’re looking at a top competitor in one of the Quadrant 3 2020 Proving Ground events. In addition to the unique skins that will be shared by all the Quadrant 3 events, there will also be specific rewards for those on the leaderboards of each event, and those rewards will change from event to event. These rewards are in addition to the loot from both the Triglavian cache and the wrecks of opposing ships that will be available to the winners of each individual Proving Grounds fight!

The last spike on 20 July? The last Proving Grounds event ran from 16-20 July.

The Great Heist giveaway ran from 27 July to 2 August

In order to show the effect of the ISK handed out during The Grand Heist, I created a separate bar chart for the period of 26-31 July. The Grand Heist gave out the following ISK rewards.

• Day 1: 10 million ISK
• Day 2: 15 million ISK
• Day 3: 25 million ISK
• Day 4: 40 million ISK
• Day 5: 60 million ISK
• Day 6: 85 million ISK

To give some context to how much CCP handed out in the last 5 days of July, in the period from 5 November 2019 to 26 July 2021, the total amount of ISK redeemed was 335.2 billion ISK. From 27-31 July, the total was 9.37 trillion ISK.

Hopefully, besides correcting a mistake I made in Wednesday's post, I've alerted people to two things to look for in the August monthly economic report. First, expect a very high number for the Redeemed ISK Token category. The event ran into August and the highest single day payout wasn't until 1 August. The other is the Commodities line item should increase by a few trillion ISK due to the update in the ESS mechanics allowing for the robbing of the reserve banks. According to one dev blog, the amount could rise by 20 trillion ISK.