Comparing Activity From Before The Resumption Of Expansions And Now

A year ago the situation looked rather bleak. Continued anger over plans to add blockchain technology and NFTs to EVE Online combined with a major price hike combined to lower the number of players online at any one time down to levels last seen during Blackout and the Chaos Era in 2019. The situation appears brighter with the return of the two expansions a year release cadence. With the third expansion, Havoc, launching in less than two weeks, I thought I'd compared October 2023 to a year ago, the month before the launch of Uprising.

First, let's look at the average number of concurrent players online. The seven-day average ended the month of October 2022 under 17,000. At the end of last month, the average was over 21,000 players, or roughly an increase of 25%. While the ACU does not indicate financial results, the number of players logged into the game is a historical mark players look at to determine the health of the game. A 25% increase over a year is usually considered pretty good.

Looking at data from Dotlan Maps, we can see all numbers are up in October 2023 compared to a year ago. The biggest changes involved the number of ships players lost in low security space (up 32.0%) and the number of NPCs killed in null sec (up 49.1%). The ship losses in low sec did not cannibalize activity from null security space, with null sec witnessing a 28.4% increase in player ships exploding.

Finally, a closer look at low sec ship losses. CCP made low sec a priority for the last year. Historically, players losing ships in low sec is still far below the security band's glory days of 2013-2015. But in 10 of the last 12 months players managed to lose over 200,000 ships. With the introduction of the Deathless and players allowed to side with the Angel Cartel and Guristas, we may see the numbers continue to increase once Havoc launches.

So far, so good. The developers hopefully will continue the work that has brought a bit of a revival to EVE over the last year. I really don't want to tempt leadership with thoughts they need to introduce blockchain technology to New Eden again.