April 2024 Activity In EVE Online

The 21st anniversary of the launch of EVE Online is just a few days away. While the game is still far from its peak in 2013, the game is still doing better than at its lowest points in the Alpha and Omega era in 2019 and 2022. The statistics in April weren't exciting, but showed the game still rising above its low points.

Jester's Average Concurrent User Graph

The 30-day average shows a very slight increase in the amount of accounts logged in at any one time in April. The 7-day average showed a dip in the middle of the month with a rise around the time of the Equinox expansion announcement. The logged in activity is most important to show New Eden still has approximately 20% more accounts logged in than in April 2023.

Statistics from Dotlan Maps

The next piece of information is measuring if the increased number of logged in accounts equates to more shooting of internet spaceships. Compared to April 2023, the answer is yes. I'll get to low sec a little later because the high sec and null sec activity is significant. The number of high sec player ships killed equates to many things, including insurance fraud. But the numbers also include new players as some of the tutorial and career agent missions require new players to lose a ship. The 29.0% increase does indicate something is happening.

Null security space also shows increased activity. The number of player ships killed isn't as significant as the 43.5% year-over-year increase in the number of NPCs players are killing in their quest to play for their PvP activity or even their game time. Null sec wars do gain EVE publicity, but as we learned during the Chaos Era, null sec PvE pays the bills.

I do want to add that I am aware of the massive (for wormhole space) going on between Singularity Syndicate and Lazerhawks over class 6 wormholes. But with CCP shutting down access to wormhole statistics years ago, looking at that activity requires either accessing the zKillboard API or the files from the April monthly economic report.

Going back to low security space, we see that for the seventh consecutive month the number of player owned ships blown up in the security band exceeded 200 thousand. Also for the third month out of the past six the number exceeded 250 thousand. I will note, however, that the number was perhaps inflated by Snuffed Out when they managed to destroy a structure with thousands of shuttles owned by Rixx Javix. I do not know if CCP removes such kills. I guess we'll find out when the next MER is published in the next few days. But with one more month until Equinox launches with major null sec changes, low sec still seems in better shape than before the Uprising expansion in 2022.

We still have one month to go, but right now the Havoc expansion looks to go down as one of the most successful content drops since the Ascension expansion of November 2016 introduced the free-to-play Alpha account to EVE Online. I might be experiencing recency bias, but after Havoc I think the game is in a much better place.