A Look At July 2024 Activity In EVE Online

Last month was the first full month of EVE Online's Equinox sovereignty system. I read and watched a lot of complaining about the changes in the Equinox expansion but Reddit and talking heads sometimes give a false impression of the state of the game based on biases. So what do the numbers show?

A precipitous drop in average concurrent users

I'm not going to lie. I can't determine the amount of decline during July using the 7-day rolling average of average concurrent users from Jester's chart. Using the 30-day moving average, used to also determine the Active ISK Delta, the decline in players last month was approximately 12-15%. 

The summer slump arrived on time this year

Normally I concentrate on year-over-year numbers. I'm looking at the month-over-month data because one of the purposes of a summer expansion is to make the traditional summer slump shorter, thus keeping profits up. While apparently having somewhat of an effect in null security space, we see the summer slump hitting high sec and low sec PvP in July instead of August as happened last year.

Uitra still the most violent system

I did have to check the activity in Uitra to see if CCP had put a stop to whatever is going on in the system. They didn't. The number of player-owned ships dying in the Caldari career agent system only decreased by 6.6% while overall player losses compared to June 2024 fell by 22.5%. I'll wait to see if Wilhelm has had any luck determining what is occurring in the system in his summary of the July 2024 monthly economic report.

Comparing July 2023 to July 2024

Still, looking at year-over-year numbers, one can see a shift of ship kills from low sec to null sec. Looking to see if low sec activity remains low this winter is probably worthwhile. In the meantime, ratting in null security space may have declined 1.7% compared to June, but compared to July 2023 killing NPCs is up 43.3%.

Historical look at player ship losses in low sec

The below graph shows the difference between a low sec focused expansion like last year's Viridian versus a null sec focused expansion like Equinox. Players seemed to leave low sec in order to check out the new Equinox sovereignty system, although the player ships killed in July was still the second highest total for the month over the past 5 years.

Low sec kills still high for the last 5 Julys

But the number of ships lost did not reach the magic 200,000 total and I doubt August or September will do so either. Will the summer slump result in people complaining about lack of activity in low sec again? We may find out if my calculated limit is true in the next few months.

Ratting was down a tick last month

Finally, the smallest month-over-month declines were seen in null sec. The number of player ships lost only decreased by 4.2% and NPC deaths decreased by only 1.7%. One of the key metrics I look at, the number of NPCs dying in null sec, continues in an upwards trajectory since August 2022. With the summer slump due to hit null sec in August, we may not see the true impact of Equinox sov on the security band until October.