A Look At EVE Online Activity In October 2024

In EVE Online's Second Expansion Era the month of October is usually an interesting point to look back on. Not only is the month the last one of the summer expansion, we can see how successful the last two expansions were in generating new activity, and presumably new players.

For once I can add some commentary from Jester on his graph. He believed that the increase was due to the big migration by The Imperium from Delve to the cluster's south and south-east. I believe the Crimson Harvest event had as much of if not bigger impact. Either way the average user counts grew from around 21,000 accounts to almost 23,000 accounts, slightly dipping down at the end of the month.

Looking at the numbers one can make the argument for both reasons for increased average concurrent users being valid. In high sec, the number of NPC kills increased by 15.1% in October compared to September. Even year-over-year making NPCs explode in high sec increased by 4.0%. But in null sec, major null sec movements seemed to dominate. The Crimson Harvest is a PvE event but NPC deaths in null security space decreased 1.8% from September. Overall, the end of the Scarcity Era continued with an increase of 24% of NPC explosions compared to October 2023.

Since the release of the Uprising expansion in November 2022 I have looked at low sec as a measure of the health of the game. After three months low sec once again witnessed over 200,000 player-owned ships dying in the security band. Also, I don't think Crimson Harvest had a big impact on low sec, with the number of NPCs dying in low sec slightly decreasing compared to September. Still, the number of NPC kills rose by 18% year-over-year.