Changes Are Coming To EVE Online's Monthly Economic Report

Last Thursday CCP Games released the monthly economic report (MER) for August 2025. Normally I would publish a post focusing on the Active ISK Delta, a measure of the net effect on the money supply of players leaving and returning to the game, including all GM actions. But with CCP's data scientists revamping the MER, now is a good time to change the way I look at the metrics like the Active ISK Delta as well.

Faucets, sinks, and the Active ISK Delta

First, let's look at the information provided by CCP.

The Monthly Economic Report for August 2025 is now available!

The Future & Beta:

• We are doing major work on both the data-pipeline and output (plots and CSVs) of the MER. You can see some of the early output in the beta directory. Expect to see significantly more in the September MER.
• Some plots will removed, mostly due to data issues.. We’ll go though each in detail next MER release.
• Specific to the Import/Export Chart - The data-source for this being depreciated. Regardless, we’ll continue to run it for as long as we can, in its current state. We understand there is some interest in it at the moment.

Some of the issues it has:

• It ignores Titan Bridge movements.
• It ignored Jump Bridge movements (rare between regions) until recently.
• We wanted to only include Non-Singleton items (that is, un-assembled items), in cargo holds. We can’t, the current data-source doesn’t differentiate between singletons and non-singletons. Nor does it differentiate between different holds (for example - ship holds for Capitals). We want the chart to show the movement of goods (but not ships) between regions. Instead we get a weird mix of goods and some ships in some cases.

For those running scripts to extract data from the MER; Sorry. Thank you for your patience.

I use the MER to explain player numbers on Tranquility which is why these posts almost always include Jester's average concurrent user charts.

Last 12 months

Since the Active ISK Delta became a tracked metric in February 2016 I have worked with the understanding that the active money supply consists of ISK held in corporate wallets plus in the wallets of characters of accounts that have logged in within the past 30 days. But I've had to question that understanding over the past few weeks. CSM member (and YouTuber) The Oz came out and stated the active money supply consists of ISK in the wallets of accounts that have logged in within the past 90 days. After searching the Internet, I can't find a statement either confirming or contradicting his assertion.

Now, if The Oz is correct -- and he does have direct access to the devs -- then the Active ISK Delta becomes a lot less explanatory of a metric. For example, let's take the Active ISK Delta for the last three Julys. The months with the most ISK removed in the last 9 years occurred in July 2024, July 2025, and July 2023. If the active money supply is defined as the ISK held in the wallets of accounts that logged into EVE in the past 30 days, then I can point to the aftermath of players who came back for the summer expansion falling away. But if the active money supply is defined as ISK on accounts that have logged in within the past 90 days? Honestly, I can't say what occurred in April of the last three years to make the money supply fall by over 5% in July.

I have to admit that due to the reading about economics I've done over the past couple of years I was inclined to just look at the money supply on a quarterly basis. The only thing holding me back was the explanatory nature of the Active ISK Delta. If the quarterly criteria applies as to whether an EVE account is active, I can't justify looking at the Active ISK Delta on a monthly basis. Not anymore.

The first two months of the global PLEX market

So does that mean I'll only look at the monthly economic reports on a quarterly basis? I do have ideas of new things to look at. For instance, the global PLEX market. I've always wondered about the ratio of ISK purchased off the market vs the ISK faucets. With the necessity of finding something new to write about I can recreate new datasets to look at the EVE Online economy in new ways.

Perhaps other ideas will pop up as CCP indicated a new data flow and different data will arrive next month. But for now I have to start working on a new format for these monthly posts.