Greedy Goblin

Friday, February 14, 2014

It's already replaced

Ripard wrote that B-R can't be outperformed, since it the current entities are unable to put up such show again, especially that most of them are allied or treaty-bound with each other. The emergence of new entities is impossible, because CFC would stomp on them before they could grow to a dangerous size.

I completely disagree with him. Why? Because of the 2013 production graph. CCP released an official data: 3.07T/day worth of ships and modules are created every single day. This means that the "breathtaking" losses of B-R were replaced by the economy of New Eden by the time Ripard released his post.

Why is this number important? Because we must put it parallel to the destruction value: 1.31T/day. It means two things: at first, while B-R indeed was an above-average day, it's not a new quality. It's like traffic accidents: on an average day 1 person dies on the roads, on unlucky days 10. While a bus crash gets to the media, it is not fundamentally different from car crashes, just bigger.

Secondly and more importantly, there is a large difference between 3.07 and 1.31T/day. What happens to the 1.76T ships and modules that are created every day and not lost? That's 642T per year. EVE is 10 years old. If we assume that its economy grown linearly from zero, having the same creation:destruction ratio, we are facing 3200T worth of ships and modules collecting dust! 100x bigger fleet than what CFC had in B-R.

What are their owners doing? Why don't they undock them and fight with them? "They are carebears" is wrong answer. Industrialists don't stockpile ships they don't use.

These ships that are created but never destroyed are waiting for a reason to undock. To fight. Often, to resubscribe to EVE first. They aren't destroyed because their owner didn't find a reason to put them on the line. While some people already found their reason (or need no reason besides "have fun lol"), 57% of the newly created ships are in the hands of players who did not. They are like the voters before an election who didn't choose a party yet. They are the soil that needs a seed: a new entity they find worth finding for.

Imagine a new entity that can catch just 10% of these players. That entity could send 10x bigger fleet into combat than the CFC fleet in B-R. No, they don't have to "build up". They already have the ships, all they need is a reason to put these assets to the line (and to resubscribe first). Maybe they don't have the right kind of ships, have to sell some and buy some first. But dreads and carriers can be built in lowsec unstoppably by CFC or even PL.

CCP already told that there are more titans in unsubscribed accounts than on active ones. Dear Rippard, you are in the CSM, having access to devs. Ask them just one question: how did the number of titans on active accounts change in the last month? If they say that it increased, don't be too surprised.



The moron of the day didn't know how to relocate medical clone. Or how to warp out pod. Or when to give up. I hope he knew about updating clone though:

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have a very good point that all this production outpacing destruction - where does it all go? It's a very valid question, and it's one worth exploring. I hope you pursue it.

... but titans can't be replaced on a dime. They take months to build. There may be inactive ones floating around waiting to be used, but the ones that are gone are gone. I believe PL said it could take up to a year to fully make up the numbers. Why would they lie about that? Appearing weak at this time seems foolish.

LR

Gevlon said...

While they can't control it, they can get titans instantly if inactive PL members choose to come back to EVE.

Anonymous said...

I have seen the argument elsewhere that typically super construction involves building 425mm Railguns for mineral compression, shipping them out to null, melting them down, building capital components and then building the titan from the capital components. Do the figures given by CCP count that you are manufacturing three times in order to get one ship?

Do they count ammo shot as 'destroyed'? I am pretty sure that I have ships that have shot more ammo than the ship is worth. How about anchored containers or lost drones that the server cleans up if not interacted with often enough?

I'm not saying that these effects balance out the numbers, just that I suspect that they don't actually portray a very realistic view of what is actually happening.

It would be interesting, for example, to compare the amount of assets in the game to the amount that CCP thinks ought to be there given their metrics of creation and destruction. Manufactured goods would probably not include loot dropped from rats? What is the sink from people quitting the game? Are stockpiles of unsold goods at the market hubs increasing more quickly than the player base is expanding?

Gevlon said...

Yes, there is destruction I that the graph didn't refer to. But there is also creation: module drops, faction ships from missions, gift ships (if there are 200000 gifted Gnosises, each worth 70M, that's 14T ships no one created)

Erotica 1 said...

Many of these inactive accounts are owned by active players. It is also an open secret that many large corps and alliances share account access of supercaps. The question is more like, what percentage of these inactive accounts holding titans are controlled by active players? There is no reason to plex a titan pilot who has acceptable skills for his flying coffin when the titan is simply in reserve.

Lucas Kell said...

Gevlon
If you read the klinked article it states this:
"Destruction values is the lost value of all kill-mails in 2013, i.e. it includes not only what was destroyed but also what dropped. On top of that, since supercapitals don't have a market-price, their production cost was added to the killmail value."

This means destruction is quite literally that. It doesn't take into account when people trash items, have extra wastage, refine tax, consumables like fuel and ammo, items remaining on deleted characters, etc. There are a host of other ways for items to leave the game that won't involve them appearing on a killmail.

And note that what Ripard is saying isn't purely from a creation point of view. Aside from the difficulty in mass producing titans, treaties mean the groups capable of fielding them in volume are unlikely to fight each other, and the outcome of B-R means they will probably reconsider if they do start thinking about a fight.

It'll certainly be interesting to see if people do use them in bulk again, but I think that time may have passed for quite some time at least.

Arrendis said...

The economic volume created daily may exceed the value of those titans, but that's not the same thing as replacing the titans themselves.

Example: in 2013, the US GDP was $15.6848T. That's just under $43 billion per day. As in my previous example, the USS Gerald R. Ford cost $12.8 billion. We didn't build 3 of them a day. And New Eden likely hasn't replaced all the titans destroyed yet, either.

PL might have - they might have done so by moving titans off of inactive accounts onto active ones, sure. But that creates a hole in their strategic reserve, so to speak, which will have to get back-filled by production, just the same.

Xmas said...

There are players that have several (many) station containers full of crap they've collected over the years. It's easy to do, if you're comfortable with the amount of ISK in your wallet. Eve doesn't punish you for having fallow assets, there's no tax on wealth and keeping stuff in a high or low-sec station is free.

(Though, an Eve version of "Storage Wars" would be the funniest thing ever. "Here we have a Nano-fit interceptor. It used to travel at 10 KM/s, but then the laws of physics changed."

Jester said...

As a matter of fact, I DID ask how the number of titans killed compared to the number of active ones, and I was shown the numbers.

That did not necessarily play into what I wrote in my post, however.

I don't disagree with your point that the EVE economy generates trillions of ISK worth of ships per day. But the likelihood of 11 trillion worth of those ships getting destroyed all in the same battle in the same system remains to me extremely unlikely.

Unknown said...

Another make flimsy assumptions on incomplete statistics to reach a convoluted view of mine:

1-"Ship production is a linear function". Of course not production is an increasing function, so the overall number is definitely lower.

2- "Carebears don't stockpile ships they don't use". Arguably that is the only thing carebears can do in the long run, what are they doing with their isk?

3- "Production figures are directly proportional to super capital building". super and titan production requires much more time, effort, and characters to build, and it requires sov.

4- "Assuming that those figures are for the most part on active accounts". Over 10 years I imagine a lot of people left the game and there is considerable wealth held on those accounts.

5- "It is a simple logistical and managerial task to get this monumental force together". Good luck herding a 100,000 nerds ("10 times as big as goons").

Anonymous said...

"fly what you can afford" translates perfectly into that ratio.

besides it's not the whole picture. only killmail and only item-production. that excludes for example "on use" items and npc loot.