Greedy Goblin

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Seems I was right about New Jita (+more RMT corruption evidence)

Update: damn, Quant delivered bad data (by mistake, or purposefully). If he fixes it, I'll update the post. Anyway, he claims that only regional data is corrupted, so the main message of the post is true, even if the numbers are off.

More than a year ago, I predicted that an extremely unbalanced feature will enter EVE: the highsec trading citadels. A bit later, when I realized that the change is not canceled despite public outcry, I announced my departure and when the deadline was up, I quit and stood by my decision. It's one thing to having to deal with the cyberbully campaign of the community manager. It's completely different to see a completely unbeatable advantage given to the selected winners.

In retrospect, I was overly dramatic in some details, mostly in the faction Keepstar as official trading citadel of the RMT coalition. Also, the head of the coalition had to be banned after legal threats just when he announced the monopoly, so probably the current situation is a temporary anarchy before a new leader emerges and banks the money.

But the recent economic report shown that I was right that this feature is unbeatable:

Yep, the citadels channeled 1360 billion ISK from the trading random people to the owners of the citadels. As the same report shows that 80% of the trading is done in the Forge (Jita) and another 15% in Domain (Amarr), Sinq Laison (Dodixie), Heimatar (Rens) and Metropolis (Hek), we can conclude that about 1.2 Trillion ISK per month goes to the highsec citadel owners. If we use the zkillboard valuation, that's $17000/month. Funnily, the shills of the RMT coalition try to convince me to blame Goons, too bad that the report shows 407B total market trade for Delve, probably just ammo and small ships, while all the large stuff goes via contracts or corp hangars.

This income comes to the selected winners of EVE without anyone even logging in. With money moons, one had to install towers, actually hold the region, freight moon material and tower fuel. Here the owner just sets up the citadel and it gives him the ISK of random players without any further player interaction. The RMT coalition behind him guarantees that his citadels won't be sieged.


Now, I promised more botting-RMT evidence, and here it is: let's compare the major sinks and faucets in 2016 March with 2017 March:
2016 (T ISK) 2017 (T ISK)
Bounties 37.6 66.7
NPC Market (WH loot) 19.9 23.9
Incursions 10.2 11.3
Mission reward+bonus 2.5 2.8
Skillbooks -9.8 -13.0
Tax+Broker Fee -13.1 -22.9
LP Store -7.3 -8.0

The obvious thing is the near doubling of (nullsec) ratting. But the interesting thing is the very modest increase in WH loot, incursions, mission rewards. It seems that only the most bottable ISK making activity increased seriously. The evidence for CCP being complicit is that money supply only increased by 5% in the last year, while it increased by 20% in the previous year (March-March). Can anyone tell me how can the inflation slow down despite the main faucet nearly doubled?! There is only one explanation: CCP knew this will happen in advance and increased the main sinks, the tax and broker fee! No, they didn't respond to hyperinflation, they turned up the sinks in the same damn Citadel expansion. I expected extreme deflation, but devs knew exactly that the ratting will double, because they let all RMT botters loose the same time when they unbanned the admittedly RMT-ing IWI bankers. Look how perfectly they tuned the sinks, until the alpha clones made a mess, the money supply was more stable than ever:

While I have a long list of unacceptable behavior by CCP devs, the open catering to RMT-ers with highsec citadels and tuning the sinks to the botters were far the worst thing they did. I have trouble understanding why they still have players, but it seems I won't have to wait long before they go down:
As you can see, going free-to-play and increased botting activity could only stabilize them for one year, the concurrent logins are exactly where they were a year ago and the summer dip is just coming. Unless they have one more "free to play" level stunt in their sleeves, a year from now they'll be under 20K concurrent players.

Please link it on r/eve, they had to miss my "conspiracies" for almost a year now.

18 comments:

NoizyGamer said...

So you have nothing. I'm very disappointed. I thought you might have something I missed. Better luck next time.

Provi Miner said...

Or it is a game with consequences..... Right now a nothing region (as you indicated that because provi is not expansionist they don't matter) will be going face to face with your winners. Now you might say "provi can't win" you are prolly right we can win the isk war, and still lose a lot. However define winning?

If winning is a single event then you are correct provi can not win, make is a bitch, make is the most painful thing even more painfull than WWB (we have far more stations, far more cits we can bleed these suckers for months) and even if evicted (has happened several times) good luck holding it. It is big it is an absolute crap ton of space to defend that has borders more porus than the us Canada border. YOu can't rent it and no one but a provi resident actually likes being under threat 24/7.

My point is: Frack your isk theory, lets see it in the field I can assure you they could pump every single isk into taking and holding provi and within two months we would have reclaimed it. Isk only matters if it can convert into a long term solution which this can not be.

Now let me ask you:

facts: I don't plex, prices are lower than I can ever recall, I sell injectors (oddly everyones insistence that the market would bottom never has happened in null).

What effect does rmt have on my game? what effect does unlimited isk faucets to a select group have on my game?

One other thing you chart shows that players are keeping well over 90% of the isk that used to flow to ccp (not what the cit owners are getting) the rest of that.... essentially at the cost of a few rmt'ers everyone in eve got 90% tax break on the buying and selling of goods I wonder why you didn't mention that. That would be a huge thing to include don't you think?

Anonymous said...

My only disagreement is with the decline rate discussion at the end. The number of players is an indicator; but the important number, the one that determines the health of the game, is revenue. With skill injectors and such like, CCP was able to get the revenue and ARPU to go up. This means the game will decline slower than the PC graphs would indicate.

Gevlon said...

@Noizy: are you trolling? I've just found that CCP somehow knew that ratting will double before it happened.

Vince Snetterton said...

Noizy, I think you are a little harsh here. Is Gevlon more than a little nuts....I will be polite and leave my question as rhetorical. But I don't see you diving into the numbers on your blog like Gevlon has, at least with respect to any numbers pulled from the Eve MER.

My view on the RMT complicity between the RMT cartels and CCP is well documented. My beliefs are based on anectdotal evidence, but strong nonetheless over years of playing.

Gevlon has provided some semblance of numbers based on CCP provided info. I don't see you diving into the supply side of RMT as this crazy bastard does.

Anonymous said...

" As the same report shows that 80% of the trading is done in the Forge (Jita) and another 15% in Domain (Amarr), Sinq Laison (Dodixie), Heimatar (Rens) and Metropolis (Hek), we can conclude that about 1.2 Trillion ISK per month goes to the highsec citadel owners."

Actually, no, you cannot conclude that.
As was written two days ago: 148T goes through The Forge citadels (we know this because the MER numbers dont include citadels, and the difference between MER and CREST is 148T). They charge 0.1% (at most).
0.001x148T = 148B

16T goes through Delve citadels. They charge 2%, they make 320B/month
11T goes through Domain citadels, at 0.1%, they make 11B/Month
1T goes through Sinq citadels...they charge 0.1%

1.2T goes through provi..if they charge 2%, they make 20B
2.6T goes through pure blind
1.7T through Esoteria
1.2T through Branch

None of these places charge 0.1%

The 1.36T also includes all outposts.

So, yes HS has most of the trade, it also has around 0.1% fees, compared to the 2% charged elsewhere, meaning their income is much diminished from its potential

Alternatively, they are all charging 1% in HS and making 1T

Anonymous said...

The ratting value doubled but i doubt the number of players ratting doubled. It has more to do with greatly increased ticks due to carrier/supercarrier made good for ratting.
As for why we have deflation it's because of mining changes made to rorquals. People are multiboxing hordes of rorquals stripping belts in hours - and belts respawn fast these days.(or in the case of goons knowingly breaking the eula by input broadcasting rorqs with no consequence)

Gevlon said...

@Anon with weird numbers: The CCP data clearly shows that total market trade value of Delve is 405B http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/MER/Mar_2017/6_trade.value.by.region.png

Anonymous said...

"Now after a few people raising concerns on this, I took a deep dive into the numbers and the eve metrics backend was indeed resolving the regionIDs of transactions with a stationID, which doesnt resolve to Citadels! This means that the regional trade value numbers have been missing citadels from the start! Total trade value is not affected though, only the regional breakdown."

Source (CCP Quant posting on the official forum with his dev character): https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6918417#post6918417

Also, it's more likely ratting value doubled because we haven't seen a big war in a while and people are krabbing it up.

Anonymous said...

There is no need for giant conspiracy. The plan for "space city-states to relax in and make easy money and no need for war" was plain from years ago. Although what CCP is trying to achieve, I don't know. As with all conspiracy we must first assume incompetence before malice.

Gevlon said...

@First anon: that means we have no reliable data. Too bad.

People ratting more would make sense. But less people ratting more makes no sense.

@Next anon: tell me what incompetence made them unban IWI despite the open protest of the team security head? What incompetence made Falcon run a cyberbully campaign against me? What incompetence made them not ban players who ran neo-Nazi symbols on their tournament ships?

Not like it would matter. If they give open season for RMT-ers because of incompetence, that's just as bad.

Anonymous said...

It means that you will have to get the real data from CREST yourself.

If you trust CCP Quant enough to believe his trade numbers and accept when he says they're wrong at face value, then you should be able to trust the CREST numbers too. Maybe you don't trust adam4eve, but wouldn't it be great to out a EULA and DLA breaking scammer when you find the correct numbers?

Gevlon said...

@Anon: Sure, I will learn to program a CREST frontend just to prove something obvious (that there are awful lot of RMT-ers) about a game I don't play.

Granted, maybe I shouldn't have written the post either, but I was curious and the official data was easy to access.

Also, if CCP Quant managed to publish data where the checksum doesn't add up (regional data is wrong, total data is not), then why should I beleive that CREST data is not equally crap (by incompetence or malice)?

Anonymous said...

"Also, if CCP Quant managed to publish data where the checksum doesn't add up (regional data is wrong, total data is not), then why should I beleive that CREST data is not equally crap (by incompetence or malice)?"

Because the total data isnt shown on the MER. He was pulling the stationIDs, CREST is the values from ingame. So, sure, you can believe that everything that goes against your latest theory is incorrect.

"@Anon: Sure, I will learn to program a CREST frontend just to prove something obvious (that there are awful lot of RMT-ers) about a game I don't play. "

It proves nothing of the sort. It proves that people are using citadels is all. In regions in nullsec, it proves that there are no stations in the system and that people use citadels a lot.

Perhaps the overwhelming use of ECs also shows people are RMTing a lot? As that ISK goes to players too.

Finally you keep posting about a game you do not play, and commenting on a game you do not play, you could at least try to be accurate when talking about the game you do not play.

Gevlon said...

@Anon: can you tell me how to be accurate when the devs in official presentations publish bullshit?

Anonymous said...

How do you know that the rest of the figures in the MER are correct? After all, you think Falcon loves to troll you, perhaps he asked Quant to put 1.36T in there to make you angry.

Perhaps the real figure is 136T, perhaps it is 5T, perhaps it is 30B, who knows?

Gevlon said...

@Anon: indeed. It's not the first time that I find something in the data and Quant says "oops, bad data" http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2016/09/evidence-for-more-eve-dev-corruption.html

You are right that at this point there is nothing to believe about EVE and the best is to not make any posts about it.

Anonymous said...

I would say Bounty payments going up has more to do with Supers and carriers then anything. Pretty easy now days to get 100+ million ticks ratting, and 1 system can support multi-people ratting.