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I'd like to see graphs for hisec 4/10s: the number of players running them, the number of players who died to NPCs, and the number of players who died to other players or a combo of NPC/players.

I would think many more people are running them than before patch since they are easier to find for lower skilled pilots now. But prices suggest otherwise.

Since T3s were banned there are more flimsy ships running them, as well as lower skilled pilots, so I wouldn't be surprised to see an upswing in ship loss to NPCs. Ive seen a few player wrecks in sites, and have found sites that were started but then seemingly given up on.

PVP activity in the most sought after hisec site would just be plain interesting to see. There is definitely more criminal activity but I wonder how much ends up with a kill.

Thanks for the exploration statistics CCP! But a few minor comments and questions.

You show one year worth of exploration being flat lined, then a spike when it is "improved". How does this spike compare to past "improvements"? In other words how much of the spike is due to something being new?

Since the "improvement" the trend for relic and data sites is downward. You could easily say this isn't indicative of future results due to the small sample size. But then why would you show results with a small sample size to begin with?

Hacking attempts is not indicative of people using the feature. As a matter of fact none of your graphs are, they just represent runs or attempts. The whole point of dumbing down exploration was to attract more people to it. Do you have any data to support that, or are the old explorers just taking advantage of you making it easier?

Hi ...

Ok ... I must be missing something.

The blog cited the "Angel Forsaken Hub" as a 0.0 combat site.

... but it isn't.

It's an anomaly which has been available as a warpable site without using probes for years. All that you needed to do was hit the onboard scanner for a list of available anomalies.

In addition, it used to be one of the most profitable and safe anomalis because it only had battleships and battlecruiser rats ... which all spawned at a central point. It was an easy, safe, fast and efficient combat anomaly for making isk.

The patch changed the ship composition in the Angel Forsaken Hub by adding some scramming frigates ... and possibly made other changes in the ship composition (I haven't been in one in a while). There were also changes to sanctums and havens as far as I know also affecting their profitability ... thus some folks have likely migrated from Angel Forsaken Hubs to other anoms ... no mystery at all.

If you want to look at the impact on 0.0 scanned combat sites you need to look at completion rates for the DED 7/10, 8/10 and 9/10 complexes and not combat anomalies.

I love how exploration works, its pretty clear that it was meant to be easier and faster to scan down a site. But I do have 1 problem or 1 question regarding the hacking sites which seems to be odd in nature.

Questions to the devs : When you successfully complate a hacking minigame and those mini cans are release was it intended to have a "BIG" random chance of loot gathering ?

Before the patch I remember when you hacked a container, you had some loot in your can and that was it. THere was no chance of getting like the current system. Just think about it. you get around 6-10 cans when you hack correctly. At best your cargo scanner on those scans works with a timer of 5 seconds. Given the fact you have to target all containers, scan it, look at the items. At the end it doesn't give you enough time to get the item you want.

Personally, I would love to get a list of items so I can choose what I want. Either because of what I need for production or just pure profit. This current system has way too much chance in it and I don't personally like that since the original one didn't incorporate any chance at all...except for the success cycle of hacking the container.

Is it possible to add scale to all the graphs?

For example, total hacking attempts per day is expected to level off ~100K, but is that the line it hovers on now?The "Peak" line?

I would like a point or some strategy to the hacking mini-game. Buy a friggin' puzzle company or something CCP. This thing is too dumb for EvE. It should be hard.

Its not the items that are the issue its the demand, demand was already relatively weak prior to odyssey.

CCP needs to create more demand for exploration related materials. Add bpc merging that uses some materials, shift datacore to supply from passive research agent farming, make data interfaces have finite amount of uses (so that people need to purchase more than one).

I have been trying out exploration since odyssey but I also did exploration 5 years ago when I dabbled in EVE as well.

The differences are stark CCP has made exploration feel like a real activity.

However I think the ideal of exploration and the reality of EVE are making it hard for newcommers to get into this.

Truth of the matter is that unless you have a partner or a fleet with you your survive ability is hard to gauge. I have gotten ganked doing a Exploration Combat site Escalation in low sec. I can't imagine how I would solo a data/relic site in low/null sec. I am a decent multitasker but I don't think simultaneously running the hacking mini game and d-scanning is my idea of a good time. Not to mention how in the old exploration you can hack and rat at the same time (numerous video guides pretty much say this is the only way to explore in low/null). Now you have to take down the rats before you can attempt a hack; and don't forget that d-scan!!!

Also I'm sorry but the toss in the air grab what you can thing at the end is silly; I feel like I lost most of the items; And why is the ability to "tractor" in items not affected by, I don't know, the number of tractor beams you have equipped? Very disappointing when I hacked a site ready with 3 tractor beams......

Finally I must say the hacking game is alot more enjoyable than I thought. There is a sense of strategy and luck that mixes well and I don't feel like I'm just clicking away until I reach the objective. I would make a recommendation for a future update that your virus should be configurable like every other fighting vehicle in the game. There should be the ability to load scripts and plugins and customize the virus. Likewise the hacking board should be made more complex and add more obstacles and opponents.

However, being that I cant see how to solo explore where the money is and high sec is pretty much getting farmed out I'm not sure if I can truly answer my own question which is can I just explore and make isk? So far the answer has been no; not alone at least.

Clearly you need to re-evaluate your priors.

Thanks for the excellent questions.

It's a fairly common trend across videogames for the new new to be extremely popular for a short period of time before declining to a stable population then declining further until death. How long that tail is depends on how good the game is. This landscape is changing a bit with the advent of alpha-funding and other similar models though.

On EVE a lot of changes that have predictable market effects will also get lots of speculator uptake as well. You can see this in the Hacking Attempts graph as the first week is full of activity which begins to tail off at a quite quick rate which rapidly begins to decrease with minor bumps for weekends. This is an expected trend as the players who still don't enjoy the feature and speculators leave to new pastures. I'm basically taking a bet on where the stable level will be, the 100,000 line is the one the graph is dancing above and below. The downward trend during the week also stopped for the first time today and we saw a slight uptick in attempts yesterday (which might just be due to the publicity this blog generated or it might just be noise).



Downward after, in some cases, a more than ten-fold increase in use. As above this is what we'd expect to see with any new feature addition or major change.



They definitely don't measure directly the number of people using the feature but they are definitely indicative of the number of people using it otherwise we wouldn't see an uptick at the weekends when we know more people are online. One thing that suggests that this is not just the old players exploiting an "easier system" is the scale of uptake.

This data collection and aggregation on a larger scale is quite new and as you reasonably point out this captures only at the character/user level. It says nothing about the subscriber level where people have multiple accounts. However characters are owned by users and users are subscribers so it should be possible to aggregate up to the subscriber level. This sort of data mining will be done by our Research and Statistics guys.