CZ Minutes: Graph Porn

EVE Vegas brought many revelations and quite a few of them have stirred the player community to various reactions, but the story does not end there. In a devblog earlier this week CCP Quant cements his position as the deliverer of fancy infographics that tell us things about EVE none of us could ever come close to finding out. Several pages of commented statistical graphs later, what do you take away from this? Have we truly been allowed a glimpse behind the scenes and seen the gears that make our online universe revolve, or is this just a bunch of well presented numbers with little informational content? Is the market data interesting for professional traders? Do the participation numbers tell us more about player behaviour? Will these statistics fuel arguments for time to come? What’s your take on CCP Quant’s devblog?  

Dunk Dinkle: We have to support CCP’s decision regarding the CSM and Manny.  Manny’s probably a great guy, but much of the last two CSM sessions have been crippled by accusations of leaks and breakdowns of the NDA.  I’ve personally spoken to several members of the CSM and they are frustrated with the impact of leaks on their relationship with the Dev Team.

Also, graphs are fun.

JEFFRAIDER: “The America we all know has been a story of the many becoming one, uniting to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness.” – Mitt Romney

Tarek: I am not yet through this devblog, but there are three things I have taken away from it so far. 1: Again it shows that Placid & Black Rise are the most happening PVP regions of EVE. Most destroyed ISK outside of the ganker hunting grounds of highsec. 2. Statistics about mining, import-export and ISK faucets show that despite everything, nullbearism is still alive and well. 3. I always wanted to know how the price indices are actually weighed. Very interesting and I am not through with processing this information fully.

Dunk Dinkle:

> when were you when Manny dies?

> I was station trading in Jita

> Manny is kill

> ‘no’

SpaceSaft: I don’t know a whole lot about economics, just some statistics and logic. I like the graphporn a lot but I’m not really sure how much it tells us or if the conclusions are correct. The least helpful are the breakdowns of the price indexes, I couldn’t tell you anything about the relative value of one group vs. another except that one is a bit bigger.

I think it’s a bit sad how much the convenience of a single market destroys the possibility for an interesting market landscape. See the sorted table of trade volume per region. It’s not new info though, just a very nice illustration. The new structure changes are the earliest date when CCP could conveniently change taxes to bring a bit more dynamik into it, if they choose to do so and those changes are still a bit off.

What I would really like to know is the PLEX adjusted price of things in Eve.

The two graphs I find most informative are the “value created or destroyed adjust by unique login” and the “isk faucets and sinks” graphs. I would summarize the two this way: People get so much more isk out of the faucets that they can spend it on buying and losing more expensive stuff, thus fueling the production of what they lose. But even though what they buy and lose is more expensive, at the end of the month they still get to keep about half of what they created. Which they pocket because there is nothing else to spend it on. Except maybe plex.

Since everyone else is talking about the leaks: were they really worth it? It’s a bit sad that another player has shown he has to removed from the CSM because he can’t be trusted with info for the sake of a little bit tension and tease.

Jason Quixos: All of the graphs in the devblog are nice, and give really good insights to where I used to live in Lonetrek. Looking over all of these graphs and all that we now know about Citadels, this is really more like a real estate brochure. All those areas clearly in need of more activity, or a quiet corner to build your empire. Maybe that’s just how I looked at it. There is so much data here many conclusions can be drawn from the devblog. I won’t discuss them all.

The one graph that I found most interesting was the monthly ISK faucet and sink for September: http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/sinksfaucets.png

I would never have thought that war fees would be so low for a month, at 278 bil ISK. Even more is sunk into office rental fees at 460 bil ISK. Then below that is manufacturing fees 1.5T ISK and transaction tax is a staggering 4.1T ISK. Looking at the scheme of things surely that is Citadel owners ISK one day? If players use the data wisely, viable market and production regions have now been given to us by CCP. I am not a market trader however so not best to speculate on the rest too much.

Diana Olympos : So let’s talk about graph porn. I’m a trader and a hauler. I seed nullsec stations and I play arbitrage in high. I’m also working on some different ways to track activity in Eve, so all those numbers are really interesting and important. I’m eagerly waiting for the raw data.

So what could we get from these? Well not a lot to be honest. Activity hasn’t really moved over the past 12 last months. (Don’t listen to SpaceSaft here. There are more to it than just “using more expensive things”). It mainly feeds the thought of people getting rid of alts instead of people unsubbing. Also, the inflation is nearly non-existent, and Jita is a big trade hub. Besides that, we know that GSF are richer than they understand and are not really representative of null. And that all areas of space see the same amount of warp more or less.

All in all, few bits of information, and confirmation of what the people that crunch data were thinking. As what i heard every day at work : “Never enough data !”

Niden: I look at and talk about graphs virtually every day at work, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that graphs =/= truth. Depending on how you display data, what kind of data you’re showing (and not showing), how that data is actually aggregated and what effects there are on it, you can really skew perceptions depending on how you present it. It’s a common mistake to look at data and make it fit your already pre-determined view unless it’s either incredibly one-sided, overly simple, or both. I would want to sit with the database and data analysis tools myself, before I’d say anything concrete about the data we’re talking about in this dev blog. It looks promising and seems to confirm theories many of us have have, but as I said, graphs =/= truth. I am however very glad that CCP are choosing to share this with us. Even though I stand by what I just said, I do think showing us data has value.

The fact that I get my fill of data analysis at work and also think industry is boring as death also means that I’m not even going to try to say anything about the industry data in this blog because I’m not nearly competent enough to understand what it actually means.

However, for those who care to understand industry and economics among us, I look forward to the announced monthly economic report. Economics are gameplay too, for some people, the most interesting part.

I will also note, as my alliance mate Tarek, that all three regions where I spend my time, Placid, Black Rise and Citadel, are three of the top six most violent regions of space. Lowsec baby.

Also, RIP Manny.