DigitalCommunist
November Corporation
   |
Posted - 2009.06.04 16:37:00 -
[1]
Read it. The only interesting part was the information on isk, rest was trivial stuff covered by past QENs. I especially wonder why they bother doing the skillpoint distribution thing, because it isn't going to change for a very long time (even after Apocrypha changes).
My interpretation on the ISK is that the low end of the scale is skewed considerably by alts and newbies, as I really doubt half of EVE is playing on <100mil when most of the newbies I've seen break that in about two weeks of agent mission grind. And like most people I keep some money on alts for market stuff. What do those numbers look like when you filter everyone with less than 3 weeks old and <3mil skillpoints? What about 3 months old?
The adage that 90% of wealth is held by 10% of people seems to be true here, but it doesn't state how much isk we're talking about. And if 10% of players have more than a billion in their wallets, they can effectively afford 95% of content in the game. There isn't anything to use all that money on beyond using it to make more money, or wasting it away on increasingly diminishing returns (read: pimp modules and ships).
Overall, I think the average player is just getting richer the longer they play. The only way you can become dirt poor again is through conscious decisions or catastrophic mistakes, because there's no way normal gameplay and its associated costs/losses can sink money out as fast as its being created - even in 0.0.
And on the issue of demographics, I would have liked to see actual distribution data and not irrelevant racial statistics. Why is it important that 38% of EVE is Caldari? It's not, because the ship you fly has nothing to do with the race you pick. Most people chose Caldari for three reasons:
- char screen aesthetics/description
- overpowered missiles (from 2004-2007)
- achura (from 2008-2009)
Show us instead:
- the average number of jumps a character makes in a day, assuming they make at least one
- how many of those are freighters and capitals
- how people are distributed in high sec, low sec, 0.0 and wh space (total distribution and active in-space distribution)
- how many people are mining/npcing/agenting on average in any given day
- percentage breakdowns for all the isk generation sources in EVE (I suspect insurance generates more than it sinks)
Generally, anything that would help players understand what other players are doing. Age-old arguments about lvl 4's in empire could be advanced by QEN reports, but instead they've been stalled by both sides calling the other "wrong" on what really happens.
|