You people really do love blowing up spaceships.

One thing I keep a close eye on as part of my role at CCP is the level of PVP activity within EVE. Seeing how many of you blow each other up and how often you do so is an important metric for seeing how much fun everyone is having. So, conveniently timed for MMOCrunch declaring EVE to be the Best PVP MMO of 2011, I present to you: many, many numbers regarding explosions in New Eden.

The information in this blog is limited to kills that have taken place since the new kill report system was introduced in the Trinity expansion on December 5^th, 2007, up until very early in the morning of November 29^th, 2011. Unless otherwise stated, we’ve also limited this to PVP, so ships lost to NPCs won’t count in the totals.

In total, 13,540,707 ships or structures were destroyed in this period in PVP, belonging to 1,075,754 characters or corporations. NPCs destroyed 7,559,088 ships belonging to 1,936,205 characters. That makes a total of 21,099,795 ships/structures blown up belonging to 2,251,177 different owners. To be fair a lot of those are rookie ships and such, but either way – that’s a lot of explosions.

From December 5^th, 2007 until November 29^th, 2011, 1,455 days passed. That’s 2,095,200 minutes. So, if you count everything that generated a kill report, how many things blew up per day/hour/minute on average?
14,502 per day.
604 per hour.
10 per minute (roughly one explosion every six seconds).

Where are all these explosions happening? First up, let’s take a look by security group:

Which systems? Well, apparently low sec travel routes and Jita are quite active. I thought it would probably be of interest to show the proportion of the explosions that were probably more of a “squish” sound than a boom, because some places happen to have a rather high rate of podkilling:

So whilst it’s been known for a while that travelling through Rancer will often result in being podkilled, it’s now official. It may be low security and therefore have no warp bubbles, but just under 44% of the losses there have been capsules. Probably best to make sure your clone is up to date before going there on a picnic.

The probably all-important question is up next; what has been getting blown up? Well, here’s the top 20 ship groups and then individual types for your enjoyment:

I’ll filter the rookie ships, shuttles and capsules out of the types, which gives the following top 20:

And what do NPCs manage to destroy? Well, from the looks of things, the tutorials are killing quite a few players:

The top 20 ships that people have been using to shoot at things (based on final blows):

It would also seem that projectile weapons are extremely good at getting those much-loved final blows. Final blow weapons, top five groups:

And then by type:

So, a high rate of fire seems to be of great use for scoring final blows. Not all that shocking.

Whilst writing this I was told that the idea of me writing a blog and not adding in some graphs is ludicrous, so I made some pie charts for you all to enjoy. In this, I broke down all ships by their hull size and excluded rookie ships, capsules and shuttles. "Other" includes structures, mining barges/exhumers, capitals and a couple of others which were too small a slice for it to make much sense to include.

Two more, these by tech level and faction. Tech level excludes rookie ships, capsules and shuttles, whilst race/faction includes rookie ships and shuttles. The "other" under faction is primarily structures that aren't of a particular race and pirate faction ships.

Now it’s time to put some names to all this destruction.

The top five killers (final blows), where the victim was not in a capsule, rookie ship, shuttle or tech one frigate. The brackets show the total kills and the number of unique victims:
Marovinchian (5,463 / 1,265), DiamondDog (4,455 / 4,259), Loren Gallen (4,383 / 3,555), kerjin (4,373 / 2,994), Hera Darkthorn (4,055 / 3,531).

The same again, but for player corporations rather than individual characters:
Sniggerdly(43,712 / 32,037), Genos Occidere(43,154 / 30855), GoonWaffe (39,943 / 25,922),  Fremen Sietch (39,405 / 27,820), North Eastern Swat (32,704 / 24,330).

And for alliances (total/unique victims):
Against ALL Authorities (115,425 / 56,169), Pandemic Legion (91,301 / 49,606), Morsus Mihi (85,062 / 38,735), Red Alliance (69,726 / 34,727), RAZOR Alliance (58,754 / 28,887).

The top five killers of capsules (again, final blows) and the number of unique victims:
ANGRY23 (4,448 / 4,198), DiamondDog (4,302 / 4,145), Xavier Theakstone (3,786 / 3,612), Lithia Tsanov (3,283 / 3,084), Mist3r Evil (3,280 / 3,171).

And the capsule stats but for corporations: the united (38,756 / 33,778), GoonWaffe (24,313 / 18,844), Sniggerdly (21,786 / 18,918), Fremen Sietch ( 15,453 / 13,369), Interstellar eXodus (14,574 / 12,276).

I’ll try to be fairly active in the comments thread and answer what I can. If there are a significant number of requests for more information, I'll probably do another blog.

Hope you enjoyed the numbers!

CCP Diagoras