You people really do love blowing up spaceships. | EVE Online

You people really do love blowing up spaceships.

2011-12-02 - By CCP Diagoras

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 5th, 2007, up until very early in the morning of November 29th, 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 5th, 2007 until November 29th, 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:

 

PVP

PVE

Total

High Sec

1,974,022

6,317,926

8,291,948

Low Sec

4,126,911

510,683

4,637,594

Null Sec

7,061,988

568,353

7,630,341

Wormhole Space

377,786

162,126

539,912

 

13,540,707

7,559,088

21,099,795

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:

System

Explosions

% Capsules

Amamake

163,106

24.74%

Jita

160,742

28.20%

Rancer

157,429

43.98%

Tama

153,503

20.37%

HED-GP

138,101

38.05%

EC-P8R

137,094

38.15%

M-OEE8

121,044

40.34%

PF-346

106,272

39.85%

Old Man Star

87,008

14.94%

N-RAEL

78,560

41.69%

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:

Capsule

3,468,179

Frigate

1,738,142

Battlecruiser

1,299,488

Cruiser

1,011,138

Battleship

921,451

Rookie ship

805,728

Industrial

613,317

Interceptor

485,349

Destroyer

364,079

Shuttle

358,370

Stealth Bomber

334,478

Heavy Assault Ship

319,003

Assault Ship

268,630

Force Recon Ship

198,800

Covert Ops

152,634

Interdictor

143,217

Mining Barge

103,393

Combat Recon Ship

87,454

Exhumer

84,301

Command Ship

60,812

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

Drake

505,263

Rifter

427,151

Hurricane

331,441

Kestrel

216,275

Raven

170,418

Caracal

167,771

Thorax

147,500

Harbinger

141,159

Thrasher

140,916

Manticore

136,193

Bestower

131,990

Myrmidon

129,330

Vexor

128,384

Dominix

126,295

Megathron

120,963

Rupture

116,389

Merlin

115,942

Punisher

108,978

Crow

105,390

Incursus

104,600

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

Condor

416,008

Atron

370,865

Slasher

262,312

Rifter

225,672

Kestrel

222,612

Catalyst

212,036

Drake

198,481

Thrasher

191,311

Merlin

173,076

Raven

161,661

Cormorant

159,616

Crucifier

155,691

Tristan

144,963

Executioner

113,012

Caracal

109,367

Punisher

108,685

Dominix

100,247

Coercer

99,493

Incursus

87,827

Vexor

74,613

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

Hurricane

925,522

Drake

908,400

Vagabond

593,096

Zealot

466,449

Sabre

447,654

Harbinger

360,268

Megathron

313,688

Armageddon

256,671

Rifter

250,641

Rapier

247,652

Abaddon

241,913

Dramiel

233,302

Taranis

224,093

Cynabal

208,933

Tempest

207,350

Broadsword

206,377

Ishtar

199,092

Manticore

195,879

Crow

189,165

Raven

188,639

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

Projectile Weapon

4,553,113

Energy Weapon

2,039,118

Hybrid Weapon

1,794,480

Combat Drone

1,448,419

Heavy Missile

1,033,373

And then by type:

425mm AutoCannon II

897,443

220mm Vulcan AutoCannon II

861,826

Heavy Pulse Laser II

603,060

Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile

579,528

200mm AutoCannon II

570,666

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