Tuesday 19 April 2011

Eve Online - Spreadsheets Online

After reading fellow Tusker Kishin Hattori's latest blogpost, announcing the opening of his second blog tracking his wallet balance month by month, I decided to do some beancounting myself. Being a lazy fellow, I decided to let the killboard do the majority of the work for me and thus have tracked The Tuskers' kills/losses since January 2010, taken directly from our killboard here. Below are my findings:

Blue line shows the number of kills, the red line shows the amount of ISK destroyed by these kills
Interestingly, the number of kills we get per month has actually decreased, whilst the actual ISK destroyed has increased. What does this mean?

Well, one way of interpreting it is that we're killing less "newbie" ships such as ratting Cruisers, Destroyers and Frigates and instead focusing on our competition which fly more expensive ships such as Battlecruisers, Battleships, Recons etc. Instead of killing the ratters, we are now increasingly able to extract a successful ransom from them - ransoms are not included in these graphs although we do have internal data backing this up.

There is also a noticeable slump in both the number of kills and their corresponding value in ISK round about October and November. Personally, this is due to university starting up again, meaning less time available for pewpew compared to the mostly carefree days in Summer.

Now, let's have a look at losses.

The blue line shows the number of losses, whilst the red line shows the amount of ISK lost
Again, the two lines show a direct correlation as one would expect. Comparing this to the graph of kills above, it is clear that generally, the more kills we get, the more losses we take. This seems rather obvious and becomes crystal clear once you fly in a gang with us - we don't retreat willingly and often engage against the odds, getting a couple of kills against larger gangs and then withdrawing before going back in for another Round.

At the beginning of the data set, the number of ships lost decreases whilst the ISK lost remains fairly constant - this is mainly due to losing more frigates than is normally typical in January 2010, which did not hold true for February 2010.

And now for the final statistic - Efficiency. Often tooted as the statistic by 0.0 players who engage in fleets of 100+ on a regular basis, for small gang pilots it can vary dramatically depending on your luck. Of course, with a corporation as a whole, one would expect it to stabilise around a given figure, for example The Bastards typically hover around 45%-50%, meaning they kill less than they lose. For The Tuskers, here's what it looks like:

Blue line is..efficiency?
 As you can see, it appears to fluctuate. However, take note of the scale on the y-axis, ranging from 60% to 90%. If you take the scale as 0% to 100% (all possible values), it does actually appear to settle around, never being lower than 70% and never being higher than 90%, respectable for the amount of traps we spring daily, both knowingly and unknowingly.

So, conclusions?

Numbers are just numbers, your efficiency has no bearing on how much fun you're having. Personally, I've hovered between 90% and 96% efficiency, with no correlation to how much fun I was having on a daily basis, out roaming either solo or with a gang of Tuskers or out of corp friends. Just enjoy the game!