While attending the recent EVE Fan Fest, News Manager Keith Cross attended a talk by Dr. "Eyjo" Guðmundsson, EVE Economist. In this article, Keith gives us a quick update on the living, breathing EVE economy
While at Fanfest I had the opportunity to sit in on a presentation by Dr. Eyjólfur "Eyjo" Guðmundsson, EVE’s resident economist, where he spoke of the work that he’s been doing and some of the information that he has gathered for EVE’s first Quarterly Economic Newsletter. He revealed that the focus of the first QEM would be on the demographics of the EVE universe, the macroeconomics of EVE where he takes at EVE’s monetary system and money supply, and price levels and changes where he looks at inflation/deflation with some interesting conclusions.
Demographics
Dr. Eyjo stared by showing us a graph indicating the average number of skill points among characters of each faction and the distribution of those points in each skill category across each faction. The graph showed that skill points are fairly evenly distributed between the factions with each faction in the 8 to 9 million average skill point range. The graph also showed that skills were fairly evenly distributed among each skill category, but there were noticeable differences in the weapon skills chosen for characters of different races. The weapon skill distribution indicates that players are choosing these skills based on the racial bonuses for their faction, which reinforces the strengths and weakness of each race. The next graph ignored race and faction, focusing simply on showing how many players have how many skill points. The results were interesting, showing that the grand majority of characters have less that 1,000,000 skill points, and the player with the most has a whopping 91 million skill points. We were told that this character has been around since beta.
Read the whole thing here.