Economics of player-vs.-player ship combat In EVE Online, The

Williams, Jacob

Publication

Economics of player-vs.-player ship combat In EVE Online, The

Williams, Jacob

Description

At times, more than thirty thousand people reside in New Eden, the expansive galaxy of EVE Online. Starships ranging from nimble frigates to the behemoth Titans have mined for resources, explored vast swaths of unknown space, and waged wars over the fate of empires since 2003. Indeed, the politics and economics of EVE approach the sophistication of their real-world counterparts: there are bankers and stockbrokers, bureaucrats and spymasters, fleet commanders and marauders in no short supply. The sheer number of possibilities can be overwhelming to the new player of EVE, as each aspect of the game can take years to master, and competition can be fierce. When a starship is destroyed in player-versus-player combat, the value in Interstellar Kredits (ISK) that is irrevocably destroyed, as well as the ISK value lost to its pilot, are made publicly available each month by the EVE developers. We seek to model the ISK recoverable to the destroyer of the ship (or to scavengers nearby) according to other parameters released in the data documenting the destruction, such as the kind of ship destroyed, its final location, whether its pilot had a bounty on his or her head, and the time of day at which the final blow was struck. We found that the distribution of the ISK recoverable is exponential, hence better considered in terms of orders of magnitude, and that the aforementioned variables are effective predictors.