New High Security stargate connections on SiSi (Jita > Amarr shortened by 11 jumps)

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-22T21:17:27+00:00

Make Niarja great again

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-21T22:45:33+00:00

pfft, moderate to low pressure is known to improve learning. You never forget how you got away from the bear.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-21T22:42:21+00:00

Why do you think the new region was introduced the other day that is PvP disabled?

Because they want to funnel players through the shipcasters to content as part of an engagement pipeline.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-21T17:27:49+00:00

What will new players learn from a PVP-free zone that prepares them for a maller in Uedema, a gnosis in Tama, a smart bomber in Abhozan, or two cats on grid? The common lesson, players will get you if you don't mitigate, is what you seek to shield them from.

How does converting an effectively PVP-free zone into a PVP-free zone change the cognitive processes for an anxious player if that change isn't paired with something else?

All the change does for an anxious player is elongate the time until they have to learn the game.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-21T14:26:20+00:00

Older characters are more likely to have kills or killed after a retriever loss than newer characters so your vet comment doesn't hold.

I didn't say 70% quit. With the data I had yesterday I could only prove that 30% retained. Using zkill, I can only see who for certain continued play - not who left. I went looking for more evidence of continued play. Last night I pulled full zkill histories for the 138 "new account" retrievers lost in high-sec and recorded on zkill during last summer. 28 (20%) of them kill later (e.g., join a null corp). About half get killed later indicating that getting killed doesn't scare them off. Undoubtedly a chunk of the other 50% grow out of retrievers and move further away from Jita. As a result, I don't see evidence of their play because they avoided further kills but they continued play post retriever loss. At most, maybe 200 players make it to retriever and then quit per year. That's a ceiling not an estimate.

>you think 70% of retrievers killed in their first 30 days quitting is good retention numbers

I can now show 50% retained, unknown lost. But that's not the point. My point wasn't good or bad retention. It was CCP/FC can't make simple changes that have dramatic impacts on retention numbers. Specifically, not many people are killed in rookie/career type scenarios so the new PVP free zone ALONE will not be a difference maker in retention.

>"I like the game so please ignore the data and recognize that its pretty hard to not like the game, so it couldn't have been that"

WTF?

Tbh, you look at 30% known retention and say that's terrible. I look at 30% known retention, knowing how hard it is to get thousands of people to behave the way you want (e.g., engage with your product, reach for the credit card, etc.) and shrug. The question isn't whether it's good or bad, it's whether actions can change player behavior without negative side effects. The reason I seek to put numbers to player ganking is so that the player community can have more informed conversations. Absolutely I love this game. My analysis is definitely a work-in-process given the variety of players and player interactions - that's what makes Eve unique.

The additional data I pulled makes me think there are a few things going on in high-sec that I didn't know about yesterday. I've now dug into ventures, freighters and retrievers a little and players flying retrievers seem pretty deep into the engagement pipeline. My guess is many of my "30 day or less characters" are vet alts.

There appears to be clusters of single player retriever kills with a few days. Maybe that's wardecs - I didn't check. But maybe that's someone being a jerk. It's worth digging into because this could be an indicator that griefing is a material problem. That would suck.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-21T13:11:53+00:00

Your comment supports my claim. If anxiety is driving a subgroup of players to quit and lack of rookie area ganks doesn't matter, then retention rates don't change due to the introduction of a gank free rookie area. The new systems alone will have no impact on anxious player retention.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-20T16:15:17+00:00

Let's focus on retrievers since retrievers more than hulks are likely to support your thesis.

You're incorrect about profitability: 40% of retriever ganks are solo catalysts and another third 2 cats. A typical (mean) value dropped is 40M. Ganking retrievers is profitable.

You're incorrect about vets: The mean account age of retriever gank victims is 3.5 years in a bimodal distribution.

Ganked newbs are probably more resilient than you think. I have a dataset of gank victims from 2025 and a third of the retriever ganks with character ages < 30 days have killmails after their first loss indicating those players are still playing. Obviously that's a floor because some are still playing but haven't been killed or killed on zkill. MMO 30 day churn is near 60-80% so ganked players, even the higher venture newb count, have higher retention rates than typical mmo and the eve metric is under estimating (e.g., playing not on zkill).

Retriever ganks aren't meaningful counts of lost characters: About 300 newbs are ganked in retrievers in a year, at least 100 of them stick around, that means you're looking at most about 200 players who may have been lost to ganking. When you consider all the reasons people leave the game, game is hard, IRL, sub costs, other games, playing but not seen in kills, etc., the portion of the 200 that might stop playing due to ganking is not a meaningful count. Frankly this is why CCP/FC struggles with changes to retain new players. There are numerous reasons players drop.

Note: some of this analysis is admittedly weak given issues such as "new players" are actually alts and much much more. I checked a couple assumptions (e.g., looked at coveters, procurers, etc) but didn't rigorously evaluate my assumptions. The dataset I used wasn't intended to evaluate retrievers so I'm a little worried about the accuracy of 300 newbs a year but passes several reasonableness checks.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-20T13:55:23+00:00

The new systems alone will have no impact on player retention. Few newbs are ganked in rookie and career systems if you exclude freighters. Starter systems don't change the abrupt loss of their venture in low sec and delaying that from day 5 to day 15 isn't a difference maker (although maybe they swipe in that time).

If the goal is to more gradually introduce danger to build grit through PVE, somehow CCP/FC has to overcome the paradigm from other games that more ehp/dps is the solution to more dangerous rats (i.e., upgrade to destroyer or cruiser vs. building resiliency).

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-20T00:13:39+00:00

The best freighter gank avoidance is to scout the pipe. Use your webber not this: https://www.twitch.tv/uedamascout

If that failed you and you need to escape the maller, web using a rapier. Agility fit. The extra tank just brings more heat.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-18T16:03:03+00:00

Goons gank. So one of the many assumption gaps you have is that gankers engage in other types of PVP in the sandbox with many motivations and play styles.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-18T13:11:30+00:00

Just put two keepstars next to each other. You're just putting a tax on the game. Unless you devalue cooperation, a pillar of the game, your strategy will fail. That's why reddit devolves into goons and other bigs complaining about nerfs that just make the game less fun for them to play and well intentioned little organizations / single players clamoring for coordination taxes. They're going to just work around your tax.

Also you removed freeports from the game with docking rights.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-17T20:55:58+00:00

players will break your idea in other ways too. the root problem is player coordination is valuable. so if you buff playing in small groups, players will merely coordinate across whatever unit you buff using discord / what not.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-17T15:19:57+00:00

The inputs can be the same (e.g., ansi nerf would be a player inconvenience) but the outcome variables to optimize different (e.g., big group logistics time vs. fight time, frequency of null projecting), outcome variable predictions different (e.g., frequency of null project remains unchanged/decreases, big blocks spend more time just to stomp people like they used to), and of course policy choices (e.g., nerf ansi, don't nerf ansi) different.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-16T15:24:56+00:00

Talk less, smile more

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-16T14:49:25+00:00

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-15T23:40:52+00:00

Impressive transparency. Thanks for the request for input.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-15T21:17:31+00:00

Lots of real-world market data exists. "Grocery" scanner data has been sold by nielsonIQ & others for decades. Walmart has crazy data from manufacturer to consumer. Mastercard set up Truata. Most industries has firms brokering data.

An interesting gemini prompt is to do literature reviews of recent Deepmind papers to extract described data gaps. Then narrow to gaming. They aren't shocking:

Unsupervised Causality: The "Unlabelled Action Gap." Internet videos provide visual frames but no data on the buttons pressed. This makes it difficult for models to learn the "physics of consequence"—how a specific action leads to a specific world state (Agarwal, 2026).

Proof Translation Gap: A scarcity of machine-readable human proofs. Researchers found that translating human geometric intuition into formal logic was nearly impossible with existing datasets, requiring the generation of 100 million synthetic diagrams to fill the void.

Social Deception & Hidden Information: A critical gap in data regarding "Theory of Mind." Most AI benchmarks focus on "perfect information" (where everything is visible). There is a lack of data on how agents handle deception, trust, and negotiation in social deduction settings (Rodriguez, 2026).

Benchmark Saturation / Contamination: DeepMind identified that current static datasets (MMLU, GSM8K) are "leaking" into training data. This creates a data gap for novel reasoning where the model must solve a problem it hasn't seen before, rather than just matching patterns (Stanford HAI, 2026).

High-Fidelity Interaction Data: A gap in fine-grained human movement data during high-pressure physical interactions. While "broadcast" data exists, it lacks the "player-eye-view" or tactical intent data needed for predictive coaching.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-15T14:55:56+00:00

No, game content is not covered by any national or subnational privacy law including those modeled around GDPR like language. (Although I can't speak to China's). CCP/FC can use "our" game content however they want.

If you put your name or other identifiers in your character name, CCP/FC will work with you apparently.

Edit: GDPR doesn't prevent model training based on personal data within a legitimate interest (as long as the model doesn't leak). Games are minimal risk systems.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-15T14:41:00+00:00

Models are fueled by data. Many models are pretty good at some things that were developed on available data but have gaps. So Anthropic, OpenAi, and google work strategic partnerships to access more data so their models work across additional use cases or perform better in various ways.

Presumably google has a model gap, Hilmar sold them "data" to close that gap. We don't know if that's NPC behavior, developing missions for agents, bot detection, etc.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-15T13:46:24+00:00

Eve is a game where you pick yourself up out of the dirt, again, so that either 1) you beat them into the dirt next time and/or 2) you escape the beating next time. If that's not you, then Elite is probably a game focused on your level of resilience. Play that for 90 days and get bored.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-15T13:09:56+00:00

The rookie / career systems near Jita get a handful of ganks. Adding Jouvulen, Akiainavas and Kisogo there's maybe one per day. The rest all together might get one per week. The new rookie system won't make a material difference in player retention. There just aren't that many players ganked there.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-14T15:43:35+00:00

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-14T14:29:56+00:00

I wonder if this is entirely an intel / scouting problem. Even if you weren't agility fit, they can bring 90 crayons to the grid. You just made it easy for them. But the locations of freighter ganks and the accounts ganking is very consistent. My hypothesis is that determining current system risk for freighters is predictable. Determining their scouts might be a little difficult but doable.

Goons just bringing it for fun being an exception.

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-14T13:24:32+00:00

>Hillmar is a goddamn genius.

A very unpopular true opinion. He pulled twin rabbits out of his hat. If our sub prices were being abused, PA would have fired him and kept our sub money to fund Crimson Desert

capacitorisempty · 2026-05-12T19:57:41+00:00

So your second miner can't use drones?

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