EVE Online developer CCP Games just released its end-of-year statistics for its ruthless space sandbox, in celebration of what has been a big year for the veteran Icelandic MMO. The game received two new expansions which introduced player-created freelance missions and an overhauled mining experience, as five new ships.
CCP’s stats suggest these expansions went down well. Players created 9,130 missions for chancing mercenaries to take up, while the most popular new ship, the Pioneer, was manufactured 71,873 times, and destroyed 4,513 times. Players across the game also destroyed 12,406 player-made ‘upwell’ structures, which presumably led to a helluva lot of insurance claims.
The number that really stood out to me, however, is how much ISK—EVE’s in-game currency—was incinerated in the course of all this destruction. According to CCP, that number totals 1,142,260,784,813,930 ISK. That’s more than one quadrillion ISK that went up in flames over the last twelve months. More than 10 to the power 15, or, as I prefer to think of it, an absolute shedload.
The second is that ISK’s real-world value is not set. It fluctuates relative to the value of PLEX, EVE Online’s paid currency players can use to buy various things including ISK. PLEX can be bought in various amounts, with higher amounts giving you a bulk discount. This is partly because CCP forbids selling ISK for real-money so it actively tries to separate the currency from any firm real-world value.
With all that said, let’s whip out our calculators and hash this out. Currently, the most PLEX you buy in one go is 20,000 PLEX, which costs $650 in the EVE Online store. Hence, 1 PLEX purchased in this pack is worth roughly 0.0325 cents (you also get six ship skins in this pack, but let’s discount those for the sake of simplicity).
According to various sources the ISK value of 1 PLEX is around 6 million, which would mean 6 million ISK is worth roughly 0.0325 cents if you bought the 20,000 PLEX pack.
In turn, that would mean that 1 ISK equals 5.41666667e-9 cents, or 5.416 recurring to the power of minus 9. 5.41666667e-9 times by 1,142,260,784,813,930 equals 6,187,245 (rounded up to the nearest whole number). So, very roughly, players obliterated around $6 million worth of ISK in Eve Online through 2025.
This isn’t the only preposterously huge number that CCP relates. Players also mined a total of 2,214,975,610,330 cubic metres in ore. From that ore, they refined 380,532,846,570,048 ISK’s worth of materials. I’m beginning to get a headache now. This is why I tend to stick with words.
Doling out absurd statistics isn’t the only way CCP commemorated EVE this year. Back in May, the studio announced it was making a tome of epic poetry in the style of a Norse saga, written on calfskin in blood donated by players. Safe to say, CCP don’t do things by halves.
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