Week 4: Case Study — The EVE Online Economy

A decade of Monthly Economic Reports, read as what they are — one of the largest publicly available datasets on a virtual economy anywhere.

15 March 2027

Open the slides

EVE Online is the closest thing this course has to a controlled experiment running for over two decades: one server, one currency, one economy, and a developer that has published a Monthly Economic Report — ISK faucets and sinks, mineral price indices, production and destruction values, regional market activity — for years. No other virtual economy this course touches has anything close to that public a record.

What’s actually in a Monthly Economic Report#

Slides walks through how to read one: where the faucet/sink breakdown lives, what “Active ISK Delta” means and why it spikes after every expansion, and why destruction value (ships blown up) counts as an economic indicator at all — in EVE, blowing things up is the dominant currency sink, not an accident of combat.

The lecture’s throughline#

Two moments where a trend visible in the published data came first, and a deliberate design intervention followed it:

• the 2020 resource-redistribution rework. Years of regional production breakdowns had shown highsec quietly creeping toward self-sufficiency in materials that were supposed to require trade with lowsec and nullsec — exactly the flattening-out a healthy interdependent economy shouldn’t show. CCP’s response was to redraw which security band produces which raw material, specifically so that no single band could re-achieve that self-sufficiency through internal trade alone.
• the 2017 Lifeblood expansion’s moon-mining rework. The MER’s regional-activity figures had shown moon harvesting as unusually flat and low-conflict for a nullsec resource — a passive income stream one alliance could hold quietly for years with no real contest, unlike every other resource on the destruction-value side of the report. Lifeblood replaced that passive system with an actively-scheduled extraction window that has to be defended, and the subsequent MER reports show exactly what the rework intended: destruction-value and regional-activity figures for moon systems that are now genuinely fought over.

Exact ore-to-security-band assignments have shifted more than once since 2020 (most recently around the 2024 Equinox and 2025 mining reworks). What this course asks you to read from the MER is the pattern — CCP deliberately denying any one region full self-sufficiency — not a specific patch’s current table; check CCP’s own patch notes before citing a precise assignment in an assessment.

Before the assessment#

The Market Data Report (due this week) asks you to do a smaller version of this reading exercise against a report you haven’t seen in class. Start early — the reports reward slow reading, not skimming.