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[Andreus Ixiris]

During the average "Andreus needs money" cycle, I - and thusly, Andreus - spend roughly six to eight hours a day missioning in a hi-sec system for a Roden Shipyards agent in Everyshore, killing rats. That time is generally related to the sheer number of rats there are in each level IV mission. If there are less rats, why is each mission taking so much time? What is he doing during that time?

[Katrina Oniseki]

I don't think it is something you can handwave. You can argue survival rates and the cost of these ships to those entities that lose the ships.... but raw kill counts are not something you can just say "Didn't happen." It did happen. People ingame actively and purposely took the time to destroy those ships. It's not fluff, or game mechanics... it HAPPENED. It is just as real and noteworthy as a nullsec battle.

I'm sorry if it breaks your immersion that [insert faction] gets stomped by the tens of thousands every day, but it's not something you can just handwave it and expect people who actually took part in these statistics to let you get away with it.

Try some creative reasoning if you can't stomach those numbers. Survival rates could be higher, or the actual cost of those battleships could be lower. Maybe you have to fork over 300 million for a battleship is unique to you being an independent capsuleer. Maybe faction navies pay an order of magnitude LESS to build their own battleships.

Simply saying "Nah. didn't happen." is silly.

[Ghost Hunter]

I don't think it is something you can handwave. You can argue survival rates and the cost of these ships to those entities that lose the ships.... but raw kill counts are not something you can just say "Didn't happen." It did happen. People ingame actively and purposely took the time to destroy those ships. It's not fluff, or game mechanics... it HAPPENED. It is just as real and noteworthy as a nullsec battle.

I'm sorry if it breaks your immersion that [insert faction] gets stomped by the tens of thousands every day, but it's not something you can just handwave it and expect people who actually took part in these statistics to let you get away with it.

Try some creative reasoning if you can't stomach those numbers. Survival rates could be higher, or the actual cost of those battleships could be lower. Maybe you have to fork over 300 million for a battleship is unique to you being an independent capsuleer. Maybe faction navies pay an order of magnitude LESS to build their own battleships.

Simply saying "Nah. didn't happen." is silly.

[Lyn Farel]

I don't think it is something you can handwave. You can argue survival rates and the cost of these ships to those entities that lose the ships.... but raw kill counts are not something you can just say "Didn't happen." It did happen. People ingame actively and purposely took the time to destroy those ships. It's not fluff, or game mechanics... it HAPPENED. It is just as real and noteworthy as a nullsec battle.

I'm sorry if it breaks your immersion that [insert faction] gets stomped by the tens of thousands every day, but it's not something you can just handwave it and expect people who actually took part in these statistics to let you get away with it.

Try some creative reasoning if you can't stomach those numbers. Survival rates could be higher, or the actual cost of those battleships could be lower. Maybe you have to fork over 300 million for a battleship is unique to you being an independent capsuleer. Maybe faction navies pay an order of magnitude LESS to build their own battleships.

Simply saying "Nah. didn't happen." is silly.

It was probably not the intention but to tell people that their real issue is that "they can't stomach the numbers" where their real issue is the rationale and logic behind them sounds rather arrogant, if I may.

We are not saying that "it didnt happen". We only say it sounds silly, thus trying to be elusive ICly.

My question would rather be firstly why people care so much about exact numbers, and not what is actually around and behind them ? What makes exact numbers so important ? Why this sudden interest for the form instead of the real content ?

That things is like Eve Noah's Ark, it can't be properly explained without sounding silly, and we have to deal with it.

[Lithium Flower]

I don't think it is something you can handwave. You can argue survival rates and the cost of these ships to those entities that lose the ships.... but raw kill counts are not something you can just say "Didn't happen." It did happen. People ingame actively and purposely took the time to destroy those ships. It's not fluff, or game mechanics... it HAPPENED. It is just as real and noteworthy as a nullsec battle.

I'm sorry if it breaks your immersion that [insert faction] gets stomped by the tens of thousands every day, but it's not something you can just handwave it and expect people who actually took part in these statistics to let you get away with it.

Try some creative reasoning if you can't stomach those numbers. Survival rates could be higher, or the actual cost of those battleships could be lower. Maybe you have to fork over 300 million for a battleship is unique to you being an independent capsuleer. Maybe faction navies pay an order of magnitude LESS to build their own battleships.

Simply saying "Nah. didn't happen." is silly.

This is just farming. There are some things that simply can't happen with real people. For example, yesterday I was trying to kill a cruiser with a frigate, and a couple of other cruisers went in to help him. What we are doing with pirates can't be true: there are lots of ships in other belts, and if they were manned, they'd ambush you like nothing else. Actually, they'd get reinforcements from like several systems around you just to take your farming ship down.
But it didn't happen.
Because they are not peoples, they are bots for farming.

Of course, you are free to tell that you are killing pirates, and have some 'hard' battles against them, that your crew hold heroic when fighting outnumbered, and 'by miracle' you won...

Although daily NPC kill numbers, or even kills for several capsuleers... I mean players, or statistics against NPC are pointless. In real combat it simply can't happen. But still because in game it did happen, there could be explanations, that other forces were 'engaged' in fights against other, non capsuleer forces, and losses due to capsuleer activities are just less than a percent of total losses/victories by a choosen NPC faction.

Thus, from my opinion, posting of NPC kill statistic should be considered either as disinformation or trying to argue with incomplete data and without full awareness of the situation. (as worse than posting killmails)

[Saede Riordan]

Ignoring the stupidity of NPCs throwing themselves gleefully under the guns of capsuleer ships they have no chance of killing. And ignoring their attempts to call for backup or flee in terror, and ignoring their failing to use even basic combat tactics. It still comes down to a question of numbers.

Would someone be able to write up a very simple program to trawl the database on an average weekend and see the exact numbers of NPC/pirate kills and losses, if so you could use a pretty simple formula to calculate the total deaths, and figure out how many people there would need to be in New Eden for those loses to be sustainable, and see if the math works out with the supposed population.

It'd be something like:

(((NPC Kills on an average day across the cluster - (sansha ships killed+% of survivors from all others))*365 days)

then look at the % of people to die of violent deaths according to the canon and (somehow) figure out how much of that is caused by capsuleers alone.

Then you have the following formula:

average yearly deaths to capsuleers (pulled from database)/100=percentage of deaths caused by capsuleers in the canon/total deaths

Thus giving you the total yearly deaths in the cluster. I think there might be a way to back-derive from this to total population required for this to be sustainable using real life as something of a rough metric. Its not great math, but you could see if the figures are ballpark accurate to the canonical population of the cluster. If so, the exact numbers make sense, if not, you have to fudge the numbers if you don't want to have the cluster population drained. CCP could easily do their own math to figure out the required population given these deaths, and retcon the population to make sense with ships killed (maybe someone should ask Falcon to do that)

[Esna Pitoojee]

For what it's worth, I know Dropbear was rather unhappy with the crew/NPC death numbers and very much wanted to do something about them, so it's not something that CCP is unaware of.

That said, I have to point out something about this quote (bolding mine):

And what is wrong with numbers?  Reasonably speaking, on a day where I sit down and seriously rat (running a tengu/blaster Naga dual box) I generally say that I will rat to half a billion isk.  This means that my little two man fleet, kills maybe 350 Serpentis battleships.  That's not an insane number.  I never claimed that I personally killed thousands of battleships a day, but that across Fade (a whole region where there are a ton of Serps) 42(ish) thousand ships were killed in a 48 hour period by all the capsuleers living there.  How many trillions of people are there in New Eden?  The current death rate of the world is roughly 153 thousand a day with a population of 6 billion.  That ratio with a population of 50 trillion yields 1.275 billion dead per day.  Sooooo, why is killing 5 million people every couple of days across a whole region of space breaking immersion?

I think the math is a bit off here: Assuming a roughly 38% survivor rate - towards the high end of what EVElopedia tells us will survive a battleship - from the very lowest possible crew aboard each Vindicator hull, 2,500 people are dieing from each kill.

Let's be conservative here and, from the above post, say you only kill 200 BS. That's 500,000 people from you, alone, in a single day. Now, I asked Alizabeth last night how many people ratted in Fade; her answer was 2-300, maybe more. Again, let's be conservative and say it's only 200. So,

2500 * 200 * 200 = One hundred million. Admittedly, these are very rough and very simplified mathematics, but still - one hundred million dead every single day from battleship NPC kills alone in a single region, not counting losses of any other type of NPC rat, with conservative estimates.

It could easily be far, far higher, assuming that number of crew don't always escape or there are more people ratting harder.

[Lyn Farel]

The number of rats being farmed in nullsec regions is probably ridiculous compared to the number of rats daily farmed by mission runners in high sec anyway. The numbers are proably mind boggling.

[Lithium Flower]

Ah, missuns... So, Back to damsels!

Anyone dare to estimate how many damsels are kidnapped daily in a single system, say, Motsu? 

[Saede Riordan]

I think the math is a bit off here: Assuming a roughly 38% survivor rate - towards the high end of what EVElopedia tells us will survive a battleship - from the very lowest possible crew aboard each Vindicator hull, 2,500 people are dieing from each kill.

actually Esna according to this article, the minimum NPC crew for a battleship is 500-700 people, so it might be a bit more reasonable.

Redoing the rest of your math with that page taken into account

assuming your own 38% survival rate on a 700 man battleship crew, 434 people die from an average battleship kill, so:

434*200*200=17,360,000 that's still a lot of people for a single region in a day, and Lyn is correct in saying the number of rats being farmed in nullsec is probably rather low compared to the amount farmed by mission runners in highsec, it might not be unreasonable, given the number of people in New Eden. I'm really not sure.

[Esna Pitoojee]

Read the top of the page - minimum crew is essentially a skeleton crew needed to undock a hull without any further functionality - i.e., no defenses, no enhanced navigation, no guns, probably no targeting...

I was working with the lowest possible numbers from the "Maximum crew" stat; I've noted elsewhere my unhappiness that CCP didn't provide a "minimum fully operational crew" statistic on that page, so using the bare lowest edge of "max crew" seemed to be the likely closest possible.

[Saede Riordan]

Eeeesh. Okay, hrm. Yeah. I see where you're coming from there.

The math really just doesn't seem to work out.

I wish CCP would just make NPCs not be derpy, and cut all the missions to a very few ships with much more abilities and higher bounties. A single BS rat should pose a good bit of trouble to a single capsuleer ship. We'd still be demigods and all powerful, because a competent pilot could still win without a huge amount of trouble, and we could still just respawn and try again if we were destroyed, but it'd at least make running missions a bit more interesting then 'warp to a mission and shoot 3 dozen harmless red pluses.' Not to mention correcting the crazy numbers.

[Alizabeth]

When I posted on the IGS, I said with a crew of 250, at the very low end of the scale.  I assumed that were they at full crew they would be much more difficult (reserved for the elite and faction ships).  Also, I posted that Alizabeth In Character kills escape pods.  She doesn't have any sense of e-honour and likes to not have to fight the same people twice.  Other people, I'm sure let the escape pods go.

As for saying that the rats are stupid, speaking from personal combat experience actions are dictated by orders.  Sure, if you're in a belt and a patrol gets attacked from another belt, you might be tempted to go and help out (which is what happened to me once, our section moved to assist Marines on the Euphrates) but then the location you were assigned is now uncovered (which is what happened again, our SSgt was chewed out by the LT for uncovering the ASR.).

I don't think it is something you can handwave. You can argue survival rates and the cost of these ships to those entities that lose the ships.... but raw kill counts are not something you can just say "Didn't happen." It did happen. People ingame actively and purposely took the time to destroy those ships. It's not fluff, or game mechanics... it HAPPENED. It is just as real and noteworthy as a nullsec battle.

I'm sorry if it breaks your immersion that [insert faction] gets stomped by the tens of thousands every day, but it's not something you can just handwave it and expect people who actually took part in these statistics to let you get away with it.

Try some creative reasoning if you can't stomach those numbers. Survival rates could be higher, or the actual cost of those battleships could be lower. Maybe you have to fork over 300 million for a battleship is unique to you being an independent capsuleer. Maybe faction navies pay an order of magnitude LESS to build their own battleships.

Simply saying "Nah. didn't happen." is silly.

Katrina, can I have your babies?

On an aside, most governments, large entities can get things in bulk for much cheaper than individuals.  Also, capsuleer ships, due to the pod/ship interface might be crazily expensive.  They might be the deluxe model, since capsuleers can and will pay for the best.  The standard rats are probably something akin to the basic US soldier in terms of equipment; elite and faction rats are probably akin to the Seals or MarSOC in terms of equipment, all the coolest toys, all the high tech gizmos.  Capsuleers, well, we're like Tony Stark.

[Katrina Oniseki]

For what it's worth, I know Dropbear was rather unhappy with the crew/NPC death numbers and very much wanted to do something about them, so it's not something that CCP is unaware of.

This. CCP is aware of the realism issue of crew survival rates. It's not sustainable even if you just count player ship deaths, completely ignoring the wholly ridiculous number of NPC deaths.

Anyways, my point still stands. The numbers CCP has given us might still be a bit unreasonable, and you're all completely legitimized to argue survival rates or material costs. But I stand by what I said. You cannot discount actual kill counts that happen ingame thanks to player action. It doesn't set a good precedent.

I'll set an example. Let's say I killed 100 Angel Cartel ships in a day. A Cartel roleplayer doesn't like that I've been farming their people, and thus denies that I've been killing off so many of their associates because the numbers are too extreme. How is that fair to me?

How is that different from me killing 100 player ships in a day (a good solid nullsec blob battle), and you saying it never happened? I took the action. I have ingame data to prove it. Wallet transaction logs, LP transaction logs, and updates to the world map visible to everyone.

But, oh just 100 NPC ships is okay, you say. That's not too bad.... except you're only counting one person. Me. If it's okay for me to make that claim, why is it suddenly not okay to also include the claims of thousands of other EVE players who killed 100 NPCs?

Denying an event that not only happened due to purposeful action by a player character, but also has multiple sources of proof to back up the claim is not acceptable. Denying actions when counted in bulk, or twisting the numbers to suit your fancy is equally unacceptable.

Katrina, can I have your babies?

Wat. 

[Nicoletta Mithra]

Anyways, my point still stands. The numbers CCP has given us might still be a bit unreasonable, and you're all completely legitimized to argue survival rates or material costs. But I stand by what I said. You cannot discount actual kill counts that happen ingame thanks to player action. It doesn't set a good precedent.

I'll set an example. Let's say I killed 100 Angel Cartel ships in a day. A Cartel roleplayer doesn't like that I've been farming their people, and thus denies that I've been killing off so many of their associates because the numbers are too extreme. How is that fair to me?

On the other hand I think you would be perfectly justified not to claim to have killed those 100 ships, but maybe fewer or not to focus on the exact numbers at all. If someone feels it breakes their immersion, to talk about how they again killed xxx ships today again, it's a perfectly valid choice for them to talk as if it were fewer ship they themselves have shot out of their skies.