13 replies to this topic

[Melissa Blick]

[img width=500]http://i.imgur.com/PZf61.png[/img]

This graph was in the recent Quarterly Economic Report. I have no idea what the SP distribution of agony is, but you guys sure get a lot of kills!

Overall, everyone has roughly the same chance of losing ships, regardless of SP. 30mil SP is the break even point when pvp becomes fun, and you start winning more than losing. I hope this does not mean pod pilots should stay put in hisec training SP for the first two years of playing eve. The hope of actually getting kills seems abysmally low below 30mil, and rises dramatically in the 50-75mil range. Therefore, to actually enjoy a decent kill/death ratio, you need > 50mil SP.

This suggests an interesting idea: Want a good pvp character? Start with a miner or trader character instead. Focus purely on making isk, till you have 10-20bil after 6-12 months. Buy 50-75mil pvp alt from the Character Bazaar. Now train the pvp char, while the trader/miner alt keeps making isk for you. Wish I'd done that instead of making a pve-char and try to make the jump to pvp. Spending 2-3 years training SP for an effective pvp char seems like a stupid idea.

[Dior Saursi]

One thing to note in the graph is that it compares only killing blows, not just being on killmails. You have to consider in many groups younger characters fill the role of scouts/skirmish/tackle. Then you consider trade alts, cloaky eyes, and other alts trained to fill a single role. The graph looks really bad. I take it with a grain of salt though. I believe I have the lowest SP total of any Agony member and I still have a K:D ratio well above even. I realize I may be an the edge of the bell curve, but abysmal record that would be suggested for my SP range (around 10 million).

[DaDutchDude]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

There are a lot of things that can be said about the statistics you quote from the QEN, but I think your interpretation is incorrect in a lot of ways, and I'll mention a couple of them.


* Killing blows vs participating on a kill: I think that the killing blow is not a good measurement of PVP success. If you would measure the amount of kills people participate on, the graph would most likely already shift a lot. Ships that do a lot of damage or great volleys of damage will usually be flown by higher SP pilots, and they are therefor statistically more likely to land the killing blow.
* PVP in 0.0 vs PVP in general: This graph only relates to killing blows in 0.0. A lot of pilots who start out PVPing actually do so in high sec or low sec. Not using that data makes this sample biased about PVP success in general.
* Ship loss as a measure of PVP success: Loosing your ship may not be a measure of failure. When you have less SP, your ships and clones usually cost less, so going out and losing many ships might be very educational on a budget. In a sense, loosing a ship and learning from it could actually be considered a success. If you really want to get good in combat, get started early, specialize in one PVP-friendly race (imho you're best off with Minmatar, because they most 'best in class' general purpose T1 PVP ships and some very good T2 ships, although that can change before you know it), do some Agony classes and take it from there. I'm not saying you shouldn't mine or do industry, but you shouldn't play a part of the game you're not interested in, and you don't have to if you want to become a PVP pro.

[Madorris]

Please don't think those statistics have any meaning i can list 101 reasons why the data collected is very inaccurate. To me all i see is a pile of rubbish compiled by someone who has no experience in pvp at all. Here are some obvious reasons for you: There is no one universal killboard for them to collect accurate data from, most people do not post all losses on the boards they do use or even run API. Many alliances Agony included have private killboards so much of data is held only by those alliances and not shared with the rest of the community. You could kill 1000 ships and never get a kill mail does this mean you don't get kills? reciving a killmail for the most part is random in gang warfare. Two hundred people kill a titan and i get the mail does this make me good or mean i have more SP than everyone else? no simply i am a lucky SOB. The more SP you have the more expensive ships you can fly and to compensate you take less risks than a young pilot in a T1 frig learning to pvp so ofc you lose less ships. In a gang high skill point players will fly BS with T2 guns, HAC's or Command ships but without a lower SP player in a frig, interceptor or interdictor to catch and hold the target they are completely useless. You can be effective at pvp within your first few days of playing the game all you need is the propulsion jamming skill, high speed manuvering and a racial frig to 3 or more. Then you can happily fly a tackling frig in a null sec gang getting lots of kills, losing alot of ships and having a ton of fun. With the exception of cloaky gangs any FC who turns down a T1 tackler is a clueless newb or an elitist idiot and you should'nt want to fly with either of those anyway.

[Silas]

There is no one universal killboard for them to collect accurate data from, most people do not post all losses on the boards they do use or even run API. Many alliances Agony included have private killboards so much of data is held only by those alliances and not shared with the rest of the community.

Do you think CCP use public killboards to track in-game statistics? I can guarantee you that they have internal systems and logs tracking everything from kills to mining stats and market orders. The game generates the killmails, naturally CCP have access to all this information regardless of killborads being public or not.

30mil SP is the break even point when pvp becomes fun, and you start winning more than losing. I hope this does not mean pod pilots should stay put in hisec training SP for the first two years of playing eve. The hope of actually getting kills seems abysmally low below 30mil, and rises dramatically in the 50-75mil range. Therefore, to actually enjoy a decent kill/death ratio, you need > 50mil SP.

No matter what the graph says this is just plain wrong. There can be a million reasons why CCPs numbers turn out this way (some good points mentioned above), but some of Agony's top killers (past and present) have been low SP players. You shouldn't use a graph to decide how you play your game. Take a ship out and have some fun instead

[Madorris]

Do you think CCP use public killboards to track in-game statistics? I can guarantee you that they have internal systems and logs tracking everything from kills to mining stats and market orders. The game generates the killmails, naturally CCP have access to all this information regardless of killborads being public or not.

Oh i did'nt know CCP does the report that explains why it's clueless rubbish. I Learn something new about EVE everyday it seems.

[Azual]

In other statistical news, global warming kills pirates!



(I actually think the chart in the OP is quite interesting data, but just bear in mind it doesn't tell you what you think it tells you!)

[Fooavenger]

The thing about statistics is that they can be manipulated to say anything, so i wouldn't hold much stock in what it is saying, if anything i would say that it is more of a marketing ploy to try and keep people playing. At the end of the day we are here to have fun!lol so what if you have a rew ship losses, so long as you learn from it.

[Aelana Anais]

Ok a few points: The reason they choose final blow instead of any participant is with the latter they would have to normalize the data. This way each kill has one and only one loss so they are roughly normalized. There is a point to be had that more SP means more likely to have better eq so more likely to get the killing blow, but I have seen a lot of newbies who are doing crap damage get the killing blow it just happened they were the last one to hit. What I read into this table is that there is a strong correlation (not a causal/direct one) between high SP and knowing what one is doing in game. Since for the most part (ignoring fringe conditions like buying and selling chars)... there is a direct correlation between SP and time subscribed... and a likely correlation between time subscribed and total time spent in game... I don't find the results surprising. This statistic isn't addressing however the distribution... i.e. you can be in a decent fleet fit thrasher or rifter in 8 days of a new character... now granted most of your "peers" are likely to not know this and die horrible deaths in badly fit ships... this graph doesn't address the possibility that within the dataset there are outliers who are low SP know what they are doing and have much better K/L ratios. Because the data is highly aggregated. So basically my takeaway from this graph is... on average it takes till about 30m sp before the average breaks even... which means in my book... CCP is doing a lousy job of education when it comes to being effective in PvP... which everyone on this forum knows because that is a hole that is quite nicely being filled by Agony. If CCP were doing a great job of PvP education, there would be no need for Agony classes... but they aren't so there is. So all in all this graph doesn't tell anyone anything that wasn't already known.

[AkJon Ferguson]

To me the chart says you prolly shouldn't PVP with less than 10M SP unless you want to die a whole lot. That seems about right. Then it says that after a year (20M SP) you are on a reasonably fair footing with the folks you're shooting at. That seems about right too. I like it that way. That's what I signed up for when I started playing just under 2 years ago.

[Gienah Corvus]

This suggests an interesting idea: Want a good pvp character? Start with a miner or trader character instead. Focus purely on making isk, till you have 10-20bil after 6-12 months. Buy 50-75mil pvp alt from the Character Bazaar. Now train the pvp char, while the trader/miner alt keeps making isk for you. Wish I'd done that instead of making a pve-char and try to make the jump to pvp. Spending 2-3 years training SP for an effective pvp char seems like a stupid idea.

I think you're overlooking a significant point. The time involved for a player to reach 50 - 75 mil SP implies time in the game and experience. If a player does nothing but carebear for a year and buys a great PvP character, they're probably gonna get hammered until they get experience in PvP. I think what this data shows is that more experienced players get more kills. Yes, the higher SP allows for better ships and fittings, but those long term players also have more experience and probably more friends to fly with. It would be interesting to see this data correlated by time spent in 0.0 by hours.

-G. Corvus

[dzu]

The time involved for a player to reach 50 - 75 mil SP implies time in the game and experience . . . Yes, the higher SP allows for better ships and fittings, but those long term players also have more experience and probably more friends to fly with.

Once again suggesting that correlation does not equal causation

[Gavin]

There was a video floating around a year or so back, where an experienced player took a brand new character (I think this was before the character creation changes, so it would have had about 800k skill points) and went and did low-sec PVP with it, to see just how successful you could be combining a new character having few/no skills with an experienced pilot at the keyboard. It went surprisingly well, or perhaps I should say not so surprisingly. Character skills have to combine with player skills for success. The second is more important than the first in most cases.

[Deran]

In other statistical news, global warming kills pirates!

Maybe pirates have a net cooling effect on the global climate; and what we really want to know is when it comes to abduction and anal probing, why aliens almost exlusively prefer pirates.