f13.net

Graphs and charts...

http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/pdf/QEN_Q3-2009.pdf

Highlights.

EVE now has 300k subscribers. This is getting on toward EQ peak levels. Yeah, it's not WOW, yes there are a lot of people with multiple accounts, but 300k is more than anyone would have predicted a couple of years back.

Most popular ship in EVE now a Hulk. Jesus Christ.

Kicking a whole bunch of isk farmers sent the markets nuts and reduced lag because isk farmers use missiles (the servers hate missiles).

Why is that surprising?

Doesn't surprise me at all, it's the main ship for an entire class of economic activity. I'd be more interested in which ship by class or role was the most frequently flown.

Not surprising. Frightening.

Again, not really. If you're a combat pilot you could be in any one of 100+ ships, if you're hauling you might be in any one of 8 different freighters or 12 different industrials. If you're mining anything except ice you're in a Hulk.

The only people who seriously mine nowadays are macro-miners working for the ISK-sellers, though.

Yeah. the only mining that's enjoyable at all is group mining. Its a actually very enjoyable social activity. Solo mining sucks rotten eggs.

Those are some seriously broad statements, there.

Obviously its subjective. I heard of one guy that studied while he was mining and it helped him relax, and he had a 3 minute timer by his desk to remind him when to move ore from his hold.

The market impact of banning RMT characters is interesting. I doubt any other game has this kind of data showing the impact of developer actions.

Damnit, that probably would have worked out well for me in College.

Yeah, I was well impressed when I heard about it.

I did the same.  Though it was a way for me to make time pass faster while I was working in the computer lab.  Help a patron with some stupid question, reach over move the ore from my hold, repeat.  Though in those days, before warp to zero, I also used the time to haul crap.  Buy low, set autopilot to sell high system 20 jumps away  :awesome_for_real:

I use repetitive eve shit to break up the tedium when I am doing marketing letters for my business. its not as glorious as using it to get through college though.

Having seen studies on concentration and learning - including one where an acontextual interruption (one not about maths if you're studying maths, say) can leave you taking up to 45 minutes to reach the previous level of achievement - I seriously doubt that having an alarm go off every three minutes will do anything but harm when studying.

One example that really hit me, as someone who often codes, was that if a coder is juggling state (holding a complex state machine in their head) and is in that semi-autistic, incommunicative state (if you're a good coder you'll know what I mean) then having someone unobtrusively ask a coding-related question does little harm and takes only a few minutes to recover from.  But having someone from marketing ask you something utterly unrelated (which demands an answer) will throw it all away.  My wife learned long, long ago that she could ask a question of me, wait 10 or 20 minutes without any acknowledgement, then suddenly receive an answer as if she had just that second asked.

My wife refers to it as "computer time". As in "Do not hassle Morat when he is in computer time, for he will ignore you and if you manage to break his concentrate it better damn well involve fire or blood".

But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I'm busy, I'm visualizing a rather complex thing and working through it bit by bit and if you interrupt me I have to start over, which requires at least 20 minutes of working out where I was.

I call it "loading working memory".  If you make me dump working memory to deal with something, it's going to take me at least 20-30 minutes to get back there.  As long as the interruption doesn't require actual thought, I'm fine, but if it's not something I can do by habit, for example asking questions you expect more than 3 words in answer to, it's going to fuck me up.  The analogy I usually use to get it across to people is trying to count change while somebody within hearing is counting off random numbers (say, football stats).

Eve, on the other hand, most of what I did in it was simple actions, that had been planned out in advance and only if what was happening diverged from the script did I actually need to think about it.

--Dave