It's been several weeks since the launch of Odyssey and the introduction of new mechanics in exploration sites by Team Prototyping Rocks. Since the launch we've been tracking usage statistics for our features and this devblog is going to take a look at some of the more interesting things we've seen from the high-level statistics. All of this has been made possible by a push towards gathering a lot more metrics from the game. Team Data, our dedicated metrics guys have given us some really powerful tools to crunch logs and generate the information below.

Impact on Exploration Sites

There have been two major changes to exploration that impact on the graphs I'm going to show. It's much less painful to scan sites down which means more people should spend time doing it and the mechanics in the newly named Data and Relic sites are different than they were previously therefore more people might want to spend time finding them.

First we'll look at the top three (by completions) Data and Relic sites:

Ruined Guristas Monument Site (null-sec)

Central Guristas Sparking Transmitter (null-sec)

Local Guristas Virus Test Site (high-sec)

It's pretty clear from these three graphs that usage and completion of these sites has increased immensely since the launch of Odyssey. Some of them very significantly, for example the Sparking Transmitter site has seen a near ten-fold increase in usage even if we ignore the initial release spike. Significantly the first two sites are only found in 0.0 space. In high-sec there is again a significant increase in traffic but this time only twice as many sites are being completed.

In the interests of comparison we should take a look at the Combat Sites being scanned down. Here is the top null-sec site by completions and the top high-sec site by completions:

Angel Forsaken Hub (null-sec)

Sansha Hideout (high-sec/low-sec)

High-sec at least seems to be on a similar trend, albeit with a much smaller jump in usage but what on earth happened to null-sec Combat Sites? We'd need to gather some more information to find out exactly but clearly people are much less interested in them now. I'd be inclined to hypothesize that people are typically out exploring null-sec in cloaky frigates as rats have been removed from the Data and Relic sites and they are reasonably effective for avoiding other players, so the Combat Sites in null-sec are out of most ship capabilities without having to multi-box or reship.

Whatever the reason for the dip in use of Combat Sites in null-sec it's clear that the Data and Relic sites are seeing much more traffic across the board and seem to be trending towards stabilizing at a much higher level of use than before. When compared to Combat Sites that have followed a similar trend they are still more popular suggesting that there is more at play than just an increased ability to find these sites.

Hacking

The trend for total Hacking attempts since launch looks like this:

Total Hacking Attempts Per Day

Here we can quite clearly see the initial interest and gold rush as people attempted to get rich before the market value of the loot dropped thanks to the increased supply. After which we can clearly see the next two weekends highlighted by the increased activity. I expect the trend to level out somewhere in the region of 100,000 attempts per day. It might even trend higher as the market recovers from the initial onslaught and we've recently fixed a bug that meant sites were not respawning as they should. This is a figure we can watch as a good 'large-scale' judge of changes we make to Hacking.

Global Ratio of Wins

In the above graph you can see that the global win/loss ratio quickly stabilized. Currently around 65% of Hacking attempts are successful. As a metric this is interesting as a high level view of how hard hacking is for the player base. However we have way more data and are working on automating finer grained metrics to let us see how successful people were depending on their ship, skill, rigs, etc. across various difficulty tiers.

Scattering

As you would expect from a mechanic closely related to the Hacking the scattering usage graphs follow a very similar pattern so we'll skip those for now. However the ratio of the cans collected to lost is very interesting when we take a look at the types of container:

Ratio of Cans Collected by Type
(Blue – Parts, Orange – Materials, Red – Data, Green – Equipment, Purple – Scraps)

We can see within a week of release that the player population had generally worked out what was and wasn't worthwhile to take. This graph also shows that quite a large number of cans are going uncollected, losing whatever value they happened to contain. We'll have to do some more digging to see how much value is represented there.

Summary

This has just been a quick poke through the high-level statistics we have for our exploration site changes. Part of our work towards Odyssey 1.1 involves getting more fine grained statistics into our automated tools so we can track changes we make to Hacking and Scattering in the future. We'll doubtless be back with more information in the future and I'm sure other teams will be along shortly with more pretty, pretty graphs.

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EVE Online: Odyssey is coming on the 4th of June and Exploration as a profession is seeing a lot of love from the developers at CCP. Team Prototyping Rocks has been working hard on improving the depth of gameplay that explorers will enjoy in their day to day lives. The devil is in the details and until this release the details behind Hacking and Archaeology have been very sparse. Our brief was to make the tasks you do in sites much more immersive and interactive. In other words, to remove the "sit and wait" aspect of Exploration gameplay and replace it with something interesting to do.

How Hacking Will Work

Our approach to this task was to start with what we know best, prototype creation. This let us come up with ideas for mechanics without investing an awful lot of time. Our final feature design came together as a card game. The feature itself takes the mechanics similar to those found in exploration based dungeon crawlers, roguelikes, etc., and gives them a hacking twist. We like this because it furthers the feeling of exploring unknown, hazardous places in the computer system controlling the object you are hacking. We hit most of the roguelike tropes, with procedurally generated levels, turn based combat and "permadeath" - albeit on a scale that is suited to shorter games.

This work in progress image shows a Hacking attempt in progress, although the hacker in this case faces a pretty stiff challenge to defeat this System Core (click to enlarge).

The player begins by activating their Hacking or Archaeology module on the appropriate target and is then presented with the UI window for their module. The gameplay remains the same between both Hacking and Archaeology with the latter being appropriately themed as an older computer system both visually and aurally. The window shows the user the computer system mapped out as a network of interconnected nodes. One of the node's contents is already visible as this was the penetration point of the activated module. Users hack a system by exploring the nodes adjacent to the nodes that they have already explored. Their goal is to find the core or cores in the system and taking them over by destroying them. Once the core is destroyed the system has been hacked and the module forces the site to scatter its contents from the cargo hold into the vacuum of space. The hacker, his friends and anyone else around can then collect the scattered contents. We'll be releasing another devblog shortly that will go into details of how the contents of the site are distributed and how they are collected.

Along the way users are going to encounter a variety of different subsystems:

Defense Subsystems – These are the protectors of the system, once uncovered they prevent the module from spreading to nodes adjacent to it. Some advanced defense subsystems also have other abilities to confound attackers.

Utility Subsystems – Scattered throughout the computer system are various utilities that the user can take and either use to bolster their module or attack defense subsystems and the cores.

Datacaches – These encrypted nodes are typically benign. The user can choose to decrypt the node to discover its contents. This might uncover a great utility or it might bring some particularly nasty defense subsystem online.

Cores – Mentioned above already these are the heart of the system being hacked. Destroy all the cores in a system and you gain control.

The modules, defense subsystems and cores have attributes that define their coherence (hit points) and strength. Combat is resolved through the attacker going first. The defender's coherence is reduced by the attacker's strength and visa-versa if the defender survives.

Modules also have a number of utility slots, this limits the number of active utilities that a module can have at a time.

A hacking attempt is failed when the module loses coherence in the system. Fail too many times and the system will self-destruct the object destroying all its contents. Hacking attempts can also be failed by flying too far away from the object being hacked, by taking too long and being kicked out of the system or by closing the module UI. On top of which only one person can hack an object at a time.

Modules and Skills

EVE's Team Superfriends are working on broader changes to Exploration and are supporting us in updating the modules that you will be using. All existing modules and skills have been mapped over to this new system so those who have already trained them will have similar advantages that they currently enjoy.

The Future

This first release of changes to Hacking and Archaeology are just the tip of the iceberg. In the future we hope to add in much more variety into the subsystems you encounter whilst hacking. We would like to add some rare, unique things for hackers to find and interact with.

We also need to tie the Hacking activity much closer into the EVE Universe. To do so we are going to find a way for hackers to pre-prepare themselves for hacking and gain items useful for Hacking from engaging in the activity itself. This may be allowing hackers to retrieve unused utilities and sell them on the market or create them themselves through some form of production line from data resources gathered whilst hacking. Either way we want to open up the Hacking experience to the economy of EVE.

We'd also like to expand the variety and complexity of things that you can hack in EVE to bring it out of its current niche and into the wider world, allowing us to create situations where hackers are valuable for more than just their ability to gain ISK.

Lots of people have asked about competitive or cooperative hacking and that's something that we may well explore but for now we wish to deepen the current experience and how it connects into EVE.

 

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