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Market Review #4 - Cloaks and Scouts and Shotguns, oh my!

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G Torq ALTA B2O 684	Posted - 2014.04.20 20:10:00 - [1] - Quote Seeing the first 3 (#1, #2, #3) Market Review articles getting fewer views than there are daily threads about cloaked scouts, I have decided to pander to the public, and write a Market Review article about Cloaks and Scouts and Shotguns (oh my!). This article is available in a version with pretty pictures in it! Prior to the release of Uprising 1.8, on March 25th 2014, there was a general expectation that the introduction of cloaks, or Cloaking Fields, as well as changes to the Scout dropsuits, would result in a proverbial rebirth of the scouts on the battlefield of New EdenGäó. Some even went so far as to state that no other suits would be used! Well, Uprising 1.8 arrived, and with it a chorus of people talking about cloaked scouts. Scout Suits Looking at the number of sold Scout dropsuits before and after March 25th, 2014, we see the numbers go up by 2x-4x, with a slight increase just before Uprising 1.8 was released, and a very significant spike on the release day. 12/03/2014 - 20070 19/03/2014 - 35957 26/03/2014 - 149908 02/04/2014 - 81660 09/04/2014 - 78043 16/04/2014 - 95619 A better way to look at it is in the form of a pretty graph! The first days after Uprising 1.8 are clearly exceptional, but after this we see it swing in the 65k-100k range, depending on the day of the week, with weekend being the high-points. For information about what kind of dropsuits (Standard, Advanced and Prototype) are being sold, review The TryhardinatorGäó, or ,as recently announced, see the The Stomp-o-MeterGäó. Cloak Fields Looking to cloaks, we see largely the same effect, except there are no sales prior to Uprising 1.8 (naturally): 25/03/2014 - 22412 26/03/2014 - 216545 27/03/2014 - 157015 28/03/2014 - 139868 29/03/2014 - 144282 30/03/2014 - 130624 31/03/2014 - 100303 01/04/2014 - 92353 Or, as a pretty graph... An early spike on the first days, easily placing Cloak Fields as some of the most-sold items, while later slowly stabilising around the 70k-100k marks. An interesting observation here is that cloaks appear to be outselling scouts! Digging into this we do indeed find that most days, more cloaks are sold than scout-suits. One tempting conclusion here is that non-scouts are using them, such as the Logistical Suits that were predicted (and proven) prior to 1.8 to be able to equip cloaks using their skill-bonus. The odd Logistics suit, Commando suit, and even Assault suit has indeed been spotted employing Cloak Fields on the fields of battle, but another part of the equation is that of Blueprints existing for Scout dropsuits and not for Cloak Fields, which skews the data. On 2 days we even see more Scout dropsuits sold than Cloak Fields, revealing to there being scouts running around without cloaks! This points to there being some that see cases where scouts do not need, or not benefit, from equipping cloaks. Looking only to the immediate uptake of Scout dropsuits as above doesnGÇÖt give us the full picture; is the sharp increase due to everyone switching to scouting, or is it due to there suddenly being 4 times as many active players? While we could go to EVE-Offline.net, run by ChribbaX, to see if there was a spike in concurrent players on those days, this is a Market Review, and we will try to do this using the sales-data available to us. Comparing Scout dropsuit sales to that of all other dropsuits gives us a more complete picture of the uptake. Looking at a few recent days: 12/04/2014 - 96.955 / 540.126 13/04/2014 - 86.551 / 534.568 14/04/2014 - 63.118 / 354.808 15/04/2014 - 69.899 / 433.225 On these randomly selected days we see a 5.5x-6.2x relation between Scout dropsuits and all other dropsuits. Rememb... Team Fairy DUST HTTP://Dust.Thang.DK/ - DUST514 Fitting Tool based on DUST SDE
G Torq ALTA B2O 684	Posted - 2014.04.20 20:10:00 - [2] - Quote Shotguns A lot of the observations about cloaked scouts is done in relation to Shotguns, to the point where one would believe that all scouts use nothing but shotguns. A first thing to look at is how Uprising 1.8 have affected the sale of shotguns. Clearly the release has a favourable effect on sales for the shotgun-manufacturers, but while it is higher than recent months, it is not notably higher than historical highs! Most recently sales have hit 100k-110k, during the ongoing Triple-SP Event, but past sales has managed to hit 100k, so it stands to reason that non-scouts have used (and are using) shotguns. The Shotgun sales figures are trailing those of Scouts, however, as players are also turning to other weapons, such as Nova Knives; at the same time, there are non-Scout suits with skill applying to Shotguns and until we have data showing explicit relations between suits and weapons, we cannot explicitly say that all scouts are cloaked and shotgunning. Counter Scouting One of the counters to a cloaked Gallente Scout with a shotgun is having Caldari Scouts with Precision Enhancers and Scan Range Extenders in your squad (or being one!). We will not go into the math behind passive scanning here, and I will instead suggest people review this document by me, with help from Ratamaq Doc: Passive Scanning The data-points of immediate interest is the relative occurrence of Gallente Scouts versus Caldari ditto, while a separate point of interest would be the Minmatar and Amarr Scout sales. Looking at the most-recent days, we see that there is about Gàô more Gallente than Caldari Scout suits sold. On top of this we have to assume that there are Gallente Scout Blueprint dropsuits running around, which we cannot immediately quantify. 15/04/2014 - 28258 - 22159 - 7368 - 12114 16/04/2014 - 40192 - 30159 - 10750 - 14518 17/04/2014 - 44675 - 32880 - 10561 - 20973 18/04/2014 - 44889 - 34782 - 11028 - 19301 19/04/2014 - 45879 - 31238 - 11054 - 18964 (Date - Gallente - Caldari - Amarr - Minmatar) An brief conclusion of this is that a notable amount of (Gallente) scouts are able to run around largely undetected, if they wish to. For a better view, a graph! A curious little fact is that on the first day of 1.8, no sales of Amarr Scout dropsuits appear to have been registered... Active Scanners Another possible counter to scouts is the use of Active Scanners, which exists in both vehicle-versions and infantry-versions. Uprising 1.8 brought along a change to the performance of the latter, while the former cannot scan Scouts due to the change in Scan Profile on all Scout suits. To some extent, the Caldari Scouts are able to replace the Active Scanners, albeit without the War Point rewards. Looking at the sales-figures of all Active Scanners (Infantry and Vehicular), we do see that Uprising 1.8 has had an effect Since early September (Uprising 1.5), there has been a steady climb in sales of Active Scanners, with sales mostly focusing on Active Scanner, Flux Active Scanner, and A-45 Quantum Active Scanner. After Uprising 1.8, sales have dropped significantly. Some detail is lost in the nice graph, but sales figures for the 25th and 26th of March are actually in line with figures from before Uprising 1.8, so the subsequent drop took some time to be realized. Meanwhile, and it is a bit hard to see, sales are slowly growing again, though that may be due to the Triple-SP event. Statistics on Forum Posts and Threads, courtesy DustSearch.com and ChribbaX Team Fairy DUST HTTP://Dust.Thang.DK/ - DUST514 Fitting Tool based on DUST SDE
G Torq ALTA B2O 706	Posted - 2014.04.22 06:58:00 - [3] - Quote Vrain Matari wrote: Once again, nice stuff GTorq! Please keep it coming. Have you thought about auto-normalizing to concurrent player stats? Love seeing the order of magnitude icreases in scout suit sales. The uptake on the minnie scout is surprising, tbh, but we're nothing if not fiercely loyal. Concurrent player stats would have to be the daily-max, as recorded at EVE-Offline.net, or an (adjusted?) daily average, based on multiple daily samplings. I guess something of the sort could be done (effort..), but looking to EVE-Offline.net, I'm not sure the measurements fluctuate as much as the market-data....which means at best, we would be seeing an indication of whether people playing weekdays spend more or less ISK than those playing weekends... shrug I'll think about it, and perhaps see if Chribba can extract some sample-values for me. Team Fairy DUST HTTP://Dust.Thang.DK/ - DUST514 Fitting Tool based on DUST SDE

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