Surprising statistics: where are the PvP-ers?

I wrote a post to debunk the commonly recited claim that WH people are both extremely rich and that WH space is extremely dangerous. I used regional statistics from killboards to prove that WH ship losses aren't that expensive. They claimed that because they go to PvP in null (because they are so awesome that no one attacks them in their WHs). So I went to look for more data. Someone who wished to remain anonymous downloaded me 2868915 API verified kills from EVE-kill.net from 2012 (until Dec. 20.) for a nice sum of ISK. Using this data I could track pilots and not places.

I identified 197164 individual pilots who had at least one 50M loss in 2012. I discarded the rest as cyno/scout alts, lost newbies and such. I mean a single 50M+ loss isn't too much to ask if you PvP. Then I classified these pilots into "Highsec", "Lowsec", "Nullsec" and "WH" pilots based on which zone they had the most losses. It's pretty straightforward that you defend your home with more expensive ships than you roam with. Some people might place himself in another group, for example nullsec JF pilots who has most losses in low and highsec, but they are wrong. Such hauler couldn't exist without low- and highsec to haul to. His whole existence is bound to low- and highsec. With the above I found the following amount of pilots who lost ships in PvP

• 18231 WH pilots
• 87353 Nullsec pilots
• 39806 Highsec pilots
• 51774 Lowsec pilots

After that I collected all the losses of these pilots and calculated the average loss/pilot. The chart below shows that, with different colors for the different regions. You can see that while theoretically one can be a WH pilot with only 25.1% losses in WH (and 24.9 in low, high, null), pilots of all zones have vast majority of their losses in their home regions. As you can see, the roaming (and hauling) losses of WH people outside WHs are only 18% of their total losses. For the record: 84% of the total WH kills are done by "WH people" so even if I misidentified some WH-ers because of a highsec hauler loss, their contribution to WH PvP is minimal.

As next move I split the people into 4 groups depending how the number of their kills relate to the average of their own zone. The averages themselves are 7.0 losses/year for WH, 14.6 for Null, 7.1 for High and 11.3 for Lowsec people. Now let's see how the lost ISK is distributed between the four groups: Highsec ISK losses are dominated by those who lost less than half the average amount of ships. They are ganked PvE players and haulers who lost just a few expensive ships. Highsec and lowsec are dominated by lot of smaller losses of active PvP-ers. WH on the other hand seems to be pretty rounded, most losses were of "average" people and the "carebears" and "PvP-ers" are both a minority. Why the amount of losses is important? As you can see, for each type of pilots the average loss values are the highest among those who lost only a few ships, most obviously they got their pimped PvE ship ganked. Please note that it's the value of one loss, the yearly total loss increases with PvP activity (obviously). For this reason the WH-ers lose less money on PvP (first figure) despite their single losses are more expensive.

Now let's look at the loss value pattern! The chart below shows the percentages of various value ranges in the total losses (1x10B is the same as 100x100m). Similar to the previous: the low and nullsec are dominated by smaller losses of the busy PvP population, the medium losses dominate WH and highsec has the largest part of large losses. Freighter ganks beat even the supercapital losses of nullsec!

Finally let's look at how dangerous systems are! While the feeling of danger is subjective, the real danger is very objective: the chance of loss. The chart below show how much ISK was destroyed in a year in an average solar system: Now look at that! Not only the mighty C6s were beaten by highsec systems but the lowsec came out on top by large! Also, C5 and C6 is dominated by expensive losses and we already established it to be a sign of PvE. If we check the number of kills for trivial (0-30M) and non-trivial ship losses in the various system classes, we get the same, lowsec is the most dangerous place to be, while WHs see much less kills than highsec due to their low population. PS: If you can get a more complete database and send me, I gladly analyze that too!

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The reason why I'm at -4 sec status after only 2 days.