Have you ever had the need to find a specific item you know you was stuffed away in a station somewhere?  Like for instance…your favorite Erebus? This is where the Asset Search comes in handy.  Just insert the name of the item type you are looking for, ie. ‘erebus ‘ and press the search button.

That isn’t helpful enough though. So I think it’s time to go over a few changes we’ve made to the Asset Search. CCP Punkturis was so kind as to tidy the search parameters and leave only the sort order and a generic search box where you could search for parts of type names, groups and categories.

Also, the minimum size of the asset window can now be a lot smaller.

Now, this works very well for simple searches. But when you´ve been collecting random piles of crap, I mean commodities, in every other station in in 100+ different solar systems…this picture gets messier.

This is why we added new keyword based search options in the asset window. Sneaky don’t you think? Well most of us computer savvy capsuleers have experience of these from popular applications like outlook or gmail searches. This is pretty much the same. So now we can do searches like this:

monocle security:null station:storage

So the search format looks like this:

‘free form text’ keyword1:value1 keyword2:value2 …

ereb system:fahruni minimum:5
group:titan security:high
region:”Sinq L” category:ship
minsecurity:-0.4 blueprint: original

You don’t have to write the entire keywords either, they are matched from the start of the keyword. They keywords are evaluated in a particular order so ambiguous words follow that order.

ereb sy:fahruni min:5
g:titan se:high
r:”Sinq L” cat:ship
mins:-0.4 b:o

This is also pretty sweet.

This is the full list of supported keyword and the expected values:

• type: matches item type names
• group: matches the group name of items (battleship, mineral, fighter bomber etc.)
• category: matches the category name of items (ship, module, commodity etc.)
• minimum: minimum number of items in a stack
• maximum: maximum number of items in a stack
• metalevel: matches the metalevel of an item
• metagroup: matches the meta group name of items (ie. faction, storyline, officer)
• techlevel: the tech level of item (1, 2 or 3)
• minsecurity: minimum security status of items location (-1.0 – 1.0)
• maxsecurity: maximum security status of items location (-1.0 – 1.0)
• security: matches security level as text (high, empire, low, null, zero)
• system: name of the solar system item is located in
• constellation: name of the constellation item is located in
• region: name of the region item is located in
• station: maches parts of station names
• blueprint: matches either copy or original

Some additional notes to keep in mind:

• All casing is ignored for both keywords and their respective values.
• Text must be enclosed in double quotes if more than one word. If not only the first word will be used and the rest is lost into the ether.
• The keywords are not translated

group:fighter bomber security:empire

will match all items in groups with “fighter” somewhere in the group name and located in empire space (that is high or low sec). The bomber word will serve no function in the search and is ignored.

group:”fighter bomber” security:empire

will match all items in groups with “fighter bomber” somewhere in the group name and located in empire space.

There are definitely more we can do with this in the future but we started this rather late and I didn’t want to add lots of broken functionality but rather a few simple options that work and cover the basic and a bit more.

Finally you should check out the updates in the Assets article EVEolopedia.

If you guys like these changes and want more there is plenty of room for more (keyword hinting, boolean operations, corp assets etc).

One thing I keep a close eye on as part of my role at CCP is the level of PVP activity within EVE. Seeing how many of you blow each other up and how often you do so is an important metric for seeing how much fun everyone is having. So, conveniently timed for MMOCrunch declaring EVE to be the Best PVP MMO of 2011, I present to you: many, many numbers regarding explosions in New Eden.

The information in this blog is limited to kills that have taken place since the new kill report system was introduced in the Trinity expansion on December 5^th, 2007, up until very early in the morning of November 29^th, 2011. Unless otherwise stated, we’ve also limited this to PVP, so ships lost to NPCs won’t count in the totals.

In total, 13,540,707 ships or structures were destroyed in this period in PVP, belonging to 1,075,754 characters or corporations. NPCs destroyed 7,559,088 ships belonging to 1,936,205 characters. That makes a total of 21,099,795 ships/structures blown up belonging to 2,251,177 different owners. To be fair a lot of those are rookie ships and such, but either way – that’s a lot of explosions.

From December 5^th, 2007 until November 29^th, 2011, 1,455 days passed. That’s 2,095,200 minutes. So, if you count everything that generated a kill report, how many things blew up per day/hour/minute on average?
14,502 per day.
604 per hour.
10 per minute (roughly one explosion every six seconds).

Where are all these explosions happening? First up, let’s take a look by security group:

Which systems? Well, apparently low sec travel routes and Jita are quite active. I thought it would probably be of interest to show the proportion of the explosions that were probably more of a “squish” sound than a boom, because some places happen to have a rather high rate of podkilling:

So whilst it’s been known for a while that travelling through Rancer will often result in being podkilled, it’s now official. It may be low security and therefore have no warp bubbles, but just under 44% of the losses there have been capsules. Probably best to make sure your clone is up to date before going there on a picnic.

The probably all-important question is up next; what has been getting blown up? Well, here’s the top 20 ship groups and then individual types for your enjoyment:

I’ll filter the rookie ships, shuttles and capsules out of the types, which gives the following top 20:

And what do NPCs manage to destroy? Well, from the looks of things, the tutorials are killing quite a few players:

The top 20 ships that people have been using to shoot at things (based on final blows):

It would also seem that projectile weapons are extremely good at getting those much-loved final blows. Final blow weapons, top five groups:

And then by type:

So, a high rate of fire seems to be of great use for scoring final blows. Not all that shocking.

Whilst writing this I was told that the idea of me writing a blog and not adding in some graphs is ludicrous, so I made some pie charts for you all to enjoy. In this, I broke down all ships by their hull size and excluded rookie ships, capsules and shuttles. “Other” includes structures, mining barges/exhumers, capitals and a couple of others which were too small a slice for it to make much sense to include.

Two more, these by tech level and faction. Tech level excludes rookie ships, capsules and shuttles, whilst race/faction includes rookie ships and shuttles. The “other” under faction is primarily structures that aren’t of a particular race and pirate faction ships.

Now it’s time to put some names to all this destruction.

The top five killers (final blows), where the victim was not in a capsule, rookie ship, shuttle or tech one frigate. The brackets show the total kills and the number of unique victims:
Marovinchian (5,463 / 1,265), DiamondDog (4,455 / 4,259), Loren Gallen (4,383 / 3,555), kerjin (4,373 / 2,994), Hera Darkthorn (4,055 / 3,531).

The same again, but for player corporations rather than individual characters:
Sniggerdly(43,712 / 32,037), Genos Occidere(43,154 / 30855), GoonWaffe (39,943 / 25,922),  Fremen Sietch (39,405 / 27,820), North Eastern Swat (32,704 / 24,330).

And for alliances (total/unique victims):
Against ALL Authorities (115,425 / 56,169), Pandemic Legion (91,301 / 49,606), Morsus Mihi (85,062 / 38,735), Red Alliance (69,726 / 34,727), RAZOR Alliance (58,754 / 28,887).

The top five killers of capsules (again, final blows) and the number of unique victims:
ANGRY23 (4,448 / 4,198), DiamondDog (4,302 / 4,145), Xavier Theakstone (3,786 / 3,612), Lithia Tsanov (3,283 / 3,084), Mist3r Evil (3,280 / 3,171).

And the capsule stats but for corporations: the united (38,756 / 33,778), GoonWaffe (24,313 / 18,844), Sniggerdly (21,786 / 18,918), Fremen Sietch ( 15,453 / 13,369), Interstellar eXodus (14,574 / 12,276).

I’ll try to be fairly active in the comments thread and answer what I can. If there are a significant number of requests for more information, I’ll probably do another blog.

Hope you enjoyed the numbers!

A new “In development” video is out, this time about Customer Relations and the Virtual Worlds team that runs the EVE universe.

In the second of our video blogs, CCP Basement Ben talks about what else Art is producing for Winter 2011 as well as a look at engine trails in development. You can check out the new video here.

We understand that players love blogs. Keeping you informed of what is in development for EVE is very important to us and we want to bring you more. More Dev Blogs, more news, more forum interaction and now a series of new video blogs. In this first video, CCP Basement Ben, the Art manager for EVE Online, talks to us about the new nebulae and an improved model for the Raven coming this winter. Enough words, go watch the video.