I like statistics , actually it can help improve the game and know where it needs work. Sharing it publicly with the player base will also make us feel more involved.

Agreed, this would be a sweet feature.

I never complain against free intel.

Imagine the following conversation within the dev team:

- Guys, guys! We need STATISTICS to see what's wrong with the game!
- But... we already know what's wrong with the game and we're working on it.
- Oh. Carry on.

Sounds like you need to dust off those beta stickers again then Zoom.

It's better to be proud with your work than to keep working because you feel you have to.

Zoom i'm sorry but your not. If you had statistics you could see the folks who are obtaining various things at a level thats vastly bigger than they should and take action on it - the beacon issue wouldn't have happened and neither would the insurance issue.

I disagree. You build a database of all items and nic that audits once a day You have it pull off average generation  and destruction rates for each item globally, by corp and by agent. You also do the same for items 'on hand' in personal and corp hangers. Look for statistical anomalies and then amend / nerf as needed.

Finding out what players do and why players don't play would be incredibly useful.

Jita: of course, making logs of everything is easy, and we do it for a lot of things. "Look for statistical anomalies" is the hard part. You can't just simply set a threshold for "plasma sold per character per day". What if he doesn't sell it immediately but collects it for some weeks and sells in bulk, what if he does it with alts, what if he puts half of it into the corp storage to let his corpmates sell it on beta? There are so many possibilities in the game that it's near impossible to set up global watchdogs for "everything".

And yes, we do have a graph of global NIC flow, but that hardly helps you discover an exploit done by a few individuals.

One part of our business sells food, its not really the main business, its more of a convience; like Ikea's horsemeatballs.

Our old Point of Sale didn't collect information about how people ordered their food. For example, it would register hamburger, but not 'well done' with extra mustard.

The new POS system tracks all that. The F&B manager can see any statistic they want to, to the smallest detail.

It doesn't make much of a difference though, because only 3-4 customers eat there, and the rest of the business is from employees. All the data in the world isn't going to improve sales.

In the case of Perp, it's not worth dev times to pour over logs to try and figure out whats going on with the details, when they know they have a population issue to resolve; that is make the game better so people stay.

You changed it from pouring 'over logs' to a more generic 'balance the economy'.

There are more effective ways for the devs to spend their time in an effort to balance the economy then to pour over detailed logs. Then again, they also have to prioritize on what problems they spend time on, since they don't have infinite resources. I'm also not sure which issues you are specifically addressing with the term balance, or if your alluding to exlpoits that create NIC out of thin air.

Changing the beacons seems to be a change in balancing the economy.

If a game mechanic allows for billions of NIC per hour to be created, that sounds like a big deal, unless your game generates 1000 trillion NIC per hour. In other words, something that's only accounts for a factional % point of your overall NIC flow may still be a problem, but its hardly something that needs to be fixed immeditaly.

You could make the arguement that beacon farming was going on for a long time, why fix it now. Probably because in the overall picture, it still doesn't matter as much as getting more people into the game.

tl;dr - Eh. Creepers gonna creep. Devs are so far behind on the fix it list, it must be overwhelming to think about it.

I'm basically saying that beacons insurance and god knows what else only come to light by forum posts and whining when its glaringly obvious from the data.