And now, time for something unexpected! After I made my last post, I noticed some oddities in the data, and after we dug around a bit,
@Orvidius found that due to some unexpected behaviours from EDSM in regard to timestamps, there were some fixes to be made for the EDAstro data. These are mostly done, and while some of it is still running, the numbers shouldn't change much now. But they
have changed from what we had before, quite surprisingly in some ways.
So, I made a copy of the "original" data before the fixes, for comparison, and you can find it
here.
Now then, here are some things that came to light:
1. The FSS hurt exploration activity more than I thought
Which was surprising, as I thought that the fixes would mostly mean mostly just less new bodies over time, and not less systems.
Before, based on the EDSM data it seemed that the FSS at best didn't change exploration activity (as per new systems discovered), and at worst led to slightly less, now it looks like it at best led to slightly less activity, and more likely, considerably less. This
does reflect the official numbers that Frontier gave us, mind.
Some numbers to add more detail to this. From 2017-04-01 (a date I chose because that seems to be from when EDSM had a decent sample) to the FSS's reveal, the median of new systems per day was 36,536. After it, it's 30,137. That's with DW2 included: if we are to check only after DW2 ended, then it's 29,129. (Which actually isn't that big of a difference.)
This is remarkably similar to the official numbers, by the way: -17.5% on EDSM, -16% on total official.
Also, bear in mind that this time range includes the Epic giveaway.
Well, there we have it then: no matter how you slice the numbers, people explored more systems before the FSS than they did after.
2. The "fleet carrier decrease" in the auto-scanned new Stars / Systems is gone
There's a good lesson there. That supposed decrease wasn't due to players flocking back to the bubble, it was due to some errors instead. With the exception of the plunge when people started abandoning DW2 (and with the new explorers, many of them abandoning exploration altogether), the changes were mostly smaller. There still appears to be a curious slight downward trend though. As always, bear in mind that stars are auto-scanned, so scanning habits don't figure in here. The most likely explanation is explorers as a whole are slowly moving farther from the core - the DSSA carriers should have helped with this.
3. New Bodies scanned / Systems looks different now as well
While scanned Bodies / Systems took a dive as DW2 wound down, once they recovered, there has been no significant increase since this January. The latter was an interesting feature I noticed, and turned out to be false. However, the launch of fleet carriers and the Epic give-away seems to have led to more frequent and higher waves. It could likely be an effect of more new players coming in, scanning more at first, then either leaving or scanning less.
Oh, and the lead-up to the carriers (when their price was first announced, and when the first beta launched and we learned that it's going to be significantly more than five billion Cr) is also visible there.
Another interesting thing, but not big enough to warrant a fourth point: while the ELWs / Systems chart had changed to be pretty constant after the FSS, the AWs / Systems went the other way around. Both these come with the usual caveats, however, so don't read too much into them.
Well, that should be all then. Hopefully. This might also mean that my monthly update texts will be shorter in the future, but we'll see.
I do hope so, but we'll see.
