The End of the Activity Tracker in EVE Online

Miscellaneous:

Activity Tracker has been disabled.

–December 10, 2024 patch notes update

The Activity Tracker is going away and I have mixed feelings.

I didn’t like it when it showed up in 2018 because it basically ignored the first dozen years of my time in New Eden.  When it was working CCP chose to track some odd things.  And, given it has been slowly breaking for ages… another feature degrading from neglect… that it is being killed off probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise.  I feel like it shouldn’t be a big deal that this feature, unloved by players and developers alike I gather, is going missing.

But these things are always more complicated than that.

Back when it landed in the game, in November of 2018, I declared it as an attempt to add achievements into EVE Online and, as I noted above and will no doubt complain about again a few more times, only achievements for things that happened after it was introduced, so it was very silly when counting things like systems entered.  After a dozen years it said I had been nowhere.

This became a bigger question when Katia Sae finished their quest to visit all systems in New Eden without a ship loss.  Katia started that journey in 2009 and didn’t finish until early 2019, which meant their tracker showed very little in the “systems entered” section, something even CCP admitted was a tab embarrassing.

I don’t know if they ever fixed that, though they were going to look into it.

I got a bit of a heads up via Reddit that CCP announced the demise of the Activity Tracker in the forums… and I hate when companies hide announcements like that in the forums.  I mean, I assume somebody out there loves the Activity Tracker and lives or dies by what it says.  Every feature has fans like that.  But unless they haunt the forums… or r/eve I guess… they might not get one last look at their data before it is all gone.

While I was never a huge fan, I did use the Activity Tracker for an experiment in ratting precisely because it had zero totals at launch to track how much in bounties I could earn ratting semi-AFK before somebody came by and blew up my Myrmidon.  The answer was a decent amount… enough to hit level 5 on the tracker and earn 1.6 billion ISK.

Now with the Activity Tracker gone, I had just enough time to take a few screen shots before the end came.

That is basically what I did from late November 2018 onward.  How does that break down for the various activity categories?

Combat is the primary category… while industry is way down at the bottom.

• Combat 72.2%
• Exploration 20.4%
• Resource Harvesting 6.5%
• Encounters 0.8%
• Industry 0.1%

At the combat end of things it counts all sorts of things, both against NPCs and other players as well as ranges of combat such as electronic warfare and support.  I might as well start with NPCs and bounties though, just to come back to the above.

That is almost 4 billion ISK in bounties, which sounds like a lot… but it really isn’t.  That is stretched over six years, 2018 to 2024.  Meanwhile, doing PI I bring in a billion ISK per month doing not that much at all save for hauling my stuff to market once in a while.  So my fortune is hardly based on ratting.

In actual player vs player combat… I don’t have a lot to show.  You only get credit for the final blow on things, and in large fleet ops that is a rare proposition.

I do believe the 7 deployables were all MTUs, but I would have to go check.  There could be a warp bubble or two in that.

Out in the field I did some logi work… though, as with all of this, my peak efforts were probably 2013 through 2016, the Fountain War and the Casino War… though I certainly did get a boost in activity with World War Bee, until CCP killed all of that.  I managed to rep some people.

I don’t know if shield doctrines were favored that much, or if I just flew logi in them more.  But that is kind of a trivial amount.  Also, for a while repair drones were not being counted, though they must have fixed that at some point as I have some hull repair credit.

Going hand in hand with that is remote enhancement.

Capacitor transmission is from the cap chain in the logi wing.  That I didn’t max that out… when you’re doing a cap chain that builds up quickly… means that I really didn’t fly logi that much in the last six years.  Probably true.

Also, the fact that remote enhancement is just 10%… I think that is all from applying a remote sensor booster to Asher during one deployment… really means that I wasn’t undocking as logi.  I should do that more.

Exploration is obvious… sort of.  I mean, I went to a bunch of systems in the last six years, mostly null sec systems.

I want to think I went to more than 15 wormhole space systems, but maybe Thera doesn’t count.  I’ve been through Thera more than 15 times in the last six years.  Again, even when CCP was maintaining the tracker it wasn’t always collecting the data correctly.

The odd thing is that Project Discovery also counts towards exploration… because reasons I guess.

I did nearly 500 entries.  I cannot remember doing more than a couple dozen honestly, but the tracker almost always under counted rather than over counted.

Finally, on resources… I have PI.

I make T2 and nothing beyond.  I am lazy.  If this had extended back over my whole career, there would have been a ton of mining.  But from 2018 forward, nothing… both because I lost all the skills in the shuffle and because mining in null sec in a coalition is complicated.  There are manual taxes to pay the alliance and your corporation as well as rules about what gets mined first and cherry picking and… basically, the only mining I have even attempted in the last six years was gas mining, and that was a complete bust.  Too much competition.

Well, that wasn’t much of a summary.  The whole thing only tracked a third of my time in the game, missing eras when I did a ton of mining and industry and only picking up when I was feeling a bit done with the game.  In the end, it was not representative of my overall career, and all the more so because it has been breaking more and more of late.  The NPC count stopped working for me a while ago and I am pretty sure the PI stuff has been broken off and on.

Which is probably why it is all going away.  The dev who knew the code has likely moved on to something else… or moved on from CCP completely… and nobody else wants to maintain it, so out it goes.  We lose a lot of features that way.

Of course, CCP puts it another way.  From the forum post:

Sunsetting this enables us to focus on and commit to enhancing the AIR Career Program (ACP) and strengthening ESI infrastructure in 2025. In time, we will make activity data accessible through ESI and the Excel add-in, while enhancing the ACP, a system built to deliver meaningful progression and rewards. Our future vision includes integrating a modern activity tracker into the ACP, one that is designed to recognize and celebrate player milestones and ensuring every step of your journey through New Eden is recognized and rewarded.

The AIR Career Program, which they just nerfed, will be the answer somehow.

Also the ESI structure for the fading EVE Online 3rd party developer ecosystem… CCP kind of has to stop leaning so heavily on the community for so many things because they also keep breaking those third party apps and don’t seem to care at all… and the Excel add-in that only works with Office 365 version of Excel and not the Office 2021 version I actually own.  Trust a company with a subscription model to only support the subscription version of Excel.

So, basically, nothing.  We’re losing a broken feature and getting nothing to replace it.

But we’ll have a blockchain game and a soulless FPS.  Oh boy.

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