Burner missions – Economic Impact?

Amidst Hyperion's fairly rocky release (including, for some players, the loss of all their UI presets), many players are attempting their first burner mission. I tested a bunch before release, but have not yet had to time to run them “for real.” I am currently more interested in what, if any, economic impact burner missions will have. The first thing I did was jot down the tech 2/pirate/navy losses in two NPC corporations over the first 24 hours after these missions were released, just to get an idea of how frequently they were being run and what ships people were losing...

Perkone

Hawk

Hawk (140m)

Cruor

Vengeance (75m)

Daredevil

Manticore

Daredevil

Daredevil (180m)

Caldari Provisions

Cruor

Hawk

Comet

Enyo

Hawk

Manticore

Astero

Hawk

Hawk

Hawk

Hookbill

Wolf

Hawk

Kitsune

Hawk

Manticore

Hawk

Jaguar

Hawk

Manticore

One notable and somewhat funny loss from another NPC corp was a condor worth 56m. The bulk of its price was a single Dread Guristas Light Missile Launcher in its high slot (one other other high slot was filled with a salvager). The missile launcher dropped, so the pilot returned to the mission complex in a rookie ship in an attempt to loot the item. The pilot looted the missile launcher, but was then killed by the burner, at which point the launcher was lost. Burners, it would seem, are a fantastic troll.

But then CCP Fozzie graced the datajunkies by noting on twitter how many player ships were lost toburners on release day: On day one, 207 Burner NPCs died, but they killed 1563 capsuleer ships.” 6.2 kills per burner, improving the text day to 7.55 says another tweet.

Has the market been affected by these losses? The relevant tech 2 market has stayed fairly stable, in spite of ships like the Hawk being popular for burner missions. The daredevil is the only ship that is noticeably up, sitting around the high-90m isk in Jita as of 8/29. The Worm is high but has been since the summer buff.

However, the relevant deadspace module markets have spiked—either because of manipulation or demand but likely both. Small armor repairers in particular have skyrocketed, with most items doubling in sell price in Jita and remaining fairly stable. Buy orders are slowly acquiescing to the higher prices so if the spike is manipulation the parties are apparently dedicated.

If the price of daredevils and various deadspace modules like SARs stays high, this in turns benefits explorers doing 1/10-3/10 DED sites, which are often new players. It's a good time to run some lower-end DED sites in serpentis and guristas space particularly. I ran a blood raider 1/10 for kicks the other night, and got a C-type SAR. That armor rep is usually 20m, but currently up 15m in buy orders and, if I managed to sell it, currently running at around 100m in Jita sell orders with very limited stock.

It is no secret that EVE has a lack of isk sinks for many play styles, leading some mission runners, for instance, to amass enough wealth to fly mission ships worth tens of billions of isk. Risk/reward does not scale well at many levels of EVE gameplay. What's distinctive about burner missions is that they create a sort of risk of loss that otherwise didn't exist in the game—an isk sink that targets mission runners specifically, does not involve PVP, and can fairly reliably result in the loss of ships. It also introduces a new sink for pirate and tech 2 frigates as well as the respective deadspace modules, one that again did not previously exist.

Dotlan reports that in July of 2014, for instance, around 313,00 player ships were lost in high sec. It's likely that the number of players running burner missions will drop significantly over the next few weeks as novelty wears off, and it's likely that those who do continue to run them will do so because they have found fairly reliable ways of winning the mission (enough to at least break even on isk). So, in terms of the long-term economic impact, burner missions are not likely to be a massive market force. However, any new content that has a large amount of risk of loss is welcome in EVE in my opinion and I count this as a step in the right direction for CCP, even if the missions leave a bit to be desired.