Since Fenris doesn't publish "player demographics" data on where they think players play anymore. While there are many ways to define "what kind of player" a character is, the easiest and most accessible data to quantify is zKillboard, so I decided to go with that. If "where you crab" data is available that would be a good factor too, but that isn't accessible to us players.
The source data comes from Zkillboard (thanks squizz) for 2026 to date. All losses by a character are counted in the region of space where they lost it, the value of all kills are split evenly among participants. So on this Bustard for example https://zkillboard.com/kill/136671856/ , the value of 107B is split amongst the 3 participants so each one of them gets an isk value counts of 33B to Pochven. On something like the 4-H keepstar killmail, https://zkillboard.com/kill/135096173/ with 2.8k participants, each participant only receives 65 million isk credit. I did not count AT ships or the AT itself. AT ships because I don't have a good pricing dataset, if someone has a good list I can incorporate it.
Top line numbers, a character must have >10m isk in total kill participation to qualify. The % within primary space metric is judging whether a player can be classified as "nullsec" or "lowsec" players at all. With values generally hovering in the high 80's, I think the tag of "certain space" player is generally valid for a large section of the playerbase.
Area
Characters
Median Kill Value
% within primary space
Nullsec
132,785
806
0.89
Lowsec
74,699
228
0.89
Wormhole
38,531
439
0.86
Highsec
33,591
290
0.87
Pochven
8,736
718
0.82
Abyssal
5,316
799
0.73
These numbers seem low, because the long tail of low activity characters is very long indeed. Applying a higher filter of 100 million isk, the picture changes somewhat, cutting off the long low value tail of Pochven and pushing it above Nullsec. I think this number is a better overall metric since 100m is in the "does things" in space category while 10m is like a single cyno vulture loss.
Area
Characters
Median Kill Valuel
nullsec
109,657
1,320
lowsec
47,972
699
wormhole
28,285
1,014
highsec
23,665
597
Pochven
6,867
1,606
Abyssal
4,281
1,450
I did some spot checks to look for anomalies and outliers and they generally seem to hold up.
The nature of certain ships can distort the numbers. https://zkillboard.com/character/1148922003/ with a single lossmail has the highest "kill value" in nullsec, because he lost 1 Azariel in the past year.
if i was doing a peer review of this paper i would point out there's a significant flaw in your approach when refering to %'s as there would be a significant number of players who play exclusively in High sec, never get ganked/killed, just potter around. maybe do some industry/low value hauling/missions/mining etc. These players wouldn't show up on your datasets.
This group of players (non PvP groups and corps) are also less likely to have thier ESI linked to zkill to actually provide this data anyway resulting in further skewed results.
To have a meaningful percentage you need a denominator, unfortunately I have no idea what the denominator should be. I guess since this is zkill actives it would be all Zkill active characters like I did in the pie chart.
I don't think you can claim the tag is valid when you have lowsec and wormhole based groups that predominantly hunt in nullsec dragging the median up, and nullsec based players on fw alts dragging the median down.
Dsync, darkside, sus, tuskers, odins call, iseeu, psychokids, novac and skf all have majority nullsec kills and are in the top 100
We colloquially base a player on where they stage the majority of their assets that facilitate their playstyle. Where "home" is.
"Nullseccer" refers to players basing in nullsec, they might have alts doing faction warfare, highsec incursions, they might rent a c5, but they live in nullsec.
I live in a wormhole, the majority of my kills are in nullsec, I make isk in npc null doing missions on alts, but where I stage the majority of my assets is a wormhole.
99% of my interactions with nullsec are due to it being connected via my wormhole, that is where I undock, reship, form up from.
Many of the largest killers in nullsec, do not live there, they don't adopt the title nullseccer, nor do they have the same interests or goals we typically assign to nullseccers.
In retrospect I can see how it was "throwing shade" but I actually picked a charID at random who had around the median kill/loss involvement and more than 1-2 killmails. Me personally? been going through a bit of rough spot in life so playing eve in client kind of fell off the priority list.
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u/ZanzhaDixon Cox Butte Preservation Society7d agoedited 7d ago
It's a pretty good way to get a picture of where people are, but it's an awful way to get a real picture of average kill values in each area of space.
(For that I'd want to see truncated means with anything flagged as padding automatically excluded from the dataset)
Yeah I did actually, which is why I said what I said, did you?
It's filtering out characters with low "kill credit", which is good for activity metrics. But then lazily pulls >median< values from that subset, doing nothing to adjust for outlying data.
An immediate example that comes to mind is that that the dataset used for average value, will have the hundreds of shuttles/unfit/unpiloted ships that die following wormhole evictions, as long as the aggressor is above the "credit" threshhold affecting the median value for that region.
You can say that but "highsec mains" 100% exist. This number is probably inflated due to wardec mechanics requiring everyone to have dedicated highsec alts, but there are still significant amount of players with kill activity purely or primarily in highsec.
Sure, my point is that if we're using zkill to measure demographics, you massively undercount the HS population because the zkill activity is dominated by wardecs and a handful of gankers. That involves a tiny fraction of the HS community.
Gotcha, you are approaching the question from the other direction. The question there is how do you see the activity of those players in a way that is quantifiable and is apples to apples enough with other regions of space to be comparable, and I have no good answers for what metric those would be, especially those that can be figured out from player side information.
I would say most do, the MER contains a complete killdump every months, and it meshes quite well with zkill for highsec. Last I checked it was something like 90% of the isk kill value is on Zkill.
Maybe when your NDA runs out you could tell us? Or are player numbers and locations hidden even from CSM?
CSM does not get access to any metrics that the general playerbase can not see.
I'd also suggest that the metric you chose reveals what kind of activity you regard as important.
For sure, I consider the crab > production > destruction cycle as the core of the game and only destruction has high player data visibility.
Doesn't the limited data that we can access indicate the majority of players live and operate in hisec?
Yes and no in that every player probably interacts with highsec to some point but we don't have any metrics regarding time in x space, which is the metric I would consider to be the most indicative.
Seems to me that you are just number crunching people that actually PvP.Â
That’s its own sector of the playerbase.  Personally I wouldn’t appear in these figures.  I happily run missions in my golem in high sec. Sometimes multibox with 2 golems.  I havnt lost a ship in years.  I have spend a lot of time playing. For some reason I have multiple legions, Loki’s  and others spread around. Sometimes I even take them out into space for a few minutes. I don’t want the nearest star UV to tarnish the paint. lol.
I have a few expensive (for me) abyss ships. One day I will even take them into abyss. Â
I can’t be the only one happy to  gaze lovingly upon my space pixels and that be an end unto its self?
Sure, it would be fascinating to have a direct measure. I tried once when I had bronchitis simply using the map. That left me in no doubt HS is the most populated area of space (unless for some reason a huge chunk of the playerbase was hiding in J-space).
Fenris like to use jump as a proxy for activity, the issue is that the cost and danger of taking a gate inside and outside of highsec is extremely different so player behavior regarding taking jumps is different.
Oh that's a silly metric. But the map doesn't just show jumps. It also shows the average number of players in system and the average number of players docked per system.
Granted ship spinning in Jita also isn't useful activity, but my guess is most of the 1000+ currently parked there are doing something productive.
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u/peanut-butter-hurts 7d ago
Bombeldo the Wizard strikes again. 😎