We've all seen the mantra of Risk vs Reward! thrown about in any discussion concerning population demographics between the various sec space in New Eden. More often than not, the mantra is rolled out as a prelude to a call to nerf a particular activity; be it mining, incursions, missions, sanctums, moon goo and so on. Typically, it is also an activity that the nerf protaganist doesn't participate in or, in extreme cases, thinks it is playing the game "wrong".
Let me make something clear before I proceed; I'm fully behind the concept of rewarding players depending upon the level of risk that they undertake. What I am against is the seemingly given assumption that risk scales inversely with system security status. Reward, or ISK/hour generated from a given activity, is relatively easy to calculate but what about Risk? Have you seen anyone put forward a working definition, or maybe a metric, based upon game data? Nope, me neither!
Some time ago, in an attempt to stimulate the discussion regarding this mystical Risk term, I turned to our beloved game community and posted in EVE O General Discussion. In the OP, I offered a very simple risk definition of ship losses/jumps. Now I'm no API guru by any stretch of the imagination and mining this data myself was never ever going to happen. Thankfully, Dotlan offers the historical stats that would allow me calculate this particular definition of risk for hi, low and null sec. I presented data, based upon the 2012 summary values, which appeared to show that low sec provided the greatest risk. There were one or two interesting replies but nothing that I felt helped define Risk to any greater workable extent than my original post suggestion.
With the success of the Retribution expansion, in terms of PCU numbers, I was intrigued to see if anything had happened to the risk values, as per my calculation. I decided to drill down a little further than the annual summary I'd used before, but again using the Dotlan provided data. Here is the raw data and calculations on Googledocs. I think the resultant graph is very interesting.
Notice how null and high sec risk have remained relatively unchanged for the last three years. The really interesting change is for low sec - we see a significant rise with Inferno (FW rework influence possibly?) and then it really appears to take off with Retribution.
But why would the Retribution expansion have such a big impact upon low sec risk? Well, remember that Retribution revamped cruisers so that they had specific roles and, specifically for PvP activity, they also functioned extremely well at those roles too! My hypothesis is that Retribution offered players the opportunity to fly low cost combat effective ships which spurred increased activity in low sec, be it in FW or in a more general roaming gang capacity. With greater activity comes greater chances of encountering an opposing hostile player or gang, followed by lots of delightful explosions.
So, in terms of Risk vs Reward, does the above data suggest that low sec should be claiming the lion's share of that reward pot? ;-)
[Edit 26/4/13: I meant to include the following definition for risk, taken from Wikipedia and slightly EVE-ified: A situation where the probability of a variable (such as destruction of a ship) is known but when a mode of occurrence or the actual value of the occurrence (whether a particular ship will be destroyed) is not. A risk is not an uncertainty (where neither the probability nor the mode of occurrence is known), a peril (cause of loss), or a hazard (something that makes the occurrence of a peril more likely or more severe).]
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