Another post bidding farewell to 2025.  We must be nearing the end of this, right?

This time I have an overview of destruction in EVE Online over the course of 2025 and how that compared to the previous few years.  But first, a glance at the December MER.

As always, others write and comment about the MER, so if you want different views or the raw data, you can start with this list.

• CCP – December 2025 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – December 2025 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – December 2025 MER Thread
• TNG – It’s A Bug, Not A Disaster
• TNG – A Look At PLEX And The Money Supply

CCP itself had the following comments on the MER:

• Economic Trends:
  • A ~23% increase in Production value over December.
  • Drop in High Sec Asteroid Mining value, and increase in High Sec Ice Value.
  • Bounty Prizes ISK faucet has stabilized over December, while the Commodities ISK faucet has seen a ~20% growth.
  • MPI continues to fall.

Anyway, fine fine.  CCP will CCP.

Though there is the Active ISK Delta, the currency CCP pulls from the game or ceases to count due to player inactivity, which hit 263.9 trillion ISK in December.

It is rare for the cash account to go down by that much.

TNG claims this is a bug in the link above.  Certainly the money supply chart doesn’t agree with this.

It seems like that would be down much more if the Active ISK Delta was correct.  Again, more conflicting and/or bad data from CCP.

One other item of note is the asset safety ISK sink, which hit 25.5 trillion ISK in December, up from the 19.5 trillion ISK in November, and about ten times its normal value, largely due to the collapse of Pandemic Horde and the evacuation of the Drone Regions.

Destruction

December saw a fall off in destruction when compared to the destructive frenzy of November and the clearing of structures from the Drone Regions, but was still the second most active month for destruction in 2025.

The month saw nearly 684K hulls, capsules, and structures destroyed, shy of November’s count of 730K, but still easily eclipsing May, which is now in third place with 538K.

Likewise, the ISK value of losses in December, measured at 63.28 trillion ISK in the MER, was down from November’s 74.85 trillion number, but was still well ahead of June’s of 51 trillion ISK total, which had been the high water mark until events in the Drone Regions started to land.

Here are the numbers for 2025:

• Loss Count Total
  • Jan – 514,511 total losses
  • Feb – 427,027 total losses
  • Mar – 538,625 total losses
  • Apr – 464,177 total losses
  • May – 530,632 total losses
  • Jun – 476,877 total losses
  • Jul – 427,662 total losses
  • Aug – 442,795 total losses
  • Sep – 420,017 total losses
  • Oct – 460,583 total losses
  • Nov – 729,531 total losses
  • Dec – 683,626 total losses
• Avg Losses per Day
  • Jan – 16,597.13 losses per day
  • Feb – 15,250.96 losses per day
  • Mar – 17,375.00 losses per day
  • Apr – 15,472.57 losses per day
  • May – 17,117.16 losses per day
  • Jun – 15,895.90 losses per day
  • Jul – 13,795.55 losses per day
  • Aug – 14,283.71 losses per day
  • Sep – 14,000.57 losses per day
  • Oct – 14,857.52 losses per day
  • Nov – 24,317.70 losses per day
  • Dec – 22,052.45 losses per day
• Total ISK Value Lost
  • Jan– 46.86 trillion ISK
  • Feb – 44.55 trillion ISK
  • Mar – 50.78 trillion ISK
  • Apr – 47.77 trillion ISK
  • May – 52.10 trillion ISK
  • Jun – 51.39 trillion ISK
  • Jul – 45.80 trillion ISK
  • Aug – 46.39 trillion ISK
  • Sep – 40.94 trillion ISK
  • Oct – 48.20 trillion ISK
  • Nov – 74.85 trillion ISK
  • Dec – 63.28 trillion ISK
• Total ISK Value Lost per Day
  • Jan – 1,511.77 billion ISK per day
  • Feb – 1,590.99 billion ISK per day
  • Mar – 1,638.07 billion ISK per day
  • Apr – 1,592.22 billion ISK per day
  • May – 1,680.63 billion ISK per day
  • Jun – 1,713.09 billion ISK per day
  • Jul – 1,477.51 billion ISK per day
  • Aug – 1,496.51 billion ISK per day
  • Sep – 1,364.76 billion ISK per day
  • Oct – 1,554.73 billion ISK per day
  • Nov – 2,495.14 billion ISK per day
  • Dec – 2,041.14 billion ISK per day

Or, to view at least some of that data in the form of a chart, this is how 2025 piled up month by month.

2025 Destruction Summed Up

As mentioned last month, CCP changed the format of the killdump.csv file, removing all human readable names and breaking all of my PowerBI reports.  So I can’t report out most of the stuff I have done in the past.  But I can still get the totals.  So we’ll go with that.

If you add up all those numbers from the MER… the MER being source of data provided to us by CCP… you get the following totals.

• 2025 Total Losses – 6,116,063
• 2025 Total Value – 612.91 trillion ISK

Of course, that is not what CCP announced in their annual summary.

Nope, this is the number they give.

That is 1.14 quadrillion ISK destroyed, nearly double what the MER data indicates.

This is part of the reason I am done with the MER.  CCP shows how little they care about this sort of thing through their sloppiness, their indifference, and their arbitrary changes to what data they present and how it is formatted.  It is almost as if they do not want an ongoing historical record.

And the community team’s indifference to any questions regarding numbers is an item of record.  They don’t know and they don’t care.  The community team exists pretty much to promote Twitch streamers and views everything else as a nuisance.  They made a nice graphic with a big number and moved on.

Over at DOTLAN EVE Maps, Wollari has his own summaries, based on the API.

Adding up ShipKills and PodKills from highsec, lowsec, and nullsec gets you to 13,702,726 total kills.

That is over double what the MER shows.  And that doesn’t even include wormhole kills, which the MER does include.

I don’t know which one is right.  We’re both using different data sources from CCP and arrive at very different answers.  And Wollari doesn’t put out the ISK numbers, but maybe that is the number of kills CCP is using to get their ISK number.  Maybe.  I don’t know and CCP never tells.

The conclusion with the facts to hand can only be that there is no way to know as an external user what the correct number is. (And it brings into serious quest whether CCP knows either.)

We are getting to the “UN Report Numbers” rule of statistics, which is that the more precise the number is, the more likely it is to be bullshit.

As such, I will fall back on what one must when the data collection methods are demonstrably not counting the right total.  If the account method is wrong but at least consistently wrong, then one can at least see trends in the data.

Trends Since 2020

With that in mind, looking at the trends, how did 2025 stack up against past years?

I have collected the data every month from the MER since 2020, and in looking at the data, 2025 appears to be an uptick.

The total kill count for 2025, as noted above, was 6,116,063.  Using accumulated MER data, so comparing apples to apples, this is what the previous five years looked like in comparison.

Year	Total Kills	Diff from 2025	% of 2025
2024	5,886,112	(229,951)	96.24%
2023	5,212,934	(903,129)	85.23%
2022	4,497,590	(1,618,473)	73.54%
2021	4,899,115	(1,216,948)	80.10%
2020	5,674,137	(6,116,063)	92.77%

To visualize this a different way, here is a month by month chart comparing the past six year.

You can see the Covid spike in 2020.  The rest of the year, which saw the opening of World War Bee in July, which lasted for over a year, doesn’t look like much compared to the March/April “we’re all stuck at home, let’s find an old video game to play” peak… until you compare it to 2019, which it beat soundly, or to 2021 and 2022, when CCP was busy breaking the in-game economy based of a set of very dumb ideas.  The war kept the numbers up for a while, but as CCP compounded its economic disaster, numbers tanked.

That was the year of disappointment, about which I have already written in detail.

Also, the there was a problem in 2020 where the MER only counted 30 days per month, so if a huge battle landed on the 31st… like M2-XFE… that just didn’t get counted.  Again, the incompetence does make you roll your eyes.

Since then the game has been somewhat on a recovery angle.  We’re nowhere near the peak of 2012 and 2013, but we’re

The ISK losses tell a similar tale, that 2025, which saw 612.91 trillion ISK lost according to the MER, was something of a high water mark.

Year	Total ISK Lost	Diff from 2025	% of 2025
2024	521.01 trillion	-91.91 trillion	85.01%
2023	478.99 trillion	-133.93 trillion	78.15%
2022	361.49 trillion	-251.42 trillion	58.98%
2021	408.49 trillion	-204.42 trillion	66.65%
2020	459.45 trillion	-153.47 trillion	74.96%

Again, 2020 is likely under counted even in the apples to apples view due to that lack of consideration of the 31st day of any month.  But, when laid out on a month by month chart, the lines look similar.

The second battle at M2-XFE is visible there at the start of 2021… as the first battle in December 2020 is not…. and then the downward trend leading to the slump of 2022.

What is noticeable in these charts is how, since the return to the two expansion per year plan, the end of the year has been hitting a peak.

You can see very much in losses per day, if less so in ISK loss, that November is now something of an annual peak moment for the game over the last three years, with 2025 exceeding the previous two years rather dramatically.

The question here is what about those expansions are causing such an annual bump?  And why doesn’t the May expansion hit as hard?  Is there a summer slump?  And why was this November so big even compared to past late expansions?

I mean, CCP was over at Eurogamer on Friday crowing about how big the Catalyst expansion was, bringing back old players and getting new players to jump in… and I am at a bit of a loss.

That is because… well, there was nothing wrong with Catalyst, but there wasn’t anything ground breaking either.  It wasn’t like the addition of wormhole space or faction warfare… or the revitalization of faction warfare more recently.  I couldn’t even begin to tell you what from Catalyst would attract new players.  Also, it isn’t like they are advertising again or anything.  Their entire marketing budget seems to go to Fanfest and streamer subsidies.

And yet, the numbers were unarguably up.  Cannot deny that.

Sure, there was the collapse of Pandemic Horde and the clearing out of the drone regions in November, but both CCP and Reddit pundits have explained that away as something that did not matter.  CCP did a Scope video and then pretended nothing really happened.

So things are great… because ORE now has mining destroyers?  Is that what the public was really demanding?

Anyway, the whole thing just makes me feel tired at this point.

The whole premise of looking at destruction in the MER was to see if destruction trends would track with the health of, and activity levels within, the game itself.  And that seems to have been pretty well proven.  Those charts line up pretty well with Jester’s login numbers when one allows for his use of a different averaging system.

Basically, the more people playing, the more destruction there is.  Seems about right.

So that experiment is at an end, as are my monthly MER posts here.

Mentions of the MER will likely be retired to a mention in Friday bullet points post going forward.