The Numbers Game

In a Gallente Faction War update on TheMittani.Com by author FunkyBacon on July 17th, he noted at the end:

One thing is certain: In June, not even Fountain (35,328 kills) saw more ship destruction than Black Rise and Placid (46,575 kills). The fighting shows no sign of slowing down, even if system captures do. The Gallente and Caldari will continue their blood feud, and the local pirate population as well as the various passers by looking for trouble will continue to find it.

A few comments, including one from a Skype channel I frequent, responded much like this:

okay so what dumb motherfucker is trying to compare "active sov warzone" to "FW combat area" as though a straight count of kills means anything?

 And this:

Faction Warfare is cool and all but it's pretty disingenuous to say that 46,575 T1 fit frigates crashing into the undock in Placid and Black Rise is somehow more destruction than what's going on in Fountain right now. 

My response is thus: yes, it is comparable and no its not disingenuous to imply that 10,000 more ships destroyed in low sec faction war is more destruction than null sec sov war.

Major coalition-level sovereignty warfare is absolutely dependent, more so than any other activity in Eve, on number of active participating pilots. In order to keep the fleets full, every major alliance has some form or another of ship reimbursement policy, from basic hull reimbursement to full on "we'll give you the ship already fit to fly" reimbursement of the rich alliances (and there will be another post on the perils of this 'space communism later this week).

In faction war low sec, there are a lot of tech 1 frigates being flown and getting destroyed. But there are a lot of destroyers, cruisers, and larger being flown and getting destroyed. Take for example this screenshot the Gallente Federation's numbers for June:

Yes, about half the ships were frigates (which includes faction frigates remember, very popular in low sec) but there were also many cruisers, battlecruisers, Tech II ships, etc. I'm sure the ships destroyed in Fountain were larger and more expensive ship hulls on average but how many of those ships were reimbursed either partially of completely? Do you want to guess at the number of faction warfare and pirate ships flown under a reimbursement policy?

At the end of the day, arguing over ship values and destruction rates is pointless. The fact of the matter is that whether you are a plex-hunter in a tech 1 frigate or null sec warrior in a faction battleship, we all get the same thrill from seeing an enemy ship explode. And on that metric Black Rise and Fountain are comparable.