Citadel Death Rate

It's been just over two weeks since the first Astrahus citadel was anchored. Many since then have been aborted before they made it to fully operational status. I thought it would be interesting to trawl zkillboard and look at the Citadel deaths so far this month.

I had thought the majority of citadels would die very early in the graph as everyone scrambled to kill the shiny new thing in-game. It turns out the rate of dying seems to be increasing. In retrospect I guess this is because the price has been dropping. More people are either willing or able to risk the cost of launching these new toys.

I can't help but notice w-space is particularly unforgiving for people launching a citadel. I wonder if that's a function of us wormhole dwellers allegedly having too much ISK. I'd need to check the classes of hole these citadels died in. The C5/6 dwellers certainly can afford to drop the 1.5 Bn ISK on a citadel. The more casual groups like my corp have to think twice about it.

I'd be interested to see how the number of aborted citadels compares to successfully onlined ones. To see seven citadels died in w-space yesterday seems concerning on the surface. But if that was seven out of 70 anchored then all is well.

I look forward to us anchoring our first citadel but I'm going to be watching silly season on these kills to pick an appropriate time before we even attempt to put one up.