The Activity Tracker came into the game with the Onslaught Expansion in late 2018 (Dev-Blog) and a bunch of people at CCP said they were “very excited” about it. Jump to minute 5:00 for that in the EVE Puls Episode below.
Fun fact: At the end of this video, you see the aquarium where CCP Leggybro was hiding for about eight to ten years. Spooky.
Anyhow. Since then it seemed like nothing more had been done with it. The feature is in the game and tracks the things you do. If you did not disable it in the info-feed options, it will tell you from time to time that you reached a new level in navigation because you jumped yet another gate. Or that you successfully have blown up a thousand rats. Hurray! Right?
Personally, I can’t remember when I looked at this thing the last time since it got implemented. I removed the icon from my neocom-sidebar and disabled the button-blink. Then deactivated its messages in my newsfeed. I didn’t want to be distracted by a “cool, you used e-war for the hundredths time!” while holding my point under neut-pressure. I’m trying to concentrate here, yo!
Why?
My wild guess is that the UI of the activity tracker we got as players is just a side product of an internal tool of CCP’s attempt to track individual player behavior more accurately than by just looking at statistics from zkillboard.com, tax from bounty-ticks in corporation-wallets, or sovereignty-changes on dotlan. Having such data to base and backup decisionmaking on is certainly a good thing. The Mining Ledger may be such a thing as well.
But I think, you could do a lot more with the Activity Tracker than just provide some fancy displayed information. You could provide an incentive for people to go out and try different things they otherwise wouldn’t. This can keep people interested in the game. Maybe even provide some long-term motivation.
How?
Suitonia wrote it down very well already. And if I would try to write that myself, I would pretty much just say the same, but with different words. So I spare you of that and link you Suitonia’s post on reddit instad:
Bragging Rights
So far, we have some tools to show off our skill and badassery in Eve. We can link our killboard. We can share screenshots of our wallet, post on the internets, or make a dank meme video. But in the game, all we can really do to brag is link a killmail, put it into our bio, or undock our biggest ship and put on the fanciest skin. That’s pretty impractical and you kind of need to smack talk in local to do it.
Being able to put on your golden skin would be the gentleman’s way of saying “I’m the badest badass in this fleet,” without actually having to say it. I would love that.
something that allows you to show off your mastery to other players
Look at other MMOs like World of Warcraft: It’s achievement-system offers rewards such as titles or mounts. The quest to acquire such an exclusive item has the potential to keep people out playing for a long time.
Of course, it does not have to be skins. Other cosmetic items like a badge or title in your character sheet, some clothing items, or a background for the character portrait. Real simple stuff could already motivate people to go and grind it out.
tl;dr:
Use the potential of the activity tracker. Give people some reward to incentive doing activities.
Give players the option to brag a bit.
This post was inspired by this thread on r/Eve. Thanks for reading.
the greybill 
What is the Latin for “implemented and forgotten?” I think that should be the CCP corporate motto.
The Activity Tracker was an attempt to make achievements a thing, but the implementation was dubious. To start with it didn’t count anything done in the past, which was something of a blow to long time players. And then it never quite got over the “so what?” barrier. A couple of the items are neat I guess. You can see how much of a thing you’ve done with they put the feature in place. I liked using the NPC kills and bounties counter when I decided to see how long I could last in a Myrmidon when ratting. But eventually you hit five or want to start the count over and you cannot, so the whole thing just sits there.
Incentives might help a bit. But I am not sure how much, since what the tracker counts isn’t all that interesting in a lot of places. Woo hoo, look how much capacitor energy I have passed in cap chains. Go me.
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[…] The Keynote… just kidding. My favorite presentation sadly wasn’t that one, although I think the Heraldry system and FW changes shown have lots of potential if it’s done right. And it seems like the Activity Tracker finally found some use. If you remember, I wrote about that a while ago. […]
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