EVE Online player loses ship and cargo valued over $6,400 [Updated]

Update: Further research by CCP shows "quite inflated" discrepancies between EVE-Kill's now-updated entry of the kill and the actual server data. CCP Senior Public Relations Specialist Ned Coker told PC Gamer the website's kill notification could've mishandled the data fed by EVE Online's API verification and substituted priceless blueprint originals contained within the cargo instead of cheap copies.

Alternatively, Coker suggested an inaccurate manual posting at the time of the kill would skew numbers upwards, saying, "While still a quite notable kill of an unfit frigate full of blueprint copies and originals, it's safe to say it's actually a exponentially less impactful loss, and that other killboard estimates of the same kill nearer the 5-10 billion ISK range are closer to the actual value in our databases depending on the market." EVE-Kill's updated estimate places total ISK loss at a more probable—yet still impressive—5.3 billion, or $173.

Original: Another typical Monday in EVE Online—in a backwater corner of the galaxy, a lone spacer is drowning his sorrows in the strongest alcoholic concoction this side of Jita after losing a frigate full of ultra-valuable cargo budgeted at over 213 billion ISK. Put another way, that's over $6,400 worth of items vaporized beneath the ruthless energy beams of a pirate squad in low-sec space.

EVE-Kill shows the details of the mishap experienced by poor pilot "stewie Zanjoahir" and the destruction of his tiny, ungeared (yet fast) Atron frigate at the hands of attackers "makasoni" and "killorbekilled TBE." A glance at the included cargo manifest shows a small mountain of rare and precious ship, weapon, and hardpoint blueprints valued in the millions. Total assets lost: 213,083,571,404 ISK.

Let's crunch some numbers. EVE Online players can purchase 30-day game-time extensions called PLEX with the in-game currency, ISK. At the current market exchange rate of around 570 million ISK for a single PLEX, Zanjoahir's haul equates to 373 PLEX or roughly 30 years of game time—or, for a cold, hard cash slap in the face, over $6,400. Ouch.

Zanjoahir's reasons for venturing into the cutthroat chaos of low-security space with what equated to a harmless loot pinata aren't known, but the attack certainly constituted the largest loss of any EVE Online player to date. I suppose the old "don't put your eggs in one basket" warning doesn't translate well to "don't store your Inferno Heavy Missile schematics in one cargo hold."