$9000 Video Game Spaceship Lost in Minutes
 

A person spends $9000 real world dollars on a super spaceship in the online game EVE. Within minutes, it is ambushed and destroyed. This person saved years for this ship and lost it. Wow.

Video game starship worth $9,000 destroyed in ambush | Games Blog - Yahoo! Games

Not exactly. My reading is that the in-game currency used to buy the ship has a real world value of 9000$.

Percent I'm surprised this happened in Eve: 0%.

They need insurance providers.

This. And I don't think it was the property of one person...think it was the property of a whole faction of people.

They have insurance companies. Who may or may not be a scam.

From this quote in the story:

"One player of the long-running online game EVE Online experienced that horror Sunday, when an ambush destroyed his supercarrier valued at a whopping $9,000.

The massive world of EVE Online is all about buying, piloting and blowing up spaceships. It’s not for the faint at heart, in part because its in-game currency, called ISK (Interstellar Kredits), carries a real-world value. The Revenant -- one of only three ships that big in existence -- carries a value of 309 billion ISK, making it among the priciest bits of code in the game."

I read as one player. Now I dont know how you earn the in game money. Is it purchased with real money or earned in game?
If its purchased, then ouch. If its earned, thats a lot of time spent. And again, ouch.

You earn the in game money they way you earn money in any MMO. Through quests ("missions" in Eve), gathering resources and/or crafting and selling on the market/auction house, etc. The thing that sets this apart from most MMOs, and why they do have a "real world value" for their in game currency, is that you can buy 30-day game codes with real money, and then sell those game codes in game. So say you are short on in game currency. You go to your account, buy a 30-day game code for $19.95, and then go into the game and sell it on the market for in-game currency ("ISK" in Eve).

That was CCP's way of dealing with the problem of "gold farmers".

Basically, high sec is your typical MMO: "Go there, do this, go there get sixhundred units of mining, etcetera". It's the training wheels. You can't really PVP in HighSec (there's automated police that take care of aggressors.. it's literally suicidal to pvp in policed sectors). Low risk, low reward

Then you get to LowSec, where PVP can occur... here you have to be careful when you do your mining and missions, because if you're not careful, someone could bushwhack you and destroy your big shiny ship (and then possibly kill your escape pod, which may mean you have to go to a less skilled clone and have to build up again)

Then we get to NullSec otherwise known as 0.0 Sectors. This is where the game's true nature lurks. Anything goes. Giant Alliances, such as Something Awful's "Goonswarm" rule large swaths of nullsec. On the wrong side in the wrong area? You WILL get Vaped. But this is where the intrigue is it's own game.

For example, back a couple years, there was a couple of major groups at war, one of them, the aforementioned Goonswarm, the other, an alliance of corps called "Band of Brothers". Goonswarm was able to insert an agent into Band of Brothers, who eventually worked their way into power in the alliance, and then when he had worked his way in, basically blew up Band Of Brothers (disbanded the alliance, stole everything he could get his hands on in goods and ships, etcetera) He even re-registered the name "Band of Brothers", so they couldn't reform under the same name..

It's not only legal, it's one of the biggest parts of EvE lore now.

In this case, it was something similar, person works his way up high into a group's favor and sets things up.

Group member reports ambush happening, group sallies out of their space stations to defend their group member, traitor makes sure that the group doesn't have enough support, group gets counter ambushed and locked down, and eventually blown up. Traitor leaves alliance, giggling.

A couple sites have a log of the group chat where the leader is raging about what just happened

I think it is pretty funny.

IMO it is a stupid game if you can work hard to level up then have to go back to square one. Seems pretty stupid

Lathum: Not quite, basically, you can take a point of time copy (at a high cost), if you get vaped, you go back to your last copy (losing any skills you've earned since). Of course, the more skills you have, the more it costs to make a clone.

And here's the leader's rage (spoilered for NSFW language)

The real money value is similar to what they've implemented in Rift, where they call it Rex. 1250 Rex (which can be bought with $10 real world) sells for 1000+ platinum in the game. Of course you can only spend it on the game so it's not exactly the same as having real world money and I'm assuming Eve is the same.

Can we please tag him just in case he ever asks for a mortgage bailout

I doubt he will need it. He likely lives in his parents basement.

It sounds like he saved up the in game equivalent of a gazillion dollars so it's more like buying a yacht with cash and then foolishly taking it into battle. I wouldn't want to be the company that insures it but he bought it fair and square.

It sounds like what he's most guilty of is bad friend selection. But even that's tough if you have something enviable like a gazillion space bucks and are in a large and, I imagine, bureaucratic organization. I talked to an acquaintance who is legitimately rich a few years ago and he lamented how it was very difficult to find a good girlfriend as all they saw was the money. And some girls who seemed really nice were just good actors. For the rest of us poor schlubs, we know our friends and spouses aren't out to get our money because we don't have any :D

SI

Just like all of us... *rolls eyes*

Another epic blowout in the EVE Online world. The equivalent of $500K lost.

An unpaid bill leads to costly video game battle | www.statesman.com

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, Nerds!

/goes back to FM14 in year 2077

Already posted about in the 2014 MMO thread.

You have a basement!!!?