For a few hours on 17 October, the biggest lossmail in EVE Online history seemed to belong to a Praxis. Not a titan, not a supercarrier fleet: a battlecruiser, listed at around 10 trillion ISK. The catch, according to most of the people who looked at it, is that the ISK was never really there.
What was posted
The thread on r/Eve, started by user aRatherScottishChap, points to a killmail on zkillboard and describes a Praxis filled with about 400 officer-grade webs and smartbombs, for a total of roughly 10 trillion ISK. The poster compares it to the 9 trillion ISK that, in their words, the Goons lost at Atioth. The full discussion is on r/Eve, where it spent about 40 hours among the top 25 posts and reached the number one spot.
The post says the trigger was "a new system of pricing abyssals on zkillboard". Another user posted a second killmail, 139213098, claiming it had already taken the record a short time later.
We could not open zkillboard from our research environment, so we have not verified the killmails directly. Everything below about the figures comes from the thread and its comments.
Why the number is probably meaningless
Abyssal modules are randomly rolled, and the killmail does not say what the base item was before it was mutated. Commenters explain the new valuation like this:
zkillboard now estimates the price of an abyssal module from comparable modules on the same ship. If the fit contains a single real officer module, the others are valued as if they were officer modules too, and the total explodes.
In practice, the modules in such a fit are likely cheap items rolled with the cheapest mutaplasmid, worth a few million ISK each at best. One commenter says a hundred-run "T1.5" abyssal afterburner they made cost them about 2 million ISK after reprocessing rebates, while a zkillboard loss showed it at 20 million.
Another user, paulatredes, writes that the page itself says it uses a comparable officer module for the price, but the killmail does not report what the base module was.
Several players add that the real cost to the pilot was small. One estimates "a couple hundred million ISK at most" and another puts the real value at 420 million. Others point out that the character appears to have been created that same day, and that the same pilot had multiple identical losses, which they read as a deliberate attempt to exploit the new calculation, or as stat padding. These are opinions from the thread, not confirmed facts.
The wider complaint: what is a killmail worth?
Under the joke there is a real argument. Players in the thread say the game never exposed the necessary information for abyssal items in the killmail API, even though the base item and the rolls are visible in the client. Because of that, one user argues, any price on zkillboard is a guess, and the new method makes "ISK destroyed" and "ISK lost" totals, including battle reports built on them, easy to manipulate.
Some are fine with that: one commenter says they never considered ISK efficiency a good measure of who won a fight anyway. Others dislike the direction of recent site changes. A few mention the previous behaviour, where abyssal modules were valued at a nominal 0.01 ISK, as the simpler option.
One more point is worth keeping in mind. A commenter notes that many players check zkillboard before engaging someone. The "danger" rating depends mostly on ship size and the number of pilots on a kill, not on ISK, so it should not be affected by this change. Another player says they only look at the solo page and the quality of the fits on the losses page.
What this means for ISK numbers
At Capsuleers we report ISK destroyed and lost from our own battle report calculations, which do not coincide with the figures of external killboards. This episode is a good reminder to read any "trillion ISK lossmail" with caution: unless the modules and their rolls are known, the figure is an estimate, not a market price.
For a real example of a huge loss, see our earlier coverage of Snuffed Out feeding over 5 trillion ISK to Fraternity at Obe.
Sources
r/Eve, "Biggest lossmail in eve, congrats": https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1x7wmik/biggest_lossmail_in_eve_congrats/
zkillboard, kill 139212538: https://zkillboard.com/kill/139212538/
zkillboard, kill 139213098: https://zkillboard.com/kill/139213098/