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Tell the story of your most painful in-game loss!

Posted by Alex Sinclair in EVE Online

The pain is real! But here's your chance to turn a loss into a win. In this bounty, suggested by Bubba_EvE, we want to hear true tales of when things didn't go your way in EVE Online, and it stung like hell. Perhaps your blingiest modules fell foul of a ganker, you ran your prize ship straight into a gatecamp, or you lost a dogfight with your archnemesis. Whatever your woe, tell your tale, and with any luck our bounty rewards will be your silver lining!

In addition to the standard $4 rewards, we have one $10 reward for the best story.

already paid

$54 / 106

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This reward closed to entries at 9:59am on October 21, 2024 but you can still reply, react, and join the conversation below! If you’d like to enter other rewards which are still open, click here.

Created at 11:16am, 10th October, 2024. Page last updated at 9:50am, 21st October, 2024.
Deadline at 11:00pm, 20th October, 2024.

orik Kado 10/20/2024, 9:45:55 PM

Often, the pain of losing a ship is associated with its ISK value. However, for me, that’s not the case.

Let me tell you the story of a very inexperienced orik who, from the moment he started playing, only wanted to mine. The first logical step in that chain was to train for mining barges and then start working towards command ships. Once I had the necessary skills, I built my first Porpoise. For several days, I focused on mining all the required materials until I could finally craft it.

At this point, many might think the process was impractical, but it was something that excited me.

Since 2018, that ship, which I built entirely on my own, accompanied me on many adventures throughout my time in different corporations. It played an important role in my growth as a player.

Unfortunately, in November 2022, I was caught while traveling with my Porpoise to another system. Despite trying my best to defend it, its equipment wasn’t enough, and in just a few seconds, my journey came to an end before a formidable enemy.

Its ISK value is negligible, but that day, a piece of my character's story was destroyed. And even though I can now build as many ships as I like, none will replace the story of my first Porpoise.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/103664676/

Hunter 10/20/2024, 9:29:14 PM

Ah Eve Online is kind of punishing when you "lose" , and for me I lost a lot in the early days , unfortunately I didn't record this story because It wasn't in one game session but Multiple ones so here how it goes :

When I joined the community of Eve Online and tried the game few years back for the first time, at first it was overwhelming sur but deep , so deep I was considering quitting, it felt like a job, but one side of the game had me interested and kept going till now .

It was Exploration, So I managed to skill my clone to be an explorer like no one in the game, and went out there Hunting for many sites to hack and loot I went to high low null then WH systems and there where I started to like the gameplay and the flow of exploration , so some times I go for a 4 hour session just jumping and scanning, hacking ( many failed ) , looting what I can, then Jump out to my next site, without going back and securing my loot( oh boy I was wrong ) I started to become a moving investment for me a new player, with half of a billion at one point.

After some time I started to park my ship in WH space in the void , till my next session . Imagine my stress level when I learned that not only My WH entrance and exit don't last for long and also those systems can have player corporations, So I started looking for my way out and every time I end up in dangerous parts of EVE's space, I was spamming the D scan 50 times/min , looking how to get to safety and when I give up, park my ship in a safe spot and hope tomorrow a WH will spawn .

Many days have passed , I thought this is the end of my clone cursed to never reach home , have to run for the rest of its life , until one last time I was scanning for WH and witnessed on my D scan some player combat probes , in my soul I felt freedom I said " Finally this dude will destroy me and I'll respawn in Jita system my home " but in front of me almost a Billion of items stocked in my cargo for weeks that I will lose , my inner Eve Greed bursted out and took control and I decided to do all I can to escape this gank.

Faster then lighting I Found an other WH and Tried to go through it, at that point everything seemed fine my heart started to decelerate , but the other side of the loading screen wasn't safety , wasn't an other dangerous WH space , but Null sec with a welcoming Party of few ships trying to go in … It was less then a second I a saw My clone floating in space without a capsule .

I felt pain and anger but , in the end we all have to lose something in Eve online , some lost their patience others their sanity , I lost my money that day …

ShoMenao 10/16/2024, 5:59:39 PM

My most painful loss occured while I was flying with Waffles. living in Kinakka. We had locals that often tried to catch our transports or other ships off the undock and as such had anchored an Astra just off grid of the main station in system. I often used it to cyno in and dock my Jump Freighter.

One particular time, I jumped in and had a solid 30 seconds of jump tunnel lag before loading grid. Once loaded, I noticed I had not received tether from the blue astra but instead was pointed by a hostile interceptor and shortly there after was one shot by a Nyx that had been in warp. I petitioned the loss, but per usual, the logs showed nothing and neither the ship nor the billions in cargo were reimbursed leading to a dead loss of around 20b isk, which at the time was a huge chunk of change to eat.

Dydo 10/12/2024, 4:41:02 PM

EVE had always been a thrilling roller coaster for me in terms of PvP. While I'm NOT the most daring pilot, the thrill of the hunt and the risk of losing it all were what kept me coming back. Despite a few close calls and costly mistakes, I was growing comfortable with the Abyss. It has a good loot and is unpredictable, so my shorter play sessions were more rewarding.

Then everything changed.

A swarm of coercers obliterated my beloved ship, the culmination of hours of research and ISK investment, and it was obliterated in seconds.

The loss was emotionally devastating because it felt like all my progress and the joy had vanished in an instant. It wasn't just about the ship, ISK or my pride... the freedom to explore the Abyss and the sense of accomplishment, before, during and after the adventure, were now gone. I felt trapped, unable to enjoy the parts of the game I loved the most.

What to do with that feeling? Do you take a step back and reassess your approach, or do you brush it off and dive back in Abyss?

The loss itself didn't break me, some sessions later I've already gotten over it, and it's just a game, but it did leave me feeling adrift for a while.

Nth Dimensional 10/11/2024, 11:43:11 PM

I had always prided myself on being a skilled pilot in EVE Online, particularly when it came to flying my beloved Stratios. With its sleek design and powerful capabilities, it was my trusted companion on countless missions. One day, I decided to venture into a particularly dangerous region, a place known for its hostile factions and unpredictable storms.

As I entered the system, the scanner lit up with warnings about a massive storm brewing ahead. I brushed it off; I had navigated through worse before. But this storm was different. The moment I crossed into its turbulent embrace, I felt my ship shudder. Systems flickered, and I realized with growing dread that my cloaking device was malfunctioning.

Panic surged through me. I tried to change course, but the storm was relentless, its winds howling and sensors spinning out of control. My heart raced as I spotted hostile ships on my radar, their signatures glowing ominously against the chaos. They were drawn in by the disturbance my Stratios was causing.

Desperate to evade them, I tried to engage my cloaking device again, but it sputtered and failed completely. The storm's electromagnetic interference was too strong. I slammed the controls, engaging my afterburners in a frantic attempt to outrun the incoming threats. But it was no use; the storm had me trapped.

One by one, the enemy ships closed in. I fought with everything I had, but the odds were stacked against me. My shields began to crumble under the relentless barrage of fire. I could see my hull integrity plummeting, and in that moment of desperation, I knew I was losing my grip.

As the explosions engulfed my Stratios, I ejected in my Virtue Pod, a sinking feeling washing over me. I looked down at my pod, which was worth as much as my lost ship, and tried to activate the warp drive to escape. But the storm had other plans. I was snagged in the chaos, unable to warp away.

The last thing I saw was the incoming fire converging on me, and the realization hit hard—I had just lost 4 billion ISK worth of ship and gear. As I drifted in the storm, a cautionary tale in the making, I couldn’t help but feel the weight of my mistakes.

From that day on, I made it my mission to share my story, warning others about the unpredictable storms that could cost even the mightiest pilot everything.

Rixx Javix 10/11/2024, 1:36:30 PM

With over 3,000 losses I have a lot of examples to choose from. But for this bounty I'd like to mention one that was public, has remained in my thoughts every time I undock, and which changed the way I fly ever since. And it is a decade old.

Before I flew in the Alliance Tournament and participated in almost 30 matches over the years, our team flew in a tournament called the NEO Tournament which was broadcasted by CCP in what might very well be the worst - and best - match ever recorded. Since this was our very first time flying together as Stay Frosty in a tournament setting - we had no idea what we were doing. And, at the last minute, I decided to trash all of our prepared fleet comps and make one up on the spot. Within an hour before the match I decided we would fly an all Pirate themed comp! The only exception being a lone Merlin, which we had to bring because CCP wouldn't allow us to bring a Pirate Rookie ship to the match.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7KiaBzsyA9s?feature=oembed

This match is legendary in the history of Eve Online. And our Pirate themed comp was victorious in the end, which makes it even better. But within that victory is another story. A story of frustration and loss that echoes in everything I do even a decade later.

To set the stage I will tell you that I was the FC and I was flying the anchor ship - the mighty Machariel. I will also tell you that I had never flown a Machariel before, barely knew how one should be fitted, and had only recently trained the skills needed to fly one. All of which I learned in the hour before the match. And, in my haste, I decided it would be a good idea to load the cargo with as much ammo as possible. I kept balancing ammo with cap charges, over and over again. More ammo means less cap charges. More cap charges means less ammo. In the end it came down to one less cap charge and a little more ammo.

Fozzie did get one thing wrong, they did have drones on me at the end there. But otherwise I should have lived. As the damage kept coming in and it was obvious we would win, I did everything I could think of to save my ship. I'm over-heating everything and managing my range, still pouring dps into the enemy. Luckily I had more than enough ammo.

But I had one less cap charge than I needed. One stinking additional cap charge and I would have survived. Instead, at the worst possible moment, I didn't.

The majority of my losses in Eve are from trying to save my corp mates, or being on the wrong side of the rock, paper, scissors equation, wrong place - wrong time. But this one simply came down to a small mistake in cargo management.

And that is a lesson I have carried with me every day since.

AlexGoesTheWorld 10/11/2024, 6:31:09 AM

Origin eviction.

I lost most of my assets at the time, a home away from home, and in general I lost... "the poetry for EVE" as in after that it never was the same again. I never managed to love the game as I did back then again and I never really found another home away from home, hopping from corp to corp, hiatus to hiatus, with no real goal or direction.

My corp had built a small home, made of multiple stations, tucked away in the depths of Wormhole space. However, our activity had declined steadily for the previous years and by the time the eviction happened, it was hard to find 2 people online at the same time. We were pretty much independent on HS but that also meant we had assets there. Having that many station and assets also made us a pinata in the shape of a sitting duck.

Someone did take notice, in the shape of someone who got his ass handed over before in a fight over the same system a few years prior, but they were still holding a grudge. If I hold a grudge I'm a bad person, these guys were holding it for years, but I digress.

So no real activity, multiple station online, a grudge, a perfect recipe for disaster.

And in disaster it ended.

I wasn't even there when things fell as the timers were at a time deep into my night but not being there didn't made it any easier. Sure, I saved my two most precious ships thanks to a friend who kept a spot for me in their cargo, even if it meant not saving one of their own ships and they had plenty of more expensive ships than me, but I lost something that I never got back and that was more precious than ships.

Kshal Aideron 10/10/2024, 11:34:41 PM

3 years ago I started a Youtube series called "Solo Hunter." The idea was to journal my solo hunting as I tried to work out the pvp shakes (I get them bad when doing solo pvp, even to this day).

I had a pretty good run hunting down ventures and explore frigates in my Astero. Until the day my luck ran out.

Now, if you watch my videos, one of the things I almost always had an issue with was remembering to put my safety on yellow in low sec. As an incursion FC, safety is always green in fleet and of course either flying in Null or WH space who cares what my safety is set on.

The day I finally lost my Astero with many kill marks I found a Heron. It's always in the back of my mind that whatever I'm grabbing is bait. But, it might not be. Well, it was. And my safety was set to green so I wasn't able to actually lock it up and nab it.

Meanwhile the Heron's buddies came, locked me up and kill me. It wasn't the value of the Astero that made it painful. It was the fact I wasn't able to kill the Heron before they killed me. It should have popped like popcorn.

Now ask me how I lost my Tengu to a Caracal Navy Issue...

FirestormGamingTeam 10/10/2024, 11:34:19 PM

I was a band of brothers FC for 9 years and during an op, I was using my alt in an Avatar class Titan, this is not the first time this has happened btw.

We where holding a sub-cap fleet ready to reinforce a trap and the FW alliances where not the brightest bunch, we offered them a "carrier" that "miss jumped" and they took the bait like a child to sweets.

So waited and they took the bait, what we didn't anticipate was a cap surge by them, turns out they had just finished a fight themselves, so they dropped caps and I "may" have jumped myself instead of the fleet...

2 x 2 = Dead Avatar and a shouting match with Shrike...

242 Billion ISK loss.

What is the moral of the story? Don't operate Titans at 4 am with minimal sleep.

FUN INC 10/10/2024, 2:00:58 PM

Ooooh - this one is perfect!

The day i lost a flagship Barghest in the AT in 32seconds! :D

Not a huge story to be fair - it was over in less than 1minute... and despite our best endeavours we lost to Lazerhawks who are very respectable team.

It's still my largest loss to date in EVE at 3.2BN Barghest | keacte | Killmail | zKillboard , and despite what everyone thinks and or says... all the spinny bits were on, and no amount of extra purple would have gotten me through the HAM assault - it may have bought me an extra 5 seconds... but the outcome would have 100% been the same. A full 10man wipe in less than 5minutes... always adds to the pain too!

Sadly... we were knocked out of AT19 at this point.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1896867174?t=05h53m26s

10/10 would do that again though - AT is fab for this type of thing!

This still haunts me to this day! >> Alliance Tournament XIX Day 1 | !schedule !brackets - Twitch

The commentators got the match analysis spot on >> Alliance Tournament XIX Day 1 | !schedule !brackets - Twitch - this match was lost before we landed on grid.

Until next time!

iBeast 10/10/2024, 12:54:42 PM

It's about the time when the huge wormhole conflict and war against LZH happened.

In one of the stages of this conflict the number of participants in C6 systems was very high. Our team stopped rolling C5 and started rolling C6, because the chances of PvP were much higher, and the number of C6 additionally increased the chances.

At some point we got what we wanted and our small group found a fleet that was preparing for the timer.

We didn't quite analyze the situation correctly and didn't start the whole fleet according to the usual scheme. Battles in WH very often happen in such a way that different groups do not show each other all their ships at once and the battle takes place in an escalation format.

That's exactly what we did. If you analyze our entire format, we closed a lot of corners and were ready to respond to any maneuver of the enemy, any new ships on the battlefield.

Due to the limited mass of the WH we planned to use only the Dreadnought (capital ships) on the battlefield, it was to appear only in case our opponent would use too many ships against us.

The start of the battle turned out to be quite good, the enemy reacted quickly and literally in a minute to us went to the enemy fleet. As the enemy was more we started a very smooth escalation, but at some point the situation changed dramatically and everything happened in a matter of minutes. At the enemy's citadel there was a log in and to go to twice 2 more ships than we expected in the worst case. At the same time, the enemy began to very actively block WH, from which we entered with the help of interdictors.

Here we had the first thought that our opponent is not trying to fight us, because of the big conflict they have much more global tasks and rather their only goal is not to lose a single ship and quickly get rid of us.

We started to react quickly to the situation and the dreadnought went to the system where the battle was taking place. Naturally the dreadnought was caught and could not go to warp on the battlefield, but we tried our best to solve this problem.

Meanwhile, in the battle, our fleet continued to live. The balance of power was absolutely not in our favor, we did not destroy anything, but also did not lose anything.

When the dreadnought was caught the enemy began to undock more ships, apparently players were getting to their computers after ping.

The dreadnought had to be delivered at any cost to the battlefield, as it was the key to success. With its damage, we would become quick to destroy ships, and that would allow us to move on with our lives.

At some point I managed to get rid of the ships holding the dreadnought, but in parallel we started losing ships in combat and they were Nestors. At one and the same second I said the phrase “Dreadnought in warp!” and our FC said “Aling to WH, we need to get out of the fight”.

When my dreadnought came out of warp there were only a few of our ships on the battlefield.

The absurdity of the situation is that if things had happened a couple seconds earlier, we could have tried to fight on our WH where my dreadnought was, but what actually happened was a cross warp.

There were a lot of factors in the situation: we didn't correctly analyze the situation, underestimated the enemy's readiness, paid little attention to the defense of our entrance. With a competent approach we could have won a very difficult battle, where we played in a strong minority, but the chance was lost.

Picture the face of the enemy. They win the battle, part of the enemy fleet flees, and a minute later a gift arrives on the battlefield in the form of an expensive dreadnought.

I bought this dreadnought an hour before the fight, by the way. Usually dreadnoughts in WH live much longer.

Amoni P 10/10/2024, 11:51:01 AM

Many losses in EVE Online happen not because we didn't know better, but because we were impatient or rushing to get something done. This game has so much busy work in between the things we actually like to do whether it's mission running, combat sites, PVP, mining, or whatever. It's just one thing after another. This is the story of how I lost a lot of loot because I was too impatient to call it a day and wait for the right connection.

This was in my farm and let me tell you that at the time I really proud of my farm. For those who don't know, a farm is a wormhole system you use purely for making money. It's common among high-class wormholers to have a farm hole for making money. I had wrapped up running sites in my farm and I was looking to sell my blue loot. The problem was that I could not find a connection to kspace. I rolled my static several times and I just couldn't get a good connection. I need a Jita, Amarr, or anywhere where I could offload this blue loot but nothing was coming up.

Just as I was about to call it a day and leave it for another time, I found a Thera connection. Thera is so dangerous it's an absurd amount of risk to haul something like 5b ISK worth through there. There's any number of things that could go wrong. Someone could put up a drag bubble, the connection might die before I get to it, there might be a camp, or some combination of all of that resulting in me losing my DST full of goodies.

But holy shit was I desperate... I had been rolling for almost two hours just trying to get a good connection and I was having the worst luck a person could have. This Thera felt like a lifeline after all that. I had a nullifier to get through bubbles, I had a warp core stabilizer which meant it would take two scrams, four points, or some combination equally four warp disruption to keep my ship from warping... I could do this. I talked myself into it. I told myself this was doable and the risk was acceptable.

I jumped into Thera. Nobody on my side and nothing on dscan. Ok, just MWD-cloak trick this and pop the nullifier and... Uh-oh, did I hit the nullifier before I entered warp or after? If it was after then the nullifier won't do a lick of good. Thera is something like 200+ AUs across. That's a long time to sweat it out as I try to remember whether I hit nullifier at the right time. I start to land and my worst fears are waiting for me. It's a four person camp on the wormhole with a bubble to stop ships short of reaching the hole. It's not a great camp, but it's enough. This is when I learn that I must have hit the nullifier after entering warp. I've landed on the bubble. There's about 16km between me and that damn hole. Maybe I can make it? Overheat the MWD and pray. Pray to Thor for protection. Pray to Odin for strength and courage against impossible odds. Pray to Tyr for the sheer gall I had to even try. Pray to Loki for a little cosmic shenanigans....

But it was not on the gods to save me. I put myself in this situation. It took all of 45 seconds for them to whittle me down and all that loot went up in smoke. They podded me to Jita for good measure. How had I been so foolish? How did I talk myself into that? It was stupid. I teach classes at EVE University and tell people all the time how dangerous Thera is and not take valuable stuff through Thera and... and... It's gone. All my work for the last week and half or so is gone. Down the drain in an act of self-delusion and hubris. RIP me.

Alex SinclairMod10/10/2024, 11:53:49 AM

Amoni P

Wow that was fast.

Amoni P 10/10/2024, 11:55:16 AM

Alex Sinclair

I love the storytelling bounties a lot, as you might have noticed.

Alex SinclairMod10/10/2024, 4:09:16 PM

Amoni P

They're also the most fun to read and write up, I love 'em too

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