In recent times, INN has hosted a semi-regular column titled “Awful Loss of the Day“. Today’s installment of ALOD is actually misnamed. It is not, in fact, one day’s loss. It is the story of poor, unfortunate Luna Kawackuci, who, between December 21 and December 29 of 2018, lost four Hels in the span of eight days.
EIGHT DAYS.
That’s not what people mean when they talk about “sending the year out in style.”
Seconds From Disaster
Luna has, perhaps understandably, not responded to INN’s request for comment on these losses. With that said, you and I, dear reader, will don Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker hat to reconstruct these events as best we can.
A glance at Luna’s killboard shows that they, as a member of Fraternity, spent the early part of 2018 heavily involved in PvP. First in the conflict between FRT and the occupants of space formerly occupied by the Drone Control Unit, and again in the continuing hostilities between FRT and TEST. In late June, however, all zKillboard activity ceased, with no further entries until December 8. There are, of course, a number of reasons why this might happen. The character might have been sold, although if this did happen, it does not appear to have been through EVE’s official character bazaar. The account could have been given to a friend, or real life could have intervened, taking them away from the game for a period of time. A final possibility is that Luna switched over to PvE to try and build up their wallet a bit and somehow went more than five months without losing a ship. However, this all seems inconceivable, given what happened to them during December.
Whatever the case, in early December 2018, Luna Kawackuci made the fateful decision to get into supercarrier ratting, and their wallet would never be the same.
The First Two Losses
It should be noted (for the sake of clarity) that Luna actually saw five Hels destroyed in December. On the 10th, while a member of Fraternity, Luna lost their first Hel in the Detorid system of W6P-7U. The attackers in this case were a mixed force that included several pilots from Legion of xXDEATHXx, a former Drone Region Federation alliance that has been fighting Fraternity for more than a year. One can only guess what went through Luna’s head when that supercarrier blew up around them (my guess is bits of shrapnel from exploding consoles on the command deck), but there is no way of knowing whether they had already been thinking about changing alliances or whether this event put the idea in their mind. However, sometime during the next week, Luna joined a corporation called NINE Continent, who are currently members of Goonswarm Federation, and moved to Delve.
Once there, they set up shop in 39P-1J, a fairly busy system, and began sharing in Goonswarm’s prosperity; at least until December 17, when their ratting Nidhoggur was ganked out from under them. Incredibly, Luna seized this opportunity to change alliances yet again, joining the alliance of Fraternity. Treasury and trekking clear across the entire EVE galaxy for a second time, linking back up with their old friends in the southeast.
The Week From Hel
It is here that Luna’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week begins in earnest. On December 21, they lost a Hel to a Tactical Supremacy dreadbomb, in UY5A-D in Wicked Creek. A few hours later, they lost not one but two capsules on the way either to or back from high-sec. The ISK value of the capsules were only the minimum zKill value of ten thousand ISK, but the annoyance of being death-cloned back to their home station when they were obviously trying to go somewhere can only have added to the day’s pain.
The misery would be compounded, though; the very next day, in the very same system, another Hel evaporated around them, this time courtesy of Bombers Bar. Again, since Luna has declined to comment, one can only wonder at where this money came from. We can only hope that she did not buy it with PLEX; at the current Delve conversion rate, the supercarrier would have cost the equivalent of over 5,100 PLEX, or a real-world cost of more than $180 USD.
No doubt frustrated by losing two supercarriers on consecutive days in the same system, Luna moved her operation to the system of 1KAW-T in Detorid, a mere six jumps from the system where she lost her first Hel two weeks prior, losses that occurred before moving to Goonswarm. Things were fine for precisely four days, until December 26, when Hel #4 bit the dust. For reasons this writer has not been able to establish, the attackers in this case included four members of Fraternity. It is possible Luna’s account may have been suspected of bot activity, as awoxing of botters is not an uncommon event in New Eden. Indeed, one of the things that makes Luna’s story so difficult to establish is the fact that in all six of these deaths – the five Hels plus the Nidhoggur – were caused by entirely different sets of people; there was not a single pilot who appeared on the killmail of more than one ship. Luna seems to have excelled at finding new and unusual groups of people to be killed by.
By now, any reasonable pilot would be wondering that if the problem was themselves, they should be doing a better job monitoring intel channels, perhaps it was a bad idea to rat with cloaky campers in system, or other things like that. Luna seems to have decided that the system was the problem yet again, relocating back to Wicked Creek and the system of Q-GQHN. Unhappily for Luna, but happily for those of us who subsist on schadenfreude, this move also did not work out, and Luna lost their fifth Hel of December, and their fourth in eight days. Interestingly, in this fight Luna actually managed to kill one of their attackers, which may indicate that they were not botting after all.
Curiously, the story would probably be easier to swallow if Luna were a botter; there being an actual human at the keyboard watching a combined total of one-hundred-plus billion ISK turn into pixelated space dust (in less than one calendar month), certainly makes this writer cringe.
In Conclusion
There we have it: the story of an accomplished PvP pilot trying their hand at supercarrier ratting with horrifying results. Luna Kawackuci lost five Hels and a Nidhoggur in the span of three weeks, across five different star systems in three different regions of space, while a member of three different alliances. Has any one pilot, in the history of EVE, ever been so unlucky?
Between the time of this writing on December 30, with the time this article needed to be edited and published, it is possible – perhaps even probable – that Luna will have lost more ships, and that the legend will only grow with time. At an estimated real-world value of $180 USD per supercarrier, Luna lost approximately $900 worth of ships during December alone. Whether bought with real-world money or with ISK earned in-game, that represents an eye-watering loss of either cash or time.
There is really nothing to say in conclusion except “Don’t be Luna.”
