The destroyed Eve Online ship belonging to user "stewie Zanjoahir" valued at $6,000 is actually "an exponentially less impactful loss" and likely the result of a coding error or incorrect information put into the killboard, a representative for CCP Games told Polygon today.
The ship's killboard report made rounds on the internet recently, attracting attention for being the most expensive kill in Eve Online's history. The development team's research into the kill showed that the killboard report program may have confused blueprint copies as originals, tagging them at a higher value. Another possibility, the representative said, is that the ship owner's recording its contents incorrectly, either intentionally or by accident.
"The killboard referenced may have mishandled our API data (which we double checked we were serving correctly), confusing some items in the cargo as blueprint originals instead of the significantly less expensive blueprint copies," said the representative.
"[Or] it was manually posted incorrectly, either accidentally or deliberately," he added. "Apparently this killboard's 'API verified' isn't always a 100 percent check with our servers versus all items in the kill reports, but just key points to verify manual posts."
The representative said that one or both of these occurrences would significantly inflate of the value of the lost ship.
The API team at CCP is troubleshooting the issue and determine whether the high value was the result of a coding problem. Meanwhile, the kill report for the ship has been updated to reflect these changes, estimating its loss at 5.3 billion ISK (in-game currency) as opposed to the original 213 billion.