I think we've all felt the pain of loss before at the hands of a video game. Corrupted data screwing up a saved game you've spent days, sometimes weeks on. Loaning that one game out to a friend only to never see it again. Buying Duke Nukem. I once stepped on my copy of Dead Space on a midnight trek to the bathroom, snapping that thing in two. Gone were my chances to find Peng and dismember the rest of the necromorphs on the USG Ishimura. At that point, I was out roughly $40 or so, and that was irritating enough. Never before have I ever lost much more than that on any thing video game related, but some have. Recently, one EVE Online player recently lost a pretty valuable ship, worth more than some gamers have spent on their entire video game library - a mind blowing $9,000.
From what I've gleaned about EVE Online, a Super Carrier is the 2nd largest ship in the game, and is one of the rarer classes of ships, with only a few even in "existence." Just a regular carrier costs 800 million ISK in minerals to make, but this Super Carrier in question cost roughly 280 to 380 billion, a USD equivalant of 8 to 9 thousand smackers.
The ship belonged to the Pandemic Legion faction's pilot TSID, who had one of four (now three) Revenant Super Carriers out of all EVE Online's 300,000 something players. The loss of the ship would make it the the single largest loss, in terms of dollars, of a single ship in the game's history. A number of other ship losses during the fight that brought down the Super Carrier brought Pandemic's total loss to about $13,000 in all.
The loss in question is only a matter of exchange, as no one in their right mind would actually dump such an amount of money into a game, which certainly helps ease the blow, but a loss is still a loss, and this one's gotta hurt.