One small gate for a Titan. One giant ISK loss for a killboard.
There are loads of stories about altruistic drivers that crash their expensive cars just to save stray animals. Sadly, this story only includes crashing expensive stuff and no cuddly furry creatures being saved.
In the Placid region of New Eden an Avatar class Titan was sold. It was an open offer made public and caught many eyes and ears. Here is the video recording the transfer:
Footage from the Titan transfer.
What is worth noting is that the seller suggests on the video that he was the “third-party” securing the deal, as well as being the seller. Even in the description of the above video it states that “I acted as my own third party to securely complete my first supercapital transaction, between myself and MOA’s newest Titan pilot.” If that was true, one would wonder why he didn’t simply scam the guy.
Click for Killmail
To begin with lets take a look at the fit. It possess a standard travel fit with inertia stabs, warp speed upgrades, a MWD for the deceleration warp trick and faction cap rechargers, supported by heavy neuts, cloak, cyno and a jump drive. Considering all the variations of tank and combat fits in the hold, the implication is it came as a full all-inclusive package.
What went wrong then? Does the new Titan pilot just have bad luck? Or was he the victim of a clever trap? Sadly, it was none of the above. To put it simply, he lost his Titan much like a newbie loses ships on PVE missions: lack of preparation.
Not only did the pilot decide to move his Titan just after a public purchase, so every super-capital hunting group was aware of his presence, but he didn’t use scouts or mention to his friends what he was planning. He also planned the most obvious cyno-route and jumped his Titan with neuts in local. Every super-cap pilot knows that it is simply a death-wish. Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that the Titan pilot simply lacked any foresight. If he would analyze the deaths of various other travelling super or at least consider what would put him at risk of being pinned by hostile groups, maybe he wouldn’t have made so many poor decisions.
To add more gasoline into the fire, it seems that he is from a well-known alliance called Mordus Angels. Mordus Angels is famous for waging guerrilla warfare on the Imperium Coalition and being very kill-ratio and efficiency oriented. 110 billion ISK lost puts a great shadow on their killboard and could cause trouble within MOA, along with making them a laughing stock for enemy entities, most notably Goonswarm and their allies. Ultimately, this could lead to the pilot being evicted from the alliance because of his actions, which will become apparent over the next 24 hours.
SenshiMaru, the Titan’s seller and third party, provided the following statement:
Recently I had decided to sell my Avatar because I was bored with it. Unfortunately, over a week had gone by without a third party being online during US timezone despite multiple attempts at out-of-game contact (twitter, websites, etc).
Now, I had always seen the need for a USTZ third party that was online consistently, and I thought I had what it took to provide that service, so I asked Calasan if he would be ok with me being “third party” to our transaction with my main as sort of a rep-building exercise. (I know it’s not really third partying, but in my eyes its the same thing.) He agreed, and I decided to fraps the exchange as a sort of proof video for use in the future.
The exchange went smoothly, and Cal jumped out of system, and I cut the video with the offer that I would provide third party services at no charge to anyone else in MOA if no established one could be contacted.
A few minutes later, I was shipping into my new solo Hyperion to see what I could derp into, and I overheard someone on comms say “bahaha, snuff just sent a Mordus Titan into the trash”. I couldn’t believe it, 31 minutes after he jumped out of the tower, the ship that I had owned since it came out of it’s assembly array was a flaming wreck. Then the Reddit thread went up, but that’s another story.
I had pure intentions going into this, and as some have pointed out, I have become a victim of circumstance. I do wish to say that I in no way forwarded any intel to any other parties about any transaction happening, and I had no knowledge of Calasan’s route through lowsec.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
