As I posted last Friday, the Forsaken Fortress update has led to a plethora of structures ending up in the new “abandoned” state, which means that they can be killed without any intervening timers and there is no asset safety, so all the stuff inside drops into space and can be looted.
The latter represented a considerable shift in policy for CCP, which had previously said that nobody would trust Upwell structures if you could lose all your stuff from them. Times change.
So there were suddenly structures in the “abandoned” state all over New Eden, including down in Delve. While alliance structures are maintained by GSOL, and active corps maintain their own, there were apparently some alt corp structures about that had been left untended and unfueled, which left the coalition with a choice.
They could leave them be, which would be an invitation to outsiders and random passers by to try and kill them and carry off the loot, or we could kill them and loot them ourselves.
I suppose the post title gives away which option was selected.
The Mittani announced on the Saturday Fireside that we would be purging abandoned structures in our territory. Attempts had been made to contact the various owners, and shooting blues wasn’t anybody’s first choice, but letting somebody else get the kills and the drops was declared to be worse, so we would be blowing them up.
The announced plan was to nationalize the loot. We would go from structure to structure, blowing them up, while GSOL followed behind to haul off the drops to be processed, re-used, or sold off, with proceeds going into the SRP fund.
After the Fireside a fleet went up to start in on the job. It was a Muninn fleet, and all I had handy for that was a Scimitar, but you can always throw some combat drones in the drone bay, so I went along with that. We shoved off to the first shoot.
Being bridged off to our first targets
The targets were an Azbel and a couple of Raitarus.
Abandoned Azbel
And Azbel is a large structure, so it took us a while, though we were able to hit the damage cap and still get some people to start on the other two structures. With no opposition… nobody was going to jump into the gunner’s seat or rush to the defense… I even drove an alt out there in an Ibis just to get him on one of the kill mails.
An Ibis at a Raitaru destruction
Once the three were down came the dull bit, as we had to fly cover for GSOL to pick through the station hangars and pull out the good stuff. Everybody’s individual station hangar gets kicked out with the destruction and is floating around in space.
A station hangar in the wild
We also had to listen to the FC warn people time and again not to go start grabbing loot for themselves. Fortunately there were not too many hangars to go through, though it still took time.
The hangar containers around the Azbel as it explodes
After that was done we were off to a Fortizar a few systems over. This was a different story.
The shoot went as expected and the whole thing blew up nicely.
I never get tired of these explosions
But this Fortizar was one of the early ones set down in Delve, which meant that a bunch of people had ended up using it over the years. It was owned by an alt corp with one person in it, and that person, who apparently had gone missing. It kicked out a lot of station hangars.
The hangar ball from the Fortizar
That is not nearly as many as the Hard Knocks Keepstar we blew up in wormhole space about a year and a half back, but it is still a sizable number of cans floating in the aftermath.
You might be able to spot the icons of ships… including freighters… checking through the containers. All those yellow cans needed to be gone through. And, as before the FCs had to warn off… and blow up in a few cases… people who just could not keep their hands off the loot.
Meanwhile, we sat there and watched. Without much to occupy us, attention was on the loot spotted and the ships being ejected from the hangars. I had to go into the “no chatter” channel to avoid that, after which I could only hear the command channel broadcasts to us, which were often asking people to stop talking about every ship that showed up on the overview.
To get at ships people had stored away, they have to be ejected into space… and there were a bunch of ships.
Ejected ships on the overview
You can tell they are unoccupied as the pilot name is the type of ship on the overview. Also, being unpiloted, they show up as neutrals in space. Some very big toys were discovered that way.
A Nomad jump freighter somebody left behind
And there were a few strange ones as well.
Wait, what?
I am not sure how you get an unoccupied capsule, but there it was floating in space.
We were occasionally tasked to warp out and blow up some of the ships that were not worth flying off. This also became something of a fiasco. People were quick to lock and shoot, so I didn’t bother launching drones, but some pilots couldn’t resist just shooting at whatever ship was on their overview despite. Over and over voices from the command channel would tell people to only shoot broadcasted targets and then would start calling people out for shooting things that had not been broadcast.
The kill mails for these ships showed whose hangar they came from, which was another odd element as I saw a couple from people who I know are active. I guess they didn’t get the in gaming warning about the impending destruction. That seems about on par for this.
All in all it was quite trying and I ended up just docking up in another structure and playing Minecraft, still listening to FC coms in case something was needed, but otherwise unenthused by the op. The FCs eventually stopped letting people shoot ships because a few people couldn’t follow instructions. It was painful to listen to.
I feel for the GSOL team, who had to slowly pick through all of those cans in space. The haul was said to be impressive, but it is dull work… though not as dull as having to just sit and watch it. After the three hour mark we got a PAP. The fleet was going to carry on in a semi-permanent state until they had hit all the structures on the abandoned list, but I was done with that for the day. I flew back home.
The work carried on. There were more structures to take care of, though not as many as in high sec space, where the big stories about this have been focused. I hope there were not too many more as full as that Fortizar. GSOL was being worked hard to take care of just one structure like that.
And it is all a side effect of the changes CCP made with the Forsaken Fortress patch.
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