So yeah I’m probably a bit late with this post but I blog when I feel like it and I felt like writing this so here it goes.
So a while ago TEST decided to drop 14 TCUs in IT space (Well they had no sov but it was their space) right before an extended downtime.
Once the downtime was over IT filed a support ticked claiming that this was an exploit (Once they figured out what had happened), and in the end the TCUs were destroyed by a GM and refunded (Who with that confirmed that this was considered an exploit).
Now this raised quite a few questions in the community, as it became apparent that TEST wasn’t the only one that gained sovereignty during downtime and due to the fact that this has probably happened before.
Some say that IT gets special treatment by CCP, now when speculating one could state that IT probably isn’t the only one that has reported this kind of issue, but someone (From within CCP) could possibly have made a GM aware of this specific incident, again purely speculation.
On the other hand, this might be the result of the large scale approach TEST took in this assault, yet I do not see that as an excuse to undo this one and not the others.
Now if this is an exploit where do we draw the line ? Can you online POSes/structures during (extended) downtime or now, where does it end.
Now I’m not too sure where I stand on this, the way CCP has acted has its shortcomings as others “got away with it”.
This could just be seen as clever use of game mechanics, however the 6 hours (or something) that it takes to online a TCU have been implemented to grant a defending alliance the time to act upon it, and by onlining them during downtime TEST clearly bypasses this mechanism.
So in the end I guess the reasonable conclusion would be that the correct decision has (sort of) been made, however it should have also been enforced on all other sov. changes that happened during downtime.
Edit: Sorry for mixing up alliance names, fixed
