I’m not sure if this has been thought of before. And I’m not sure if this is the best place to put this. But I’m going to present it here anyway and pray the gods of the internet are kind today.
I’m fairly new, as anyone can see by looking me up. Today I helped my corp. take out a POCO in our system left from a long dead corp. As we sat there bombarding it with drones, fighters, and missiles, I wondered if there wasn’t a better way to deal with the structures and assets of dead corps that sit collecting dust and are, essentially, resources lost to the universe.
My solution?
An ‘corp inactivity timer’. It’s simple, if no member of a corp. logs on for over, say, 6 months, the corp is considered dead and their assets begin transitioning to a status of ‘player relics’. Give them a timer of, say, a week. After a week they are considered derelict, abandoned, whatever. They are locked down but can be ‘hacked’ and claimed by another player or corp.
What about structures owned by living corps but have been abandoned for all intended purposes? Create a system in which a corp, say one that now holds sov in the system, can activate it and puts it in a status of powering up for a period of time, say, a week. This alerts the owners to the activation so that they can decide whether or not to try to make good their claim or even negotiate the sale of the structure in order to avert an fight over a structure they don’t want to have to protect.
Why do I think this is a good idea or even necessary? Let’s pretend that Eve is ‘real’. Would a space-faring society really just leave an abandoned structure or blow it up to get it out of their now claimed space? No. They would try to make it useful for them. Whether by scavenging it or simply restoring it and using it for themselves. If they make no steps to avert the activation timer, then after the timer ends, the structure becomes the property of the corp. or player that activated it.
POCOs would be claimed in order to allow the now present and alive corp. to use it.
Stations and other docking structures could be opened, claimed, and its contents inventoried and sold or distributed by the new owners.
Would this be a big f you to corps that take long hiatuses? Sure. But, honestly, if not a single member of your corp. can’t be bothered to log in, even just as an alpha, in order to reset the timer, f you. This goes for solo corps as well. Have an alpha alt just for logging in once every so often to reset the timer.
While this workaround would perpetuate the issue I am attempting to solve, it would still leave those structures open to attack as they are now. A corp. on ‘life support’, to wit, that logs on only so often to keep their assets from becoming derelict, is still open to having their assets seized and/or destroyed as they are today or taken from them as described above.
But for those corps that truly are dead, it would open up new avenues for the rest of us to ‘salvage’ and expand our hold on systems through claiming ‘derelict’ structures already existing in them. It would increase the real estate value of systems with lots of derelict structures.