Anchoring of secure containers

We have been, for sometime now working on various player owned items in space. These are things like: Mobile refineries, Sentry Guns, Warp Disruptors, Force Field Emitters, Field Assembly Arrays, Docking Bays, etc. To cover deployment, overtaking, destruction and undeployment we have added a new state to all items, anchored. An item in space can be anchored by it’s owner, given sufficient skill.

This state is introduced to allow for players with insufficient skills to handle all the items (to facilitate trading and corp. delegation). The state is also introduced to create vulnerability for the items. Anchoring and unanchoring takes times, so if you outpost is under attack you can’t immediately deploy extra guns or scoop up all your operations into industrials, there has to be an investment in place.

Now this has been in development for some time and we’ll start to introduce the items on Chaos one by one in lieu of their availability on Tranquillity.

As we have the anchoring process tested and ready, we were thinking of starting to use that with Secure Containers. There is a certain abuse going on with them now, which involves keeping all your cargo in a secure container, thus making one immune to looting. The change would basically be that the secure container is not secure unless it has been anchored. An unanchored secure container would be just as regular containers, i.e. disappear after 2 hours and not be password protected. Anchoring of a secure container would require a skill and allow you to set password and name during the anchoring process.

Making this change now would eliminate this unintended loot protection and polish up the anchoring process (and introduce more skills) thus speeding up the process of introducing more player owned items in space.