Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

All the Factional Warfare excitement has really put a crimp in my old-time aggressive salvaging fun. I’ve been too busy fitting, fighting, and losing ships to bother much with any but the most opportunistic of salvage opportunities.

Like the one I encountered today. I was putting a different fit on my Scorpion, and on a whim, I warped to the belt to jam the crud out of a Gurista Arrogator. Instead, I found a dude in an Osprey snuggling up to a Giant Secure Can. It was NOT anchored.

Back I went for my Crane.

By the time I returned in the “helpless hauler”, the Osprey dude had managed to anchor the GSC. Drat.

But hey. Has he had the time, or the knowledge, to set the password?

In a word, no.

So I removed the ore from the can, fully expecting to get a criminal flag the way I do when I remove ore from a jet can. Only, no flag!

Cool! I’ve never found an unpassworded can with stuff in it before, so I’d never realized there is no agro when you take from an unpassworded can. I looked around, saw two more anchored cans with the same owner, and went scooting around emptying them, too. Tasty, tasty pyroxeres!

By now the erstwhile ore owner is convo-ing me in impotent fury. He keeps opening new convos and typing “WTF” into the windows, then apparently losing the windows, before starting over. I think he sent me about five “WTF!” convos.

I had to jet some of the ore — there was too much for one trip in my Crane — so he had a chance to take some back if he was so inclined. Sensibly, he wasn’t.

Eventually he manages to keep his eyes on a chat window long enough to ask why I was stealing his ore. That question always bemuses me, I’m never sure what to say that isn’t hopelessly sarcastic. Usually I fall back on my “I prefer to consider it aggressive salvaging” and leave the “why” unaddressed — if the tastiness of ISK isn’t universal, I don’t know how to communicate it.

But then he asked a very good question: “How are you doing that without flashing red?” I didn’t want to educate him about password protection, so I simply said “you have failed to secure your ore” and closed the chat. But I got to thinking about the question.

Is taking ore from an anchored can with no password most analogous to scooping a can with no anchor (in which case the lack of red-flashy is to be expected)? Or is it more like taking ore from a jet can? If the latter, there should be red-flashy, and there wasn’t.

Given the two years of ugliness with VampireZIM that’s at least partly founded on his opinion that my operations against his POS were exploitative, I’d much prefer to know what the game mechanic is supposed to be. And I wasn’t quite sure, in tonight’s case, whether my salvage victim should have gotten the right to shoot at me.

So what did I do?

I petitioned myself.

Well, not literally. I filed an exploit petition, but they are described as being for the purpose of “asking whether something is an exploit” as well as reporting exploits, so I wrote a nice note explaining what happened and asking whether the lack of a crim flag when I took from the unpassworded can was “working as intended” or a bug.

Within minutes, I had my answer from GM Surmoi. Criminal flagging, it turns out, is only supposed to happen with respect to wrecks or jet cans, but never in connection with secure containers. Cool!

Moral: Anchor those bad boys, and then don’t forget to set the password!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Salvage Notes, Today In Ironfleet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.