When EVE Online introduced player-built citadels in the 2016 Citadel expansion, there were fears that people wouldn’t trust them enough to put their valuable assets into them. To keep people’s stuff safe, CCP added a mechanic called Asset Safety that magically whisks your items and ships away to a nearby station if the structure they’re in is destroyed. Thousands of players stored their stuff in citadels and thought nothing of it, until May 26th 2020 hit.
The recent Forsaken Fortress patch makes unpowered citadels eventually fall into a new Abandoned mode, which removes its reinforcement defense timers and disables asset safety, making it so all the ships and assets stored in the structure can drop as loot. Pirates have been scouring the map for abandoned citadels and destroying them, and a few of them have hit the absolute jackpot.
One corp hunting abandoned structures recovered a huge cache of extremely rare original tech 2 blueprints worth trillions of ISK, the equivalent of tens of thousands of US dollars using PLEX price equivalence. Another player recently looted an extremely limited edition Alliance Tournament ship worth over 100 billion to the right collector, and it looks like the owner only found out his assets were even at risk when someone posted the loot to an EVE Discord channel.
If you have assets in a station that is about to go into abandoned mode, you get a 48 hour warning to your in-game mail so you have time to evacuate everything. The problem is that thousands of inactive players have stored items in citadels all over the game on the understanding that Asset Safety would keep their items safe. Players logging in after a several-month hiatus may find that their most valuable possessions which they thought were safe have been stolen through no fault of their own.
