Bye-Bye to the Cans
Ok, this deserves a resounding cheer from the EVE community.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=540
It seems all the trash floating around in space is finally going away. It’s amazing even in video games humans have a giant propensity for throwing junk all over the place. I guarentee if this happens in EVE, once humanity populates space, it’ll be the same, except there won’t be a program to remove all of the junk we’re leaving floating around in space IRL LOL.
So I guess they decided in order to maximize performance the junk just has to go. So any unused containers/junk floating around in the asteroid belts or at gates or whatnot will be deleted from the world at different intervals depending on what kind of junk it is.
“Drones, Fighters, Shuttles and Rookie Ships. Generic space junk will be removed (Read: permanently deleted) from open space the first of every month.”
Basically, anything that’s just plain old trash will go away. Stuff people leave behind and forget about. Although I was under the impression that drones automatically depopped after like 20 or 30 minutes, I guess not. I’ve left a few drones here and there accidentally, and come back and they’re not there anymore. Guess someone came by and scooped em LOL.
“Anchorable containers will from now on have a 30 day lifetime from last usage. “
I’m all for this, I’ve been dying for the day that I can enter an asteroid belt free of the millions of little cans floating everywhere that people probably left there years ago and either deleted the toon, quit playing or just plain forgot about them. All you have to do to keep your can floating around is open it once a month. Fair enough. If you can’t make it to open it once every month, it should go away since it’s not that important to you.
The article goes into a little more technical detail and has a disclaimer that they may change the intervals as they see fit. But I’m just dying for this change to go into effect 
Whee! There are some asteroid belts out there that literally have more anchored cans than they have asteroids. I don’t mind the litter so much as the fact that I so very rarely ever see any sort of mining op going on using any of these cans.
It is usually just me, jet can miners, and the mining bots.
Yeah mostly the places you will see that aren’t filled with cans already are exploration sites that no one has scanned down yet.