So it seems my alliance managed to create a nice bit of controversy. EVE was taken down for half a day to apply the Tyrannis 1.2 patch. Before the server went down, TEST planted Territorial Claim Units in areas of unclaimed 0.0 space. They normally take 6 hours to complete the claim, during which the unit can be destroyed. Due to the downtime, however, nobody could contest the claim and TEST returned to EVE several systems richer. Apparently the former owners (or non-owners to be more accurate) did not like this chain of events and petitioned the GM's who revoked the claims on the territory.
So the first question is: was this an exploit? Probably. My personal thought as a programmer is that timed items like this should not elapse while the server is in downtime. As soon as the server came up and was accepting player connections, then the competing alliance should have had 6 hours from that point to contest the claim.
So now extrapolate that. What if the downtime was arbitrary, like the two-day unforeseen outage caused by moving the database? The timer starts when the server is up, but how can a group organize when the server comes up at a random time with real-life constraints sometimes preventing you from acting?
Also, consider what timers stop and which ones continue. Skills continue training because they don't affect other groups directly. What about reinforced towers? Other sovereignty timers? Planetary Interaction? Research and Industry? Capital Shipbuilding? My opinion is that any timer that can cause a loss to someone should stop. That means that towers and sovereignty freezes and everything else keeps going.
It's not perfect, but it's better than provoking GM interference in the shadow of the whispers of favoritism of which CCP will probably never rid themselves.
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