Bring Back Fortuna 69, the Nicest Place in Warframe

It turns out, when you stop playing Warframe for a bit, you miss out on a few things. But for me, I missed out on something not so nice. It turns out, three months ago, the Fortuna 69 had disappeared!

For those of you who don’t remember, Fortuna 69 is an instance that had been kept up and alive while all other Fortuna instances (aside from 1) faded away. Fortuna 69 was kept open by the community, with all sorts of people visiting and AFKing within the instance, stopping it from shutting down and closing. With a team of Tenno with spare computers, accounts and time, Fortuna 69 was kept alive through numerous updates. Those with fast internet connections would download any updates and get back into Fortuna 69, while a group of Tenno stayed within the relay until they’d get kicked out and forced to update. This was always a challenge with larger updates.

And, a few times, DE themselves helped out, bringing back the instance after an event outside players’ control killed pretty much every instance of every relay. Most of the time though, the players kept Fortuna 69 going. For a long time, this worked, even with player counts slowly dropping. When Star Days came back, Fortuna was revitalized with a brief influx of new Tenno. But slowly over time, the number of people in Fortuna 69 would dwindle. Still, they managed to keep the server online.

On May 11th though, a hotfix, specifically Hotfix 31.5.8, managed to deal a massive blow to Fortuna 69. While one of Fortuna 69’s most well-known Tenno, Schmedley, was busy at work, with no one else around to download the hotfix. So unfortunately, the game kicked Schmedley out, and Fortuna 69 finally shut down. “Quite the quiet fizzling end for something that was such a big part of the community at one point,” says Schmedley. “I was just the only one there, in a work meeting at the time, when I got kicked for 15 minutes it went from 1 to 0.”

This time however, it seems that the developers are too busy to care. It’s been months now, and the instance is still missing.

Sadly, we can’t really fix this ourselves. This is one time where only the developers can bring back our nicest instance. But there is actually quite an easy way to bring back Fortuna 69, without having to bring it back normally. Just do an event in Fortuna!

Okay, maybe not the Thermia Fractures event that comes by every so often. Few people enjoy those, and they can also bypass Fortuna completely, since you don’t need to start a bounty to do them. However, an event like Star Days would very easily bring back enough players to reactivate Fortuna 69. Dangle some new, Fortuna-based shinies in our faces, and people will come back in droves. The more people, the more quickly we can get Fortuna 69 back.

For now though, there’s not much we can do, apart from pestering DE to bring it back. Here’s hoping that the Neon Phoenix rises from the ashes once more.

In the mean time, why not join the Fortuna 69 Discord server? Everyone there is very friendly and loves to chat. And they’re always happy to see a new face.