A group of hardcore number fans have kept Warframe‘s Fortuna 69 instance alive for over a month now, and developers Digital Extremes are lending a hand. Instance 69 of the Fortuna hub area has become a bit of a party zone with dedicated digitheads loitering round the clock to prevent the free-to-play action-RPG’s server instance from automatically shutting down. Digital Extremes even guided players through keeping the instance alive after a patch launch. Though I admire their commitment, I don’t ‘get’ the fad. As kids we all liked the number 7 best, then we got calculators in maths lessons and suddenly everyone was thrilled with 58008, then they were into 420, and now they can’t stop it with the 69… I can’t keep up.

The Fortuna expansion launched on November 8th, and the party is still going. Warframe instances switch off and on as demand ebbs and flows, so Fortuna 69 will shut down if it ever becomes empty. There are other Fortunas, of course, but number fans don’t seem remotely interested in those. So they’ve made sure Fortuna 69 is never empty, taking on the responsibility of loitering and turning it into a bustling hangout space.

Fortuna 69 has survived the launches of several hotfixes so far, and Digital Extremes even explained how to keep it alive through the latest with a series of service messages broadcast ahead of its launch. As noted on Reddit on Monday, they said:

Time for your weekly reminder about the will of the Tenno: Fortuna 69 lives, and here’s how you can keep it alive.

At least one of you has to stay in Fortuna 69 while everyone else downloads. Once people with the Hotfix return, whoever was keeping Fortuna 69 around can safely Hotfix.

It is only by your hand that Fortuna 69 will live on – which is true in many ways since it’s likely it is also only by your hand that any kind of 69 will live on.

That’s nice of them.

YouTube fella “PsyCoCinematics” made a motivational message for players back in November, and look at us now:



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Ta to Taylor Cocke for pointing this out on Twitter.