Some guilds (and players?) use a separate account to create themselves service bots or relay bots.

BLAK Hive, SkyCommand, IRC are some that come to mind.

Given that these bot accounts are not used other than to watch for certain events/messages and that they typically dont fly, it would be nice to reduce the cost of ownership of these drone accounts. Perhaps a flat yearly fee (with no possible monthly payments) with a discount of some sort.

Given these would be drone-only accounts, these could have the "Leave Station" functionality locked out. Therefore, you can't use that account for regular game play, thus not stealing Guild Software revenus & bandwidth (sector loading etc).

There's one such service bot I'm planning and I'd like to register another account for it. The only thing is, a whole account is a bit expensive for the actual usage this will have.

Perhaps one restriction of this sort of account would be that another full account be required. So to avoid those who'd use it as a chat-only application system.

Edit: the no-fly account could be linked with the regular account via the payment information.

I'd like to see a documented interface to the Vendetta universe that would facilitate writing such scripts without resorting to the current (rather messy) method of interfacing with the game. The interface would provide methods like <GiveMoney>, <ShowMenu>, <Say>, <GiveCargo>, and have access to a player's name, nation, and faction info. That would eliminate the need for having a dedicated connection to the server altogether, since only a fragment of the state would have to be sent, and only when players are interacting with the service.