Please, it would be awesome for those boring trading missions, and it would make life so much more simpler! Just select the sector you want to fly to, and press auto pilot!

No.

As long as it couldn't dock for you, this is a great idea. Set your navroute, click the go button, and let the AI fly to your destination for you. It would be slower, as the AI doesn't fly nearly as efficiently as a human.

I think its a great idea, let them go 140 (AI Autopilot speed)

and leave their computers, until they get to the other end where they need to dock.

Pirates will blast the slow fliers, but escorts could be hired to keep a set of afk traders safe during the journey.

Seems like a win-win situation

blech

Unless the escorts have a magical way to detect who's going to attack their trader before the fact, they won't be so much defenders as avengers, specially if the dumb AFK trader falls into a storm (serves him right). The other option would be to have the escorts attack everything, which is just as bad.

Best Option: you want to trade, you fly the ship yourself. You don't want to do that and yet sell your stuff halfway across the galaxy, do us all a favor and go play EVE.

Just say NO to autopilot kids!

..I still think we should have have guild- (and maybe player-) owned NPC convoys... but that would really have to wait until they're persistent, I guess

I'm not talking about AI escorts, I'm talking about player escorts.

I don't get what the issue is.. they would make MORE money, FASTER, if they were in control the entire time, but it would populate the galaxy with life, since players would leave their accounts logged in to trade.

Pirates would scout out trade routes, and wipe out traders.

There's no detriment to gameplay at all, except from the TGFT traders who want it to be boring, timeconsuming, and require constant attention.

I think that as long as it didn't fly as efficiently as a human and couldn't dock, this would be perfectly fine.

It would allow you to eat and chat while playing, much like a slightly improved version of the auto-turbo binds which essentially allow you almost the same thing.

And it wouldn't allow you to stay completely AFK, as you never know when you'll get pirated or (even in nation space) caught in a storm.

If the devs gave it the extremely rudimentary guidance system most of the bots have, you'd still need to watch out for roids for one thing :P

hmm.. this thread got me thinking about the old /displayshippos controversy.. they took the command out, but then put it back in recently..

go try it and see what it does :D

Display Ship Pos beacons!

Undock.
Travel to beacon.
Mine.
Travel back to station beacon.
Wait for player to come back from AFK to dock.
Dock.
Sell.

Repeat.

Pretty much amounts to what we do these days, LeberMac. Flying to an asteroid is what takes the least time of a flying operation, unless you're being dumb enough to stash the ore three or four systems away. I see no gain in what you propose, and I'll really hate it when I begin seeing player bots mining while the owner is off to lunch with his buddies. Hell, I already report any AFK miner I find to the nearest pirate!

Just say No to anything that will allow for player bots.

P.S. It's not "sell", it's "store". You don't sell until you have enough foar huge profit! Learn to mine properly, frechrissake! :P

I usually bonk the AFK miner away from their roid and then shoot them to within an inch of dying.

Well, OK, sometimes I kill the serco ones, but it's by accident, I swear!

AFK mining is evil. AFK trading will be even much more evil

If trading/mining is boring for you, you can always try another RP (pirating, anti-pirating, serco-itany war, botting etc)

I peed my pants:D